Welcome to your ultimate productivity stack guide!
If you're reading this guide, you:
What you won't find in this guide are general software recommendations with a bunch of tools that are 'trending' but we haven't actually used ourselves. This isn't another guide about all the productivity tools under the sun.
This guide is prescriptive and offers single tools to help you make essential business software decisions more quickly. The software below has been deeply vetted against competitors and all the below mentioned are used by us (we are paying customers).
Let's get into it! ⤵
Let's start with the portal to the internet: your browser.
For years, we used Chrome and the last thing we ever thought about needing was another browser. We have seen browser companies come and go with none on the market leaving much to be desired.
Then Arc by The Browser Company showed up. Arc is not just another browser. It's a workflow engine, offering an entirely new way to personalize the internet and make it your own.
The idea behind Arc is that no matter where you are in the world, no matter what device, you can log into your "portal to the internet" aka your browser and have it configured exactly like you left it.
The problem with Chrome, we learned, is that the creators had no reason to make the internet personal. This is because the creators want you to start from scratch every time you open the browser, searching Google for where you want to end up online. This is great for their ad revenue business model.
It wasn't until we started using Arc that we realized how often we really were unnecessarily going to Google to just open up the programs we use on a daily basis.
The difference with Arc is that the team has totally rethought the bookmarks and the "tab experience", along with introducing a feature called "Spaces". Spaces allow you to stay focused and easily segment your personal and work life while easily organizing tabs are important to you in folders.
For example, set up a personal space, favorite your YouTube, Spotify, WhatsApp, and Gmail tabs—from there, they function like mini apps. Now, with the swipe of 2 fingers, you're in your work space. All of your favorite apps are swapped out with your work apps, and you're logged into all of your work accounts:
This is like organizing a drawer. You put everything in its place, and hours later when you return, everything is as you left it. No more "searching" every time you want to use the internet. This has tremendously reduced fatigue (we didn't even realize we had) when using the internet.
If you're intrigued, want to know more, and see more of the features/benefits in GIF format, go check out this article where we've done a deep dive on why we think Arc is the future of the internet.
Sign up for Arc For Free (MacOS only, Windows coming soon!)
Now that you've enhanced your browsing experience, let's move onto your email. Meet Superhuman. Superhuman is a paid email client tool that is designed to make your email experience faster and more enjoyable.
But wait, you might be thinking why pay for your email when you can use any email client for free? 🤔
"Making email suck less" is Superhuman’s business mission. And remember — this guide is for the folks who want the best of the best—and Superhuman is a tool that after using for several years, we can't live without.
Prior to Superhuman we were using Gmail. And Gmail is great as a free email sending tool, but once we tried Superhuman we found it made the entire "checking and answering emails" experience way more enjoyable—and fast.
Not kidding, you know those 3-5 seconds you often need to wait for Gmail to load—yeah, Superhuman is literally instant. Want to write an email? Open Superhuman and press [c] and you'll be in a compose window a solid 2 seconds before Gmail loads.
Superhuman allows you to triage through your inbox using only keyboard shortcuts and the app on the phone is also super sleek and fast. Set reminders to be returned on your emails if someone hasn't responded, mark messages as done with hitting a button and label messages with ease. Since we started using Superhuman, we see inbox 0 way more often.
In summary, if you’re on email A LOT and want to optimize for enjoyment/ease/speed, Superhuman is 100% worth it. We’ve been paying for it for years and can't see life without it It's thoughtful, fast, and powerful. The way email should have been.
Click here to get a free Superhuman trial (get 30 days free).
On the topic of email, Mailman is a Gmail plugin that allows you to control when and what emails should land in your inbox.
You can set the times you'd like Mailman to deliver your emails (say at 9 am and 4 pm daily) so that you are not constantly interrupted by a new emails coming in.
Waiting on an urgent email? You can tell Mailman to only allow the email from that specific sender.
Mailman is that cherry on top of email if you're looking to optimize your email experience and create more blocks of focus time in your day.
