Physician and Bestselling Author Ranks 22 Productivity Tools From Worst to Best After 15 Years o

Over the past 15 years, I have tested dozens and dozens of productivity apps, tools, and tech tools. Some of these have truly changed my life, but others were only fun to try for a few days because the effort to maintain them wasn't worth the benefit. So in this video, I'm going to create a ranking of 22 different productivity tools. All of them are tools that I still use, but the goal of the ranking is to show which ones are just nice to have and which ones really impact my personal productivity. And if we don't know each other yet, hello, my name is Ali. I am a physician-turned-entrepreneur and the author of the New York Times bestseller Feel-Good Productivity. Since 2017, I have been documenting my

journey from a poor medical student to a doctor, and then to a seven-figure entrepreneur and author on this YouTube channel. All this time, I've been testing all these different productivity apps, workspace setups, and tools. So if you also want to be more productive or move towards your goals, I hope you find something useful in this video for your journey . First up is a great tool called Readwise, which I've been using since about 2019. Readwise is a tool that connects to your Kindle account and pulls up everything you've ever highlighted in books. So I have accumulated thousands, if not

tens of thousands of highlighted fragments. Its function is to remind you of these fragments, showing five or ten per day. It sends them to your email or lets you view them in the app, so it's a good way to review what you've learned. Unfortunately, I would give Readwise an F grade when it comes to things that actually affect your productivity. It's very easy to set up, and the benefits are noticeable from day one, especially if, like me, you often highlight quotes in Kindle. But if you think about what productivity really is, it's like having a goal that you're trying to reach. There is a plan you follow to achieve a goal, and there is a system you follow to stay on track. This is the

GPS method that I have often talked about. So I would define productivity as moving towards goals that are important to you. So, we become more productive if we move towards goals that excite us, but we do it faster and, ideally, more efficiently. And I would define efficiency as reducing the amount of energy required to move toward a specific goal. So, for example, if you really like something, you will spend less energy moving towards that goal because you don't have to fight against yourself. In the early stages of my self-development journey, Readwise was very helpful as I reframed ideas I learned from productivity, personal development, and business books. But at this stage of my life, it's more of a nice addition.

I still use it every day. I'm still crying for him. It's great, but, you know, if I were stranded on a deserted island, it would be at the very bottom of my list of tools I can't live without right now. Next we have Spotify or any other music app you like. It doesn't sound like a productivity tool, but I got so much use out of it at university because I created a playlist called "Study with Me," which I then made public, and it's now been downloaded tens of thousands of times by people all over the world. My study playlist includes music from TV shows, movies, and video games, especially from when I was studying for my Cambridge University medical school exams. It really helped make learning much more

interesting. One of the principles of Productivity in Pleasure is that if you can make work more enjoyable, as we've said, it makes you more efficient, more productive, more creative, less stressed, and gives you more energy for other important areas of your life. So, if you have tasks that need to be completed but they are particularly boring or you have a hard time getting into a state of flow, I highly recommend using background music. I still use my study playlist, but unfortunately it falls into the D category because, again, it's not something that makes a significant difference. This is a slight improvement in the satisfaction of the process. This is a slight improvement in concentration. But,

honestly, you can achieve the same effect by simply being in a quiet room or by playing some YouTube video, such as instrumental music, in the background. So this tool doesn't make my list for a deserted island. Then we have Slack and other similar instant messaging tools like Microsoft Teams, and those seem to be the two main ones. Slack is one of those weird apps: if you work in a team and are a manager, it's an undisputed S-level because you literally use Slack every day to coordinate your team's work. In my case, I'm more of a creator than a manager, so for me, Slack is definitely F-level. The less time I spend in Slack, the more personal progress I make towards my goals, because for me the main thing is to create more videos,

