Over the past two years, I embarked on an ambitious quest for ultimate productivity. My goal was clear: find the perfect app to revolutionize my workflow in 2025.

Vesa Palomäki

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4 min read

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Apr 16, 2025

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• Driven by ever-increasing curiosity (shine-object syndrome) and perhaps a ‘hint’ of digital perfectionism, I systematically evaluated 28 different productivity apps available on macOS.
• I Started from popular task managers like Reminder, Todoist, TickTick, and Things, climbing more towards to comprehensive note-taking and organizing tools like Evernote, Notejoy, Heptabse, Tangent, Bear, Obsidian, Mem.ai Anytype, Capacities, and the hyped newcomer, Tana — I tried them all.

The journey was intense, enlightening, and ultimately humbling.

• At some point I nearly had nervous breakdown due to not finding fully end-2-end working app. Always some promising app lacked key feature for me… frustrating! (You know what I mean.)

But here’s the shameful confession:

• After hundreds of hours invested, extensive experimentation, and meticulous notes: the winner was unexpectedly simple: Apple Notes.
• Yes, the macOS built-in app that was always there, quietly waiting me in the corner of my desktop.
• Let me explain how…