Click here to sign up for Mailman.
If you've hung around our website long enough, you'll know we 🫶 Motion. And that's because it's changed the way we managed our meetings, time and projects — and this cannot be ignored.
We think of Motion as the ultimate platform for time management. Motion is a calendar, a meeting scheduler, and a task/project manager all in one. On top of this, it uses AI to help plan your day (as if you had a personal assistant on hand).
Here's how it works:
For example, let's say you have three hour-long meetings scheduled for Monday. You also have some other tasks that you need to get done that day. If something urgent comes up and you need to add an ASAP task, Motion will automatically rearrange your day and push the other tasks back. This way, you can always be sure that you're working on the most important tasks first.
There are so many other calendar and project management tools on the market and we find that Motion to be the best that we've evaluated. It's also helped us replace numerous tools. For example, we went from using four tools, Google Calendar, Chili Piper (call scheduling), TickTick (personal task management), Asana (project management) to using just Motion to manage all of the above.
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Get through your inbox 2x as fast (for teams of all sizes).
If you get more than 10 emails per week and you enjoy beautiful software, you'll want to seriously consider Superhuman. Superhuman app claims to be the fastest email experience, and we tend to agree.
Sign up here for a free month of Superhuman.
You might be thinking "why pay for email management when you can use any email client for free?" 🤔
While I've spoken to many about the sheer simplicity and power, I find that either someone "gets it" or "doesn't", and if you don't, it's not for you.
Prior to Superhuman we were using Gmail. And Gmail is great as a free email experience, but once we tried Superhuman we found it made the entire "checking and answering emails" experience way more enjoyable—and fast.
If you highly value your time, and are willing to pay a bit extra for enjoyment, Superhuman is the tool that will do just that, while get you through your email inbox 2x as fast.
In summary, if you’re on email A LOT and want to optimize for enjoyment/ease/speed, Superhuman is 100% worth it. We’ve been paying for it for years and can't see life without it It's thoughtful, fast, and powerful. The way email should have been.
Sign up here for a free month of Superhuman.
I'm not kidding, I'm talking like those 3-5 seconds you often need to wait for Gmail to load—yeah, Superhuman is literally instant. Want to write an email? Open Superhuman and press [c] and you'll be in a compose window a solid 2 seconds before Gmail loads.
Superhuman also allows you to triage through your inbox using only keyboard shortcuts.
I was a skeptic for years, until I finally gave it a shot. Learned some of the simple keyboard shortcuts like [e] for archive and [h] for snooze + some additional fun shortcuts like [#] for delete, and [!] for spam.
Don't like memorizing keyboard shortcuts to get through your email more quickly? Great, then just press [CMD] + [k] for the command bar → the Superhuman key, which allows you to do absolutely anything from anywhere just by typing.
Sign up here for a free trial of Superhuman.
Set reminders to be returned on your emails if someone hasn't responded, mark messages as done with hitting a button and label messages with ease. Since we started using Superhuman, we see inbox zero way more often.
Read statuses are super helpful for our team too (if I send an email and Andra (my Co founder) is cc'd, she can also see if the recipient opened the email or if I am in the middle of typing a reply. This has been so helpful for collaboration 🤜 🤛).
Set filters so that you can have different inbox splits (for example, filters for emails that are Important, Newsletters, Calendar Alerts, and Notifications). This creates a unified inbox that is more orderly.
Want to access more info quickly on the person that just emailed you? Superhuman's right hand bar will pull in the social media profiles of the person your writing to for easy access.
Use their advanced features like saved snippets for a re-usable bit of text that you use often and you'll save a ton of time.
Their *new* AI features are impressive and a fantastic use of AI. Write your emails quickly as a blurb, then ask AI to re-write with commands like "shorten", "lengthen", "simplify" or "improve writing". Even cooler? Superhuman learns your voice from your previous emails and you can ask Superhuman to re-write something in your voice 🤯
Sign up here for a free trial of Superhuman.
