What I use

I'm always curious about how academics actually accomplish their work. Andrew Heiss has a post here about the tools they use, which inspired me to write up something similar below.

Writing: Microsoft Word with the Zotero plugin

Presenting: Microsoft PowerPoint

Email/Calendar: Outlook for work. Proton for personal.

Reference management and PDF annotation: Zotero

Analysis: Stata and R/Positron

Website/blog: leafleft.pub

OS: macOS

Hardware: MacBook Pro, two external monitors.

Social: Bluesky

Project management and lab communication: Basecamp (free for educators!)

Cloud storage: Box

Window management, snippets, shortcuts, calculator, file search, app launching, clipboard management, and more: Raycast

Password management: Proton Pass

Digital notes and web clipping: Joplin

AI: Claude

Most of the above are pretty standard. I've tried a variety of different apps in nearly every category, but almost always go back to the more standard apps. My university uses Microsoft Office and Box—so those are largely what I use day to day.

If you are not familiar with Zotero , do yourself a favor and try it. It is incredibly useful free open-source software for managing references and PDFs. It has so many useful features including auto populating metadata, recording annotations, search/OCR, tagging, clicking on a citation to take you to the reference, and even letting you know when articles in your library have been retracted. For a small fee, you can reliably sync your entire library of PDFs across devices. There's also a Word plug in that makes citation and reference list creation a breeze.

Raycast is a powerful open-source launcher and utility app. Think Alfred, but better. There are endless use cases and plugins. Some that I use regularly are hotkeys for window management, hotkeys for pasting without formatting, snippets for en dashes and em dashes, querying google scholar, launching apps, quick calculator operations, time zone conversion, and searching files.

I was an Evernote user for years. But the lock-in and price increases became untenable. Joplin is a decent replacement. It's open source, has a low-cost sync service, and has OCR.

I don't use a task manager. At one point or another, I've used Things, Todoist, and Microsoft Tasks. What I've found works best for me is a simple weekly note with checklists. Most of my research tasks are managed in the lab's Basecamp .

I also tend to keep a small notebook with me to write down quick things, help draw out thoughts on paper, write down meaningful quotes, and track some writing habits. If I write down todos in the notebook, I'll typically migrate them into my weekly task list or Basecamp tasks. Although I don't follow it exactly, the Bullet Journal method/philosophy is how I organize my notebook. My favorite journal is the Leuchtturm1917 Medium (A5) with a dot ruling. Right now I'm partial to the black Sharpie felt tip pens.

Like many, I'm dipping my feet in the AI waters. I've been using Claude for this, but am not that familiar with how it compares to other services.