Apps and slow productivity

I simply don’t trust Notion and the myriad of other clones enough to use them for anything in my personal life. Even Evernote, a paragon of software longevity, isn’t looking great.

To quote from @kepano:

The plan for Obsidian is to never grow beyond 10-12 people, never take VC funding, never collect personal data or analytics.

Continue building with the assumption that software is ephemeral, files matter more than apps. Use formats that are open and durable.

And hence all of my personal stuff, notes, blog posts, thoughts, ideas are in simple, mostly markdown files. Sometimes I open them with Obsidian, sometimes iA Writer, sometimes VS Code, depending on what I want to do.

But the companies that take a more sane pace and approach to development are few and far between.

Take Raycast. I like the product (except the annoying release notes that keep getting in my way and I can’t figure out how to opt out of), but they are at least 21 people on the team. Alfred, which does basically the same thing with a bit less polish has 2ish (my guess from looking at LinkedIn).

If I had to bet, Alfred will be around in 10 years. Raycast won’t.

Lately I’ve been around a lot noise. AI this, some new bot for that, more push workflows, more, more, more, and fast!

And the more value I see in things like Cal Newport’s slow productivity.