I spent my entire Saturday building a requirements document for the perfect productivity system.

AI comparisons. Notes apps. Task apps. Even Notion. I landed right back at Apple Notes and Reminders.

So I started asking a different question: do the biggest creators in tech have this figured out? Is there some app or workflow that separates someone with 20 million subscribers from someone like me, still rearranging apps on a Saturday?

I went looking for the answer. The Cortex podcast did a State of the Workflow series that gave me a window into how some of the best actually work. What I found surprised me, but not for the reason you’d think.

20 million subscribers. 5 billion views. And a shockingly simple setup.

The team uses Notion to visualize their video production pipeline, a status board showing who is assigned to what and where every video stands. But Marques isn’t writing in Notion. He writes scripts in Google Docs. A free app.

I was surprised to find out he still writes out entire videos word for word. I’ve been experimenting with bullet points lately, trying to sound more natural. Hearing that the best tech reviewer on the planet still writes it all out made me stop and think. He delivers it like he’s just talking, but the full script is underneath. The thinking happened in sentences first.

For task management he uses TickTick. I’ve recently started playing around with it myself. It’s a well-rounded task manager at a reasonable price compared to other options on the market.

Here’s the thing though. I spent my whole Saturday building requirements documents and feature comparisons. Marques has 20 million subscribers and uses three apps. That contrast was not lost on me.

If MKBHD made me feel like I was overcomplicating things, Austin Evans gave me the opposite feeling.

Austin talked about his custom Claude projects, trained on YouTube performance data. He feeds every video transcript into a project that suggests titles, descriptions and SEO keywords. I agree this is one of the best use cases for AI tools right now. Crunching large amounts of data and making connections that we might never see ourselves, even with a dedicated team.

I have similar projects set up with title and thumbnail data. The more information you give the AI, the better the results. Hearing someone at Austin’s level validate the approach mattered. Maybe the path forward isn’t fewer tools, it’s smarter ones.

Austin uses Todoist for task management, which his team forced him to download. His team also uses Notion, a common thread with MKBHD. I’ve come more to grips with why people choose Notion in teams, the sync is good and it’s full-featured software. But every time I look at it for myself, I can’t get past the lack of file ownership and true offline mode.

Austin commented and let me know that he also uses Google Docs for writing videos. I find that really interesting, I assume it much be better at multi-user, real-time collaboration for scripts but Notion is no slouch when it comes to managing docs in a team setting.

David Pierce from The Verge describes himself as a “note-taking lunatic.” Same.

He’s tried every notes app and bounced off all of them. Again, same.

His core philosophy is that speed of input beats everything. Organization doesn’t matter if capture is slow. I made the same point in a recent video and I’ll keep making it. If you’re building a notes app and aren’t working to make input as fast as possible, that should be priority number one. Before fancy dashboard views or plugins or anything else.

David and I also align on loving Obsidian’s principles but finding that it has too many hoops. I agree, even though I wrote the entire video script in Obsidian.

His solution? Four different Apple Shortcuts on his home screen. Each one opens a text box that dumps information directly into a different notes app. He uses this over 100 times a day.

That’s where it got uncomfortable, because I basically have the same setup. Action button mapped to a shortcut list for Apple Notes. An Obsidian widget. Reminders and TickTick in Control Center. All designed to get information into apps as fast as possible.

If MKBHD’s setup told me I was overcomplicating things and Austin gave me confidence to lean into AI, David looked me right in the face and said “you will never solve this.”

Because if someone this accomplished, this thoughtful about tools, still hasn’t landed on one system, maybe the search itself is the problem.

John Gruber co-created Markdown and still writes every article with it. He has a simple setup with BBEdit and MarsEdit, with north of 30,000 articles posted from those two tools alone.

But even John isn’t immune. He carries a paper Field Notes notebook everywhere and uses Apple Notes for quick capture. The first time one of these creators mentions Apple Notes.

What hit me was something he said almost in passing: “Writing is thinking.” He doesn’t consider something thought through until it’s written in full sentences. That landed. Because like MKBHD and John, I write out all of my videos. It helps me think through what I’m actually going to say. Do I really understand the problems? Writing slows me down enough to think through the problem, segment out my ideas and structure it before film day.

He picked his Mac as the one device he couldn’t live without. He described it as a mental “place” he gets lost in and uses paper to stay grounded. I love working on the Mac. The convenience of the iPhone and iPad have their place, but being connected all the time has introduced plenty of downsides when picking tools.

These four people are responsible for a combined 8 billion views. Not a single one has the same system.

MKBHD is minimal. Austin is AI-powered. David is hacking together multiple apps with Shortcuts. Gruber is using a keyboard from 1992 and a notebook.

They barely have a single tool in common, but there is one thread that runs through all of them. They picked something. They stopped tweaking. And they got to work.

I spent my Saturday building a requirements document to find the perfect system. The most viewed tech creators? They just started.

The best productivity system is the one you actually use. I already had mine.

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