Here are some recommendations of tools I use almost, if not, everyday to make my work easier and fun. Hope you find it useful and drop a line below if you end up using them! :D

Tools

KanbanFlow

Tasks and time management. KanbanFlow Is a project management tool that integrates both the Kanban tasks management method, and the Pomodoro technique.

This app helps me DAILY to keep focus, organize tasks, track progress, record my effort, and importantly, also reminding me to take breaks and stretch :) .

I color code and sort my tasks by priority {low. Medium. High. Highest.}, then pull them to a column based on the date I intend for the task to be completed on {Backlog, This month, This week, Today, Done}.

I recommend start as simple as possible, make it an habit and then making it your own customizing the board even more.

Paperpile

As Schargi once said, “The most useful piece of software I have ever encountered”. Paperpile is a Reference Manager that has worked very well for me. It is highly integrated with GoogleScholar and GoogleChrome which makes it very easy to add papers automatically using a provided proxy. It works very well with GoogleDocs, which has been part of our writing workflow, and Word as well. Organizing and exporting BIB files is also very easy and have some integrated workflows for this as well to automatically update BIB files in GoogleDrive (which can be used for Obsidian notes, discussed below).

Obsidian

Notes keeping. Obsidian

As of recently I am starting to use it to keep my notes in one place and coming back to them as often as I need them. But it is still an in construction habit.

Duckduckgo Bangs

I’ve been using the Duckduckgo (DDG) search engine for many years now. For me its greatest feature may be for others its greatest flaw, it is not personalized search, as it doesn’t use cookies to track you. Trying to avoid the filter bubble effect is the reason why I prefer this approach.

But the most important reason I’ve been keeping DDG as my default search engine is its Bangs!, shortcuts that quickly take you to other search engines or sites. For example typing:

• !w Popocatepetl: Will take you to the Wikipedia article about the Popocatepetl volcano, which happens to be pictured in my website’s homepage (My best taken picture probably).
• !pubmed Schwartz Schraga: Will take you to PubMed listing all papers authored by Schragi (My PhD PI).
• !gsc Pan-mod-seq: Will take you to Google Scholar search for “Pan-mod-seq” (which is clearly my latest paper :P).

And so on and so on, as Zizek would say, hehe.

For all Bangs look on DDGs website

Sublime Text and Sublime Merge

My choice for source code editor and git GUI respectively.

Spotify playlists

These are some playlists I have curated. Video game music has shown to have focusing enhancing effects on people^{[ref needed]}.

• All Nier Gestalt & Replicant

• All Final Fantasy XIII

• Video Game Focus

It’s wonderful music, but most probably works best if you actually played the games ;) .