improve the curriculum for Lifestyle Business Academy, and work on our product Super Focus, our productivity app. Very little of this requires me to be on Slack and coordinate with the team. I am in a privileged position because I have a team, a wonderful general manager, Angus, as well as department heads and other specialists. That's why they're constantly sitting in Slack and coordinating their teams. It allows me to be " above the clouds" and focus on the things that I really enjoy and energize, which is usually not Slack messaging. Next, we have a tool like Opal. This is a program that blocks other applications on your phone or computer. At various times in my life, these kinds of tools were about A-level for me. There were times

when I would stay up until one or two in the morning, scrolling through Twitter, Reddit, or something like that. Therefore, an automatic app blocker on your phone, which automatically restricts access to Twitter, Reddit, and other familiar resources after ten o'clock in the evening. At certain times in life, this was a truly revolutionary solution. But since I had my baby, I no longer have a problem with nighttime gatherings because I know I'll wake up pretty early every morning. So, a blocker like Opal has dropped to an F level for me as I simply don't need it anymore. Although I still have it installed. Next, we have something like Zapier. These are tools that automate elements of your workflow. If you're an average person,

you probably don't need automation tools like Zapier at all. But if you run a business, they become incredibly useful for automating routine processes. For some members of my team, tools like Zapier are absolute S-level. For example, our operations team has hundreds of "songs" that save thousands of man-hours every month. But for me personally, there is no zap script that I really use to advance towards goals that interest me personally. Therefore, tools like Zapier, Make, or n8n fall into the F category for me personally. But of course, your experience may vary. Then we have tools like Obsidian. Obsidian is a fairly popular tool among geeks and AI enthusiasts. People are connecting Obsidian to their various AI

agents, building a "second brain" and all that. If you seriously think about how much storing all my files in Obsidian has helped me advance towards the goals I'm interested in, I'd say-a little, but not significantly at all. Actually, later in this video I'll talk about my AI agents, such as Hermes and Open Claw. These agents are so advanced today that I don't even have to open my markdown files in Obsidian, I can just communicate with them using my AI agents. This puts Obsidian squarely in the D category for me. It's definitely a nice app. I still have it installed. It's nice to see you click on an item and see how all your notes are connected, but in terms of real-world impact-it wasn't very useful for me. It's about the same

with Apple Notes. Many people use Apple Notes to manage their lives, but as we'll discuss later, I believe there are much better note-taking and project management tools than Apple Notes. I use Apple Notes for random shopping lists or some drafts when I just need to write something down or copy it, but again, it's not something that really serves my purposes. So, those were the tools in categories D and F. Again, I still use all of these tools in different ways. These are just not the things I would take with me if I were stranded on a deserted island, but I still had to move toward my goals-they would be low on my list of priorities. By the way, speaking of productivity tools, I want to tell you

a little bit about Lovable, who very kindly sponsored this video. Lovable is a software development tool that my team and I have been using for about two years now, and it allows you to build real websites and apps by simply describing what you need in plain English. The main thing we use it for on our team is prototyping, and we often use it to build our Superfocus productivity app, mostly as a way to translate the vision of the app from my head into a clickable prototype that our designer and developer can then take to work. This has saved me countless hours and weeks of meeting time that I would have previously spent drawing on a whiteboard, in Figma, or in Photoshop files, and now I just work with

Lovable until the prototype of the feature is exactly how I envision it, then I send it to the team to properly integrate it into the app. We use it for marketing, for onboarding, for the product itself, and the great thing is that even those members of our team who don't know how to code can use Superfocus and use Lovable to suggest changes to the product, some of which we even implemented. Lovable now has so many new features that working with it doesn't necessarily have to end at the prototype stage. Many people use Lovable to create real software for real tasks. You can connect it to a database, add features like

user login, and even accept payments by simply describing what you're selling and it will run it all for you. So, in one place, you can go from an idea to a product that real people around the world are willing to pay for, even though it would have previously required a lot of setup, effort, and coding. And now you can easily do it all with Lovable. To date, over 40 million projects have been created on Lovable, including real businesses that make money, as well as large companies like Zendesk that also use it every day. So if you have an idea that you've been putting off because it seemed too complicated to implement, you should definitely give Lovable a try.

