I have tried almost every creative productivity system available. Most of them are overkill. The ones I have kept are embarrassingly simple.
My stack has one rule: every tool must earn its place. If I can do the same thing with something simpler, I will. The goal is leverage, not novelty.
Pen and Paper
The slowest input I own and easily the most useful. A Field Notes in my back pocket, a softcover on the desk. The act of writing something by hand forces the idea to be small enough to fit. If it can’t fit, it isn’t ready.
Calm Writer
A web app by Ben Krogh. It looks like a piece of paper with one font and no buttons. I draft every post here in one or two sittings. The minute I open a “real” editor I start fiddling with formatting instead of writing — Calm Writer makes that impossible.
Obsidian
The brain. Local markdown, no syncing service eating my notes, no proprietary lock-in. I use it less like a Zettelkasten and more like a long compost pile — half-formed thoughts go in, finished ideas come out months later. The killer feature is that nothing goes anywhere I can’t find again.
Claude
The thinking partner. I treat it like a sharp coworker who is willing to read anything I throw at it. It edits, pressure-tests, drafts, and occasionally calls out when I’m being lazy. The trick is to talk to it like a person, not a search bar.
Cursor
The IDE for everything code-shaped. Claude does the heavy lifting; Cursor is the surface where I can see the diff and click “accept.” For someone who is a designer first and an engineer second, this is what closed the gap between I have an idea and the site is updated.
Astro
The site you’re reading. Static output, no framework gymnastics, fast as hell. Each page is HTML by default and I add interactivity only where the page genuinely needs it. The mental model is closer to the old “save and FTP” days than to modern SPA hell, and that’s the point.
Figma
Where the visual thinking happens. Most of what ends up on the site starts as a few sloppy rectangles in a Figma file. I don’t believe in jumping to code before I know what I’m building — Figma is the cheap, fast space to be wrong on the way to being right.
That’s the stack. Seven tools, each earning its keep. Nothing on this list is exotic and that’s the whole point. Boring tools, used consistently, will out-perform the latest thing every time.