Hi Friend,

​Every year I try to lock in my tools for the following year. 2025 was odd because I moved most of my daily management into the Apple productivity suite to prepare the Apple Productivity Suite Field Guide. Now heading into 2026, I’m rethinking what I’m using and why.

Task Management

I tried using Reminders all year and largely pulled it off. There are interesting web-based and AI-based task managers out there, but none seem useful to me. I just don’t believe artificial intelligence should be telling me what to do every day.

But looking back at OmniFocus, it’s clearly the choice for me. I have so much knowledge of the product and I still think it’s the best on the market. The OmniFocus team is hard at work on improvements.

I’m also excited about the recent automation additions and their use of Apple Intelligence as local AI. Not to pick your tasks for you, but to manage your task list better. Fixing typos. Adding appropriate tags. I want to spend more time exploring those features and maybe writing a few of my own.

Another reason OmniFocus wins is how friendly it is with other apps. You can create URL links to tasks, projects, and folders easily and get back and forth between them.

Calendar Apps

I got a lot more respect for Apple Calendar last year. I’ve also been spending time with both BusyCal and Fantastical. I have subscriptions to both.

To be honest, I could get by with any of these three. They’re all good quality and do a good job with calendars.

But I’m leaning into Fantastical because of a few additional features that are useful to me. Primarily proposals. When someone asks to meet and I’m willing, sending them a few proposals of my availability is the method I always use. It never lets me down. The proposal feature is what locks it in for me.

There are other quality of life improvements. I particularly like the quarterly view.

Fantastical added the ability to run multiple instances last year. I like making one calendar full screen that I can swipe to using Spaces, then having a smaller one as I’m working with dates.

Also, I’m constantly impressed with Fantastical’s development schedule. They’re always adding new features.

There’s a whole series of other calendar applications emerging on the web. Often, they combine calendar and task management.

I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the utility of this. I managed tasks and calendars running a legal practice with 100-plus clients. I do it now with an active content business. In both cases, managing tasks and calendar items is essential.

But in neither case can I imagine turning it over to artificial intelligence. I want to be intimately involved in deciding what’s important and how I spend my time.

I see some use for artificial intelligence in my tech stack, but not in these roles.

Notes Apps

This one was the biggest question heading into 2026. I spent a lot of time with Apple Notes, NotePlan, and Obsidian.

The big revelation? Apple Notes is really good. I mean it. After spending months in it for the Field Guide, I’m all in on Apple Notes for general note-taking. It’s fast, reliable, and more capable than most people realize.

For linked Markdown notes, I’m still deciding between NotePlan and Obsidian. They’re both excellent with different strengths.

Obsidian has this massive community plugin ecosystem that lets it do damn near anything. NotePlan is more conservative, but it’s a native Mac app, which makes it easier to use on mobile and gives you all the traditional Mac benefits like Shortcuts integration and proper window management.

I expect my notes workflow in 2026 will be Apple Notes for daily work and one of these linked note apps for my SparkyOS and other MacSparky-related thinking. But which one? The jury’s still out.

Video Production

For video editing, I moved from Final Cut to DaVinci Resolve last year at my editor’s request. I’ve been quite happy with the change.

DaVinci Resolve works the way I think more than Final Cut does. The transition was easy. I’m hardly an expert at it, but I’ll be editing in DaVinci Resolve again in 2026.

I’ve also moved my screen capture tool from ScreenFlow to Screen Studio. ScreenFlow has had a shaky history the last few years in terms of updates.

Screen Studio is less powerful and requires more post-production. But it does the pieces I need very well for screen video capture.

Email

I broke my rule halfway through 2025 and switched my email to Superhuman. I deal with a lot of email, and I’ve tried many solutions over the years. I can say without a doubt that Superhuman is the best tool I’ve ever used to work through email quickly.

There’s no single reason. The keyboard shortcuts are lightning fast. The composition tools avoid friction. Its auto-sorting is excellent. I’m just scratching the surface of the full feature set.

But Superhuman comes with a significant cost at $30 a month. In my case, it also requires a full Google Workspace account for myself and two additional people. So the actual cost is more than $100 a month.

It also requires moving all my data into Google. Even after six months, I’m still not entirely happy with it. This is primarily due to Google limitations, not Superhuman.

So heading into the new year, I’m moving back to Fastmail and using Apple Mail. I’m giving up a bit of efficiency, but with my knowledge of AppleScript and the other tricks I’ve learned over the years, I’m pretty efficient in that platform as well. More importantly, I’m entirely comfortable with the underlying technology.