The link will be below. Thanks to Lovable for sponsoring this video, and we're back on topic. Now let's move on to level B and C stuff. This tool is the icon for Superhuman Mail, an email app I've been using since 2019. I use Gmail for personal email, we use Google Workspace for work emails, and Superhuman is a kind of email client that runs on top of Gmail, so it provides a more convenient interface for working with email than just gmail.com. I would classify this general category of email as Category C. Reading and responding to emails doesn't get me closer to any of the goals that are important to me. However, these videos have sponsors. I have to communicate with my book agent

and editors. These people often communicate via email. Our accountants communicate via email. Our lawyers are too, so email is a necessary evil in my life, but an app like Superhuman really makes it less painful, which is why it falls into category C. The next tool is Whisper Flow. You've probably seen the Whisper Flow commercials before. I starred in some of their commercials because they invested a lot of money in the commercials I created for them. This is a cool utility that is essentially a very fast and accurate dictation software that can be used on a PC, Mac, or anything else. For me, this is the main way to communicate with artificial intelligence, because I just press the dictation key and Whisper Flow records everything

I say. It makes me a little more productive, but I'll put it in the C category because I've been using it for the past few months, as well as our own Voice Path app for the past two years. Yes, it's very convenient to dictate instead of typing, but to be honest, many modern AI tools already have a built-in voice dictation feature that works very well. Even if this were not the case, if we were to estimate the personal productivity gain from speaking instead of typing, the difference between 156 words per minute when typing and 180 words per minute when speaking is not very significant

. But if you think about Whisper Flow for my team, some members type 40 words per minute but speak 160 words per minute. In this case, they get a fourfold increase in productivity by speaking rather than typing. Therefore, for these team members, a tool like Whisper Flow is absolutely indispensable, although I personally still use it every day. I still pay for it, but it falls into the C category because, again, if I had to boil it down to a few tools that really get me closer to my goals, it's still important, but somewhere lower on the priority list. Next, we move on to-do lists. So, this is the icon for Todoist, which is a very good to-do list. There's also Things 3. I used both of

these tools off and on for years until we created Super Focus, which I now use as my to-do list. And I would put to-do lists in general in category B. To-do lists are important. It's important to be able to keep track of tasks that need to be completed, but the problem with to-do lists is that they are infinitely long, so you can just keep adding tasks to your list. And my problem with to-do lists in general is that they don't force you to prioritize. One of the key principles of productivity is that it's not about trying to get more things done.

The point is to try to do fewer things, but better. This is what most people look like when it comes to their productivity. They have too many goals and they are scattered in all these different directions. But one interesting diagram from Greg McKeon's book Essentialism shows what it looks like if you focus on a small number of things, the few things that are truly essential, and just fixate on them. And to borrow a principle from Oliver Berkman's book "4,000 Weeks," many people are afraid to focus on just a few things because they're worried they'll miss something. But one of the things you eventually realize as a human being at some point in your life is that it's physically impossible to try to do everything

, and it's certainly impossible to do everything at once. Therefore, the people who are most productive and actually achieve their goals are usually those who are okay with putting off less important tasks in other aspects of their lives. I say all this because to- do lists, to some extent, encourage this approach, where because you can add an infinite number of projects and an infinite number of tasks, and you want to write everything down on your list so you can remember it, and you end up with this long list of to-dos, they don't force you to prioritize, they don't force you to sort. So they're still important, right? Because you know, filing your taxes, paying your bills, and staying out of

jail are important, but are they getting you closer to the goals that really matter to you? In my case, not so much lately. But if someone doesn't use Super Focus, then I would recommend To Do List the most. Or Apple Reminders if you're in the Apple ecosystem. Next, we have one of our applications-Voice Pal. So, Voice Pal is your pocket literary secretary. The idea is that you just press record on your phone, and while you're out walking, you can dictate anything you want into it. I've been using Voice Pal for many aspects of content creation for about two years now, since we launched the app. And the great thing about it is that I can sketch out a plan for my YouTube videos, courses, or something like that