Rating: A-
Oh, and the mobile Superhuman app. You can mark messages as done in literally one second on the go via the Superhuman mobile app. Triaging your inbox on the go has literally never been easier. You can also go ahead and "snooze an email for when you're on your computer", because sometimes you just want your full keyboard.
One thing to note is, this rating is for the Superhuman iOS mobile app (Android was released more recently and is still a few features behind, e.g. read statuses, the calendar and customizable swipe actions are still to come along with a few others).
Superhuman email works with Google Workspace (G Suite) or your Outlook account. As a part of Superhuman's onboarding process, you'll get a 30 minute call with one of their reps to show you how to get the most out the tool. You can then add multiple email accounts (e.g. personal + work) and it's super easy to flip between email accounts making it even more worthwhile as now you never have to use Gmail or Outlook again.
At the end of the day, I'll never leave Superhuman, because it makes me dread email less. Enjoy it even. I told my wife Andra about Superhuman and while she resisted the idea of paying for her email experience, after a month of using it she couldn't see herself not using Superhuman again.
Our advice? Try it and you'll be unable to see yourself using Gmail ever again too.
Sign up here for a free month of Superhuman.
Superhuman use to have a waiting listing, but not any more. You can sign up and get access right away.
There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!
Get 1 month free & skip the waitlist by using the link above!
A browser extension that allows you to connect your CRM with LinkedIn in 60 seconds (for teams of all sizes).
Using LinkedIn with any CRM has always been a completely disjointed mess. You're adding people, unsure if they will accept your requests, and then conversations are had there before knowing if they should even be in your CRM.
This is where Surfe comes into play—you can simply continue using LinkedIn to connect and build your lead list like you normally do, but with the added benefit of accessing all of the most important information from your CRM right there within LinkedIn.
What I really appreciate about what the team is doing here is that they are focusing specifically on LinkedIn, to give the best user-experience possible, whereas most integration companies will start narrow and then begin going broader over time (e.g. Zapier + Make + Outfunnel + Whalesync). While this is totally fine (we love those mentioned tools), it just means that there's only so deep they can go into the user-experience and integration depth that focus allows you to do.
So with that said, we're confident in saying that there's no better CRM + LinkedIn integration tool on the market. Surfe is the clear winner. We personally use and pay for them and love it.
In-fact, what I find myself doing is going to events and prioritizing adding people on LinkedIn, because I know if they are there, it's a single click to get them added to our CRM (along with all of our conversations).
One thing I wish they had though was a way to create the lead/person within the CRM when on mobile, because I'd love to do this step when meeting someone cool out at a networking event instead of waiting to get them added to the CRM until after I get back to a computer.
There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!
Your meeting insights automated—the meeting recorder to understand & champion your users’ needs.
What we love most about tl;dv is that you can take all of your meeting notes directly from a floating pop-up right within the meeting you're in.
As you type the notes, tl;dv automatically timestamps your message and your entire team can also see the notes as they are being written.
No more do we need to find where to take collaborative call notes of which would otherwise not even be connected to the call recording itself.
All of the most important notes and timestamps are automatically sent to everyone on the call (or just your team), and they even have a nifty Slack integration as well.
We do wish it natively integrated with more CRMs though, but know the team is working on opening up the API to allow for it.
There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!
Free trial + get a 30% discount for the first 6 months + we're also a close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, they'll appreciate hearing it!
Security, reliability and speed everywhere. More easily manage your website DNS.
We use Cloudflare to manage our website DNS and domain names and also as a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to speed up our site. Some 60%+ of the internet relies on Cloudflare, and you get most of these great features for free.
Rating: A
You can essentially use Cloudflare for free, just to better manage your website DNS all in one place.
They also allow you to purchase domain names and manage them all in one place.
Simply set up your Nameservers to go through Cloudflare, and they add a layer of protection and CDN (Content delivery network) to your website.
Cloudflare provides serverless compute services via Cloudflare Workers, a platform for building and deploying JavaScript functions that run on the Cloudflare edge network.
