You set up your second brain, your notes, tasks, and calendar are all in sync, and you’re the most productive that you’ve ever been.

Then, all of a sudden, your life changes:

All of these can have an impact on what tools make sense to use.

As you enter these new seasons of life, the system that was working perfectly might totally fall apart, and that’s okay.

There comes a time that it makes sense to change your system instead of app-hopping every other day trying to find the next latest greatest thing.

These bigger life changes are the moments where it actually makes sense to search for new tools that may fit your new life better.

I’m Bill, a mechanical engineer, project manager, YouTuber, and writer. Juggling all of this requires me to have a system that is dialed in all the time. I can’t have things scattered around: tasks, notes, and events on my calendar haphazardly placed.

Otherwise, it feels like my life is in shambles.

I like to take a systems approach because ultimately, these apps are here to serve you. This means I could translate what I’m doin into any app and make it work.

So, how do you know when to actually switch?

Well, when managing the system becomes more cumbersome than you could ever imagine, and you have even less time than you thought was possible. This is when the system needs to operate like a well-oiled machine.

It can feel all too easy to give up on your hopes and dreams if you have the wrong tool that is misaligned with your current season of life.

I’m also not here to tell you what to pick. I love sharing my learned experiences with different applications in hopes that you can find something that works for you.

Remember, everyone is different and there is a tool out there that is right for you and we can find it together.

Let’s take a step back and focus on what I had been using in my last season of life as a married couple with no kids.

There was plenty of time during the week for me to focus on YouTube, a podcast, newsletter writing, daily social posts, and engaging with my community online.

Apple Notes, Reminders and Calendar were my hallmark tools. Simple, built-into all of my Apple devices and quick to sync everywhere. They even offer some ability to talk to each other.

It is possible to link Notes to Reminders through the share sheet and scheduled Reminders will show up on the Calendar.

As we’ve entered this new season of life that we call parenthood, a lot of that time has evaporated. When I sit down at my computer and I need to work on a video, I need to have my tasks and schedule and my time walked out appropriately for the very limited amount that I have available.

If things aren’t crystal clear, I tend to sit down and get easily distracted. When scrolling my phone or watching random YouTube videos is easier than finding what I’m supposed to be doing, you will find me doing that instead.

I started to realize that I spend a fair amount of time working to adjust things in my system. To link Notes, get my Reminders in place and move them along a Kanban board, there was a lot of manual effort there to keep things aligned with where they actually were in the production process.

This led me down a giant rabbit hole, first re-creating my system in Notion. A place where the status is directly tied to the notes, as are the tasks AND they show up on the calendar.

Exactly what I was looking for.

So why do I not like using it?

I’ve struggled to give up Apple Calendar. I prefer the interface to Notion Calendar and I need a dedicated app on every device, including iPad. Currently Notion Calendar has the iPhone app, horribly scaled to the iPad.

Plus it is more difficult to quickly get items into the right database within Notion. When I have an idea, if I don’t get it written down within a minute or less, it will usually be gone. Too many responsibilities and other things taking up space in my mind now to hold onto good ideas for too long. That is just the reality of my life.

Then came Craft, a beautiful solution, pretty much like Apple Notes, but they’ve added collections, similar to Notion databases. Craft also offers tasks built in and you can see your calendar events from apple and google inside of the app.

The downside is there is currently no monthly or even weekly calendar view, everything appears as a list. Again, not the end of the world, but for how I plan within my system, a monthly view is a must, especially with my personal and family calendars overlayed.

2-3 videos per month, 1-2 podcasts per month, 1 newsletter minimum, plus all of the social posts that go along with all of these items is a ton of work to manage.

Ultimately all of the extra tools and features just added frustration to my stupid simple system.

For now I’ve sort of settled back into Apple Notes, Reminders and Calendar. I now need to migrate all of the things I was working on in Notion and Craft back into Apple Notes and adjust my tagging system a touch but it is largely still the best system for me.

While that is true, the features and abilities that Notion and Craft offer are great! If you can design your system around either of those applications if will be just as powerful as whatever I am using.

P.S. If you’d like to grab my Apple Notes Essentials guide you can do that here. It is still 50% off through Cyber Monday with code “BF25NOTES”.

Thanks!