while I'm walking, while I'm getting my steps in. Voice Pal transcribes everything you say and then asks leading questions if you want to reveal your thoughts in more detail. The functionality is quite similar to Whisper Flow. I use Whisper Flow mostly on my computer, or if I'm on my phone and have a quick chat with Claude, ChatGPT, or my agent Homies. But Voice Pal allows you to record up to 90 minutes. So if I'm having a personal conversation with someone on the team, I just turn on the recording in Voice Pal to capture everything in full. Or if I need to unload a bunch of thoughts, clear my head for a course, new content, or something else, I use Voice Pal instead of Whisper Flow. Therefore, I would

put Voice Pal in category B for me personally, because my goals involve a lot of deep creative work, where I transfer thoughts from my head to "paper" to then create videos, courses, or work on my next book based on them. So I do a lot of these things while walking and talking, rather than sitting at a computer and typing. By the way, an interesting fact that we found out while preparing this video: I watched a lot of videos with tear sheets, but I never knew where they even came from. For example, why do they start with the letter S? And why is there no level E in any of these ratings? So, the S at the top of the list is obviously the Japanese "shu", which means "perfection", especially in fighting games. The reason they

removed the E is because E could be confused with "excellent", even though it is at the very bottom of the list. So the rating looks like this: S, A, B, C, D, F. I just thought it was pretty interesting. Okay, we've already discussed levels B and C. Now let's move on to level A-this is the heavy artillery that I use several times a day. Now we come to the toolkit, namely-AI agents. This is the Homies Agent icon, which is my personal favorite right now. Since the beginning of the year, I've had time to experiment with many of them. I first tried Open Claude, but found it required too much setup and effort. As a result, I spent more time on debugging than on the actual work that was important to me. But when I

discovered the Homies agent about six months ago, I've been using it almost every day since then. It's like a more convenient version of Open Claude that requires less manipulation. So my agent Homies via Telegram is one of the apps I use most often, and I would rate it as A-level because it helps me achieve my goals. A more user-friendly version of this is, for example, Grokbot, which I have also experimented with. OpenAI has just released Dots. Meta just introduced Muse. There is another agent called Instinct. They all serve roughly the same function: they provide you with one or a whole team of AI agents that can work on your behalf. I put them in Level A because

I currently do a significant portion of my work communicating with AI agents. Essentially, I have my own virtual private server with a bunch of different files for each of my projects that I work on both in business and in life. And every time I have a new idea for business or life, I just open Telegram and discuss it with my agent Homies. By the way, let me show you what it looks like. For example, for working Homies, I have materials for the Lifestyle Business Academy curriculum. I have tools that help identify "bottlenecks." I have materials for developing the Lifestyle Business Academy. We are currently moving to a new office here in Hong Kong, so I have correspondence regarding the office.

Every day, I get a report on our students' achievements because the agent automatically collects data from our Slack channel and our calls with students, and then notifies me of interesting successes, such as attracting new clients, making a lot of money, or overcoming psychological barriers. This allows me to send them congratulatory messages, which is just great. I have a content director project, YouTube, finance, social media, super focus, Lifestyle Business Academy. So, as you can see, there's a lot going on here. But you see, almost every day I talk to my agent Homeies about the five to ten main topics I have here. And I also have a similar system for my personal life. This is health, my

daughter, personal development, household chores, Izzy, my wife. I have a chat that helps coordinate meetings with friends. So yes, more and more often, especially when I'm on the road, I communicate with my Homeies agent, who has access to his own computer, file system, and can make changes to those files. I usually use Whisper Flow to communicate with a Homeies agent, although it has a pretty good built-in transcription feature. This has been a real breakthrough for my personal productivity, because the goals I'm interested in are not only promoting large content projects like my videos, courses, or book, but a significant part of the work is generating business ideas that I can propose to the team so

