The team's preferred productivity tools to be more efficient.

Digital life can become as messy and chaotic as real life if you're not careful, especially when working remotely at times. This can contribute to the overwhelming amount of information managed online every day. For this reason, many team members have done various tests with digital tools to determine which ones can help maintain both personal and professional order. Fortunately, there are many useful productivity tools, including some of our favorites, many of which are free or have cost-free versions that can be explored.

In 2022, an article was published about Notion and its new artificial intelligence feature, which turned out to be a preview of my career direction. First, because I later began reporting on the artificial intelligence industry full-time, and second, because Notion became my preferred note-taking application, initially for work and soon for much of my digital life. Paradoxically, it wasn’t the AI features that convinced me to make the switch. What I have truly appreciated about Notion is its ease of formatting text and other elements. Instead of relying on a complicated toolbar, Notion uses a command-line interface. For example, if you want to add a bulleted list to a document, you simply type “/bulletedlist.” While this does involve a slight learning curve, after familiarizing myself with a few commands, formatting a document started to feel natural. More importantly, I never felt that the interface interfered with my writing.

Another standout feature of Notion is how it organizes files. Pages are the basic organizational elements of the app and function as expected. Through the formatting interface, you can add text, images, to-do lists, and more to a document, and it is also possible to nest pages within each other, allowing you to create the file structure that best suits you. In my work, I have pages dedicated to reports, news, usage guides, and buying guides. When I start working on a new story, I first go to one of those pages to categorize it appropriately. Thanks to the structure I’ve created and the application’s sidebar, I can always easily find which piece I’m working on or refer back to a previous article; in fact, I’ve never had to use Notion’s search function. This represents a significant change compared to my experience using Google Docs. While no one may want to experiment with a new note-taking app, if you’re looking for a more efficient way to organize your digital life, Notion is worth considering. There are excellent tutorials on YouTube where people share how they have used the software to organize their projects.