If Superhuman supported IMAP or Fastmail, I'd still be using it.

I’ve also recently made the decision to get some assistance with customer support email. This will shorten response times and free me up to focus more on making content. Getting help with support email feels like the right move.

File Storage and Management

My choice has stayed the same forever: DEVONthink. I’ve experimented with tools like Apple Finder and other solutions to keep track of items. Nothing can hold a candle to DEVONthink.

I've got multiple active databases and when I receive any kind of files related to the work I do, I’ve got a simple system in DEVONthink that keeps track of everything and gives me a link straight back to the appropriate files and information. The release of DEVONthink 4 last year only further affirms my decision since the app is obviously actively developed and supported.

Reading and Research

For RSS, I use Unread as my feed reader. It’s not the most efficient RSS reader, but it’s good enough and it is gorgeous. I use the Reader app from Readwise. I continue to get a lot of value out of my Readwise subscription in terms of capturing and organizing what I read.

Browser

I’m probably not curious enough when it comes to browsers. I like all the benefits I get from using Safari because it’s so baked into the other applications I use.

However, I frequently run the Dia browser these days when I need a Chrome-based browser. It lets me explore the emerging mashup between artificial intelligence and browsers.

Artificial Intelligence

This is one where it’s silly to pick a horse. These applications seem to leapfrog each other every month or two. That said, the last six months I’ve been primarily using Claude. I’ve been really happy with it.

I’ve been using Model Context Protocol to link into some of my other applications. For the kind of work I want to perform with artificial intelligence, Claude does a nice job.

I’m not looking for it to write for me so much as help me with the grunt work so I have more time to do the creative work myself. Using a combination of Claude projects and skills, I’ve got quite a nice workflow going.

I’ve been testing Google Gemini and OpenAI. They’re also excellent models. In addition, in 2026, I expect to be increasingly using more private artificial intelligence. I’m finding that the lesser models are good enough for the kind of work I’m doing.

Apple’s Private Cloud Compute for this purpose is already helping me. As Apple’s silicon gets even more efficient at running local models, I expect I’ll be running more of those this year as well.

My tech stack with respect to artificial intelligence is still a bit up in the air and will continue to be throughout the year. Things are moving too quickly to settle on just one.

I’m increasingly realizing that I don’t need frontier models for a lot of the donkey-work type of artificial intelligence applications I do. I may find at the end of the year that I’m using frontier models less than usual and relying more on local models and Apple’s Private Cloud Compute.

Analog Tools

The analog pieces of the system heading into 2026 are two-part. I’m using my collection of Field Notes more aggressively than ever.

I carry them in my pocket. I’ve usually got a page for each day. Out of all the digital tools I’ve covered above, it usually boils down to a few items I write down on that page to get done every day.

Historically, I’ve been using the Ugmonk notecards for this. But I switched over to Field Notes because it lets me carry notes for future days as well in my pocket. I work on that basis from front to back of each book. Then from back to front, I take random notes as they appear. Whenever they meet in the middle, it’s time for a new book.

Also, for several years now, I’ve been using Plotter stationery. I’m still loving it. My daily journals and a lot of my entries for the SparkyOS, where I write down my thoughts about any concept I’m trying to sort out for myself, use my Plotter stationery.

In 2026, I ordered a set of calendar refills for it as well. I'm curious to see how I balance the digital and analog calendar. It’s an interesting experiment heading into next year.

Conclusion

One reason I’ve prepared this document is to give myself a stake in the ground as I head into the new year for what I’m going to try to use to get my work done.

An overall thought I have these days is that you have a lot of options when choosing your tech stack. That wasn’t necessarily true a few years ago. When I first got into the business of writing about app recommendations and workflows, there were very few apps worth considering. That’s just not true anymore.

I think there are several reasons for that. Apple has made the APIs so good for native Apple platform apps that developers get a lot of stuff that used to be very difficult for free. Cloud sync. Cross-platform tools.

Likewise, the web has matured a great deal, and there are a lot of tools available there. And of course, with this AI boom going on right now, we’ve got a lot of emerging tools using large language models to try and make the work easier.

So I’m not giving you a list of my tools to convince you to switch to one or the other. Just to give you an idea of my thinking and why I’m choosing what I am.

One thing I’m pretty strict about is that once I get settled into a tool set for a year, I really try to stick with it for the year. It’s easy to want to switch horses every couple of months and spend all of your time engineering systems, instead of actually doing the work.

Your pal,

David

​Read this post on macsparky.com​

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