they can then implement them. Before, before AI agents took over the world, I had to come up with complex schemes: record something via voice memo on Apple Watch, send it to Draft, then via Zap in Notion, or something like that. Now with AI agents like Homies, Grok Bot, and Open Claw, it's much easier: I can capture these ideas, ask them to test my thinking for strength, or interview me. If I want to give a detailed answer, I just record it in Voice Pal and send it to the agent. If the response is shorter, I just write it down in Whisper Flow and send it to the agent. So, I'm constantly switching between these three different tools. My agent Homies in Telegram, Voice Pal for long messages and Whisper Flow for

short dictations. If you look at Voice Pal, you can see that I dictated 603,709 words in total, which saved me 7 days, 19 hours, and 45 minutes. If you look at Whisper Flow, I've already dictated 170,490 words there. Mostly it's some little things here and there. I guess most of them are words I've sent directly to my agent Homies, Grok Bot, or agent Claude Code as I work on various things in business or life. Next, we move on to our favorite AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. I would confidently classify all of them as category A. These models, especially ChatGPT and Claude, are the ones that power the various agents I work with. So my Homies agent is currently running on ChatGPT 6 Astro. When I

work with Claude Code in a terminal or on a computer, it runs on Opus 5.5 and I just choose whichever advanced model works best. There is a danger of overusing AI tools, and I have had periods where I have delegated too much of my thinking to them and then realized that you lose a little bit-at least I, as a human, feel that content loses a little bit of its essence if you rely too much on AI. So now I use AI agents more often than not to create things. I use them to test the strength of my own thoughts on matters in business and life. They are also great for automating a lot of boring routine work.

Finishing with the A category tools, let's move on to the S category. This is something I literally can't live without. This is indispensable for my productivity. And I think you'll be surprised at how simple some of the tools in Category S are. The first is a paper diary. It falls into the S category. I have used paper diaries for handwritten notes for most of my life. I don't have any kind of daily record-keeping practice. This has been irregular over the years. Sometimes I do it every day, sometimes once a week, and sometimes once every hundred years. But the great thing about journaling is that it helps

structure your thoughts. So, you remember our GPS system: goal, plan, and system. Productivity is moving toward goals that are important to you in a way that is satisfying and effective. Keeping a diary helps you understand what is really worth working on. This helps you clearly identify which goals are truly important to you. When I was working as a doctor, I felt a certain uncertainty: whether medicine was really what I wanted to do, whether I should focus on YouTube, or perhaps sell online courses. I spent a few days keeping a journal, and it helped me realize that what I enjoyed most about medicine was teaching students, not treating them. Working with different questions in my journal helped me

understand what kind of business I wanted to build, and it was one of the impetuses that led me to leave medicine forever. So if you don't journal but are curious, I have a free list of journaling prompts that I've been collecting for the past 10 years. The link to it will be below if you want to watch it. The next S- level tool is the stopwatch. I use the stopwatch icon, but I mean time tracking. Time tracking is an extremely useful productivity tool. There are special applications for this, for example, Toggle. There are also Pomodoro timers. I think Hank Green created one called Focus Friend. I used to use the Forest app when I was at university, and we

already have a built-in time tracking feature in our productivity app Super Focus. The best thing about time tracking is that when you sit down to a task, especially a big and complex one, a huge benefit is just starting a timer or stopwatch. This allows you to record how much time you actually spend on focused work. Personally, I notice that my concentration doubles if I have a timer running in the background that counts down the time spent on a task. This is one of the pieces of advice I often give to people who have trouble concentrating. Simply choose a task you want to do and track how many minutes you actually spend working on it. Almost everyone I've given this advice to has noticed that the quality of

focus improves significantly when you simply know how much time you're actually spending on a task. Next on our S-level list-Google Calendar. S-level is productivity tools I can't live without, and Google Calendar is one of them thanks to the most useful productivity technique, namely time blocking, where you book time in your calendar for specific tasks daily and weekly. In my case, for example, I know that Mondays are the days when I work on the curriculum for the Lifestyle Business Academy. I know that Tuesday and Wednesday are days for creating content. I know that Thursday is the day I work on product and development for Super Focus, our productivity app.

