8 min read

Personal Stack

I am probably not, on net, someone anyone should look to for productivity advice. However, I do think I have a halfway decent system going to meet the goals I have set for myself under the principle that I would rather get something done than nothing. As someone who struggles with the twin demons of executive dysfunction and perfectionism, this is maybe the single guiding principle of my life. Everything is in service of, to paraphrase Bourdain, outwitting the guy inside me who will give up before he's started. I spend a whole lot of time taking notes, tweaking the software I use and habits I keep up, and thinking about how best to improve the ways I exist in both the digital and the real. So here's the stack of stuff I use or do on a regular basis as of August 2025.

Habits

I am not an Atomic Habits convert to the degree of some folks I know but I've read it and I think it has a few nuggets of really good advice. The biggest one is setting extremely achievable goals when you're trying to start a new habit - ideally, something that takes 2 minutes or less. My morning routine is designed to take as little as ten minutes or as much as two hours depending on the day: as long as I do the bare minimum version of it I consider that a win, which helps me keep these things up on days when I am busy or tired or truly, deeply don't want to.

Morning routine:

  • Meditate for 5 minutes
  • Do 1 set with the weights I keep in my office
  • Clean 1 thing
  • Journal

All of these I am allowed to do more of if I have the time and inclination, but I set the goals intentionally low so it's pretty hard to convince myself I shouldn't do it at all. Some days I do the bare minimum, some days I write 10,000 words or clean the entire apartment. The important thing is that I do something.

Code

I use VSCode with vscode-neovim for everything - I put in the time to get halfway decent at vim a decade ago and I will never give it up, but it's nice to have access to the VSCode plugin ecosystem. Documenting every plugin I use within both VSCode and neovim is a post unto itself, but highlights include:

  • lazy-nvim for neovim plugin management
  • GitHub Copilot for single-line autocomplete (multiline hallucinates constantly in my experience) and the occasional Q&A with Claude - I find that I only really get use out of AI once every few weeks, and have rarely come across a use case in my own work where I have any need for a complex agent architecture. Ultimately I'm an IC at heart: managing a bunch of agents doesn't sound any better to me than managing people, and I'd rather write the code myself 90% of the time. Also if you've read my blog you know I have uhhh extremely mixed feelings about AI in general but I try to keep abreast of it since I spent a lot of time working on and around machine learning before it was cool.
  • Git for version control.
  • just for command running.
  • WSL for linux emulation: I left the Mac ecosystem in 2020 and, to my chagrin, spend most of my time on Windows now. Since I refuse to learn Powershell this is the best option available to me.
  • bash for anything shell-related: I have tried zsh and fish and all the other things out there and I have yet to encounter a case where it was really that helpful for me to use anything other than good old bash.
  • Probably the single best code-related thing I do is write comments for myself when I'm working on a project - I am neither good nor bad at writing comments for other devs, nor do I have a strong opinion about the best practice for doing so (other than that AI-generated comments that just turn a class name into a sentence are not helpful), but taking the time to write out why I made a weird choice, explain how to interface with something complex or non-obvious, or just flag a #FIXME whenever it comes up has saved me a lot of headaches over the years.

Computers/Devices

  • Aorus 15G for gaming/personal work. It's 5 years old and beat to hell but it was the best deal I could find on a mobile 3090 when they came out. The build quality for this batch was terrible, I've had to replace a bunch of parts over the years, and it now lives exclusively on my desk because the replacement case I put on it a year ago is half-broken and the screen could fall off in a stiff enough breeze. It can still run Cyberpunk which is good enough for me.
  • When it became increasingly clear my gaming laptop could no longer survive being in my backpack, I purchased a refurbished ThinkPad T14 Gen2 to be my travel/streaming/note-taking computer. It was $280 bucks and it can run Rimworld.
  • Synology DS423+ for homelab stuff: the plus allows you to do transcoding without issue and doesn't have some of the vendor lock-in/generally shitty moves Synology has made in newer models. You can also self-host pretty much anything on it if you're so inclined.
  • Rakuten Kobo Elipsa for e-books. The interface is a bit janky and I have not used the stylus as much as I thought I would, but it doesn't have the insane level of vendor lock-in that Kindle does and plays nicely enough with most of the third-party software I've tried.
  • Steam Deck for travel gaming: this is a really impressive and well-designed device! So much so that I now keep it in a closet and only take it on trips because the temptation to play videogames in bed is too high otherwise.
  • iPhone 16 for mobile: while my screen time is higher than I'd like it to be, most of it is spent reading manga and scrolling Reddit or bluesky on the toilet. My last phone finally broke earlier this summer so I got a new model, which I will keep until it breaks. This system is good enough for me until they make either a Linux phone I actually want to use or a "nothing phone" that still has music and maps.