Want to set up complex email routing and even run emails through a Cloudflare Worker to format data before delivering it to the inbox you want it to go into? They do that too! Super powerful.
Okay, Cloudflare just does a lot, and most of it is totally free for quite high usage.
Rating: B
Show me one DNS provider that has an exceptional UI for managing DNS records and websites. They all suck. If there's a single company that's innovating in the design and layout of DNS settings and site management, it's for sure Cloudflare.
Rating: B
Mainly deducting points because they have so many services, that it's easy to get lost in the navigation when trying to do simple things. They also rename their services from time to time to make things a bit more confusing. Not a huge deal in the day-to-day usage though.
All other DNS providers are also super slow to propagate changes when they're made. Cloudflare on the other hand is usually instant which is fantastic.
Rating: A
We have gotten so much value from Cloudflare over the past decade, and we still have not paid Cloudflare for anything (aside for the domains we purchase through it, but they charge at cost, so you're paying less with them than any other domain registrar out there).
There's genuinely no reason to not give Cloudflare a shot. They are free and have an incredibly UI/UX and just make DNS management more enjoyable.
There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!
A powerful launcher (spotlight replacement) for MacOS that bakes in deep integration and collaboration (for teams of all sizes)
Most people use the native Spotlight search within MacOS, and most are totally happy with it. If that's you, you probably don't care much about this space, but I'm here to tell you that you should.
Search is the main way to navigate the OS, and imagine this search box with superpowers. Do you open up the calculator? Raycast has that built in. Have a separate window resizing/manager tool like Rectangles? Yeah, Raycast does that too.
Just about anything you can think of, Raycast can do, or they have an app/integration for it. I'm not kidding—I literally compressed the image to the Arc + Raycast integration using a Raycast plugin:
Never again do you need to navigate to a sketchy "image conversion" website again—you can now do it all through your favorite ⌘ + Space shortcut via Raycast.
Now for the more technical crowd... I'm here to tell you that it's better than Alfred in every way. It's beautiful, free, has deeper native integrations, and the developer community is next-level.
Skeptical? I hear you—so much in-fact that I've debated (for hours) with just about every single one of my power-user friends about why Raycast is far-and-above better than Alfred. They didn't believe me, fought me tooth-and-nail on it.
And guess what? Every single one of them are now using Raycast (and Arc 😉). They just needed to download it and give it a genuine shot. It does everything better, and looks 10x as good (UI/UX).
It's free, just give it a shot yourself. If you're skeptical, come debate me on Twitter—happy to convince you as well 🦾
There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!
For teams of all sizes, drowning in Slack notifications? Use Dispatch to get 2x more done in Slack.
Dispatch was one of those apps that I didn't even think to look for because I never thought I needed it. Until I used it...
Let's be real, Slack is an overwhelming mess. You get mentioned all the time, have tons of DMs, while channels are just popping off left and right at all hours of the day.
So what do you do? You start muting all of the channels, and then you start missing everything. What if you could set simple filters which split your inbox to "Important" and "Other", all while all useless messages got auto-read (archived)?
That's Dispatch. It allows you to work through your Slack environment like email: [e] to archive messages, [h] to snooze them for later. Within the first minute of using it, you'll be wondering why Slack wasn't just built like this from the get-go.
It's like Superhuman for Slack (genuinely, if you're using Superhuman and not Dispatch—go and give it a whirl right now, you'll never be able to go back):
It also has super powerful team collaboration features. Have a shared Slack channel? Cool, @mention your team members and have private side comment threads without the external team members ever knowing.
If you're in any way trying to use Slack for internal or external support (inviting customers/clients), then you must be using Dispatch. Slack wasn't built for that. Dispatch was. Few apps have I actually bought the annual subscription so quickly (within 3 days). It's just magical.
There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!
Get 50% off for the first 3 months (for 2+ seats) and free white glove onboarding. After you've created your account, email hello@dispatch.do with the subject line "Efficient" and they'll apply the discount.
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