Being able to schedule all of these things in Google Calendar is truly life-changing because I can build my ideal work week and be sure that the things that are important to me get their due time. Like with mail: I use Gmail as a base, but Superhuman is a client that runs on top of it. I use Google Calendar as my primary calendar, but as an add-on to it, I also use Super Focus, our new productivity tool. The problem with Google Calendar itself is that, yes, it's a great, reliable, and free tool, which is great, but it doesn't know what your goals or tasks are. So at Super Focus, we tried to solve this by using a bunch of different apps and trying to connect them via APIs, spending hours

maintaining those connections-believe me, I've tried-we decided to combine the key features of indispensable tools into one simple app that helps you achieve your goals, plan them, and have a daily task system. For example, Super Focus has a calendar view mode that displays your Google Calendar so you can clearly see where your time is going. It has a built-in task manager, but importantly, it's not just a to-do list; It also forces you to be clear about your goals, and your most important goals will always be at the top of the list, and the calendar will automatically color-code accordingly so you can see if you're really spending time on what's important to you. There's also an AI coach powered by advanced models that can

interview you and ask you questions about what goals you're interested in, then helps turn those goals into concrete plans you can put on your calendar. As we said, Super Focus also has a built-in focus timer. So, you just add something to your calendar, and when you start working, you click "start focusing." This starts the timer we mentioned and also turns on background music, so you don't have to keep Spotify open or anything like that. Additionally, it optionally allows you to block distracting apps while you work. Personally, I don't use the app blocking feature, but many of our users do and are simply delighted with it. Super Focus also integrates Whisper Flow, which allows you

to communicate with your coach by voice, rather than just typing text. It has a very simple notes feature where you can jot down some quick reminders about next steps for goals that are important to you. It even has integration with Slack: when you're focused on something, the app changes your status in Slack, signaling to your team that you're currently deep in work and shouldn't be disturbed unless absolutely necessary. Now I'll use something like Super Focus. He is not the best at any of these functions. Its calendar is slightly inferior to Google Calendar's functionality. Its note-taking capabilities are a bit worse than Obsidian's. Its task management tools are slightly inferior to Do list, Things, or other apps that specialize

in this. But really, when we created Super Focus, we wanted to simplify everything that's here - to simplify all these great productivity tools that I've been using for over 10 years and identify the most essential features to combine them into one simple tool that helps people achieve their goals in an enjoyable and effective way, without having to maintain all these complicated systems. Notion is still at S level. I've been using Notion every day, mostly for work, since around 2019. The value of Notion, and why it's so much better than a regular task manager, is that we use it for project management. To make progress on our business projects and goals, we use the goal planning method, but we built it directly into Notion.

We set annual and quarterly goals for our company. This is the part about goals. We then turn them into plans and distribute them into projects and tasks for our team members. This is the part about planning. And then we have a system of daily and weekly execution: the rhythm of meetings, performance indicators, metrics, and everything else-this is the systemic aspect. My team and I are increasingly finding Notion AI very useful for finding information across the Notion workspace. So, if I think about the apps I use most often, they are Super Focus and Notion when I'm at the computer, and mostly the Telegram bot when I'm on the go. The rough breakdown is this: I use Super Focus for things I need to accomplish personally, like my own work

goals, life goals, calendar, and time tracking. But if the target requires team interaction, I still leave it as a target in Super Focus. For example, my YouTube channel or our Lifestyle Business Academy. However, in Super Focus I only track what I personally have to do, while in Notion I track tasks for the entire team. That's why Notion is absolutely indispensable in my life and for everyone on my team as the ultimate productivity tool. If you enjoyed this video and want to learn how to use these tools to make progress on the goals that are truly important to you, here is a video where I explain the practical methods, not just the tools themselves. Thanks for watching, see you there.