Homelab/Servers

The homelab stuff is a relatively new hobby but it's a good one: my homelab can go untouched for weeks at a time now that it's set up, but there's always something new to try out when I have some free time and an itch to set up a docker container. I don't have strong opinions about most of the homelab stuff because I'm new enough to it that I haven't explored my options much.

  • Plex for video hosting.
  • Calibre for e-book management.
  • Home Assistant for smart home stuff.
  • Dreamhost for DNS. I would probably never recommend it but I've been using it for a over a decade and this is one part of my stack I would rather not spend much time thinking about.
  • Hetzner for cloud server stuff and self-hosting. I actually would recommend Hetzner - it's the least "fiddling with menus" type of cloud hosting I've had to do since working with Linode a decade ago, and while I can't say confidently that Hetzner is morally good, they're at least GDPR-compliant and I'm not giving my money to Amazon or Google.

Note-taking & Tracking

I have written about my many years of trying different second brain software before, but for right now I use vanilla Obsidian. I have a daily note that I use for my journal with checkboxes for my habits, and a note that I manually update every week with my schedule, a few general goals and to-do list. If a to-do list item stays on there for too long, I move it to a "to-do grab bag" for things that clearly weren't important enough for me to get done but that I can go to on days when I feel like I can take on the world. Everything else gets put into a category folder - personal, creative, notes - which I make fairly haphazard subfolders for when I'm making a bunch of different notes on a single topic. I do keep separate vaults for work and personal stuff since I have no desire for my journal to end up on my work computer.

After a few failed forays into Kanban and Dataviews I have settled on being the most basic Obsidian user imaginable. I barely use internal links, I don't look at my knowledge graph, and at most I have one or two plugins installed that are just for things like "automatically turning a pasted link into a markdown link". The only note I have a template for is my daily note. Basically it's a prettier version of just using Notepad. I've changed second brain systems enough that my priority is sticking to that "do something" philosophy: if managing my notes app becomes too much of a chore I won't do it, and there's always the damn search function if I really need to find something. If I stick with Obsidian for long enough there will may come a day when I get obsessive about it but for now treating it as a bunch of folders and files is good enough.

Communication

I think a lot about, but can never seem to find, a piece of advice I read several years ago, which is that your boss isn't worried about inbox zero so you shouldn't be either. I try to take this to heart, along with the many forms of "if it's really important, they'll contact me again" you'll find in Linkedin posts and productivity books the world over. Worrying about keeping up with email and the eight million messaging services we all have to use now is a mug's game.

I only have notifications turned on for text messages, calls, and direct messages on my phone. I think this keeps my signal-to-noise ratio pretty good and allows me to keep up with things that actually matter. I probably miss some interesting stuff in Discord channels or whatever but I'd rather this than my already-poor attention span be frayed even further by a constant stream of notifications.

In General

The things I tend to fixate and spend the most time on are code and homelab-related - these are things I enjoy playing around with and am comfortable coming back to after long breaks. I reckon they're also the things that have the most value in my day-to-day life: pretty much everything I do professionally involves code at some point or another, and the homelab, particularly my Calibre library, is my primary source of entertainment other than videogames.When I don't have a big creative project going, I try to prioritize my "project time" on things that will make my life easier or save me time in the long run: I rarely regret investing time upfront so I can save time later. This can turn into productive procrastination at times, but hey, at least it's productive.

For everything else, my focus is on something over nothing. I don't have the best note-taking system in the world, my inbox would give a lot of people nightmares, but I do use my note-taking system constantly and for the most part I manage to keep up with the emails that actually matter.

In spite or because of the fact that these are two of the practices I am the least obsessive and weird about, if everything else here had to go away, I would probably recommend daily meditation and journaling above all else. They're hard practices to keep up, which is why I only require myself to do the bare minimum, but the rewards for even that are pretty significant. When I actually take the time to examine what I'm feeling and thinking in the morning I'm more likely to do so throughout the day, to avoid making bad decisions or losing hours to nothing, and generally able to be kinder to myself and others. Maybe if I couldn't use neovim none of that would matter though. Hard to say.

Published by:

Brent