t’s 8 pm. A task pops up on my phone, the same one every evening: Daily dump: empty the day into inbox, raw.
I open it and pour the day in. An inquiry to quote on. An order confirmation. A customer’s price update. No folders, no tags, no deciding where anything belongs.
Last week I noticed something. I hadn’t opened Notion once all week. And for the first time in years, I didn’t miss a notes app.
That’s strange for me. You know me. I’ve used and reviewed more than 60 productivity apps and written over 220 posts about them. My first love is the notes app. I think by writing.
And that love was the problem. The more I loved notes, the more time I spent tending them. Tags, folders, links, templates. My notes looked beautiful. My thinking had stopped. I had become a note organizer, not a thinker.
So today, my notes app is a task manager. Superlist.
Here’s the one thing that made it work. Inside that daily dump, anything that needs action becomes a task, with its own date and label. Everything else stays a plain bullet. One question, two seconds: does this thought have a next step?
Notes apps never asked me that. So nothing moved.
When I tick the dump done, it rolls to the next evening. The history stays in the log, day after day.
That’s most of my system now. One plus one:
Superlist: where everything lands during the week.
Notion: projects, opened once a week for a 60-minute review.
My long-form writing still starts in Obsidian, and I keep it that way on purpose. That’s slow thinking, a different job. This is about the daily flow, work and personal, and that runs on two apps.
To be honest with you: I’m a Superlist affiliate. I also pay for the Basic plan from my own pocket. I’ve looked at the Super plan more than once and can’t see the value against the cost yet. Basic covers everything here.
Is it the best notes app? Not if you want a library. If you want notes you actually use, it’s the best I’ve found.
One question before you go. If you could keep only one app, which would it be? Hit reply and tell me. I’ll read every one.
-SystemsAndFlow, Kaushik
P.S. A fuller walkthrough of my Superlist setup, sidebar and all, is coming on Medium in a couple of weeks.