Zenbe Is Gone: 6 GTD Email and List Swaps
Zenbe is gone, and so is the app its list users were told to move to. That double shutdown is the whole story, and it is the part the old blog posts still floating around Google will not tell you: Zenbe Mail and Zenbe Lists were closed down in the early 2010s, there is no login screen, no archive and no successor from the original team. Zenbe Lists refugees were widely pointed at Wunderlist, which Microsoft then retired on 6 May 2020, pushing everyone to Microsoft To Do. Two forced rebuilds in under a decade.
This piece does two things. It gives you the honest status of Zenbe, then names six live replacements, split between the two very different jobs Zenbe was trying to do at once: a shared, commentable inbox and a stripped-back list app. The conclusion up front, so you can stop reading if you already agree: if you are the only person in your system, buy a plain standards-based mailbox and a separate list app. Do not buy a team inbox.
How to Make Money Blogging Around a Full-Time Job
The honest answer, up front: making money blogging around a full-time job is a scheduling problem wearing a marketing problem's clothes. Every guide to how to make money blogging lists the same income streams and stops there, which is fine if you have forty spare hours a week. You have about six, some weeks four, and roughly none in December. So this piece does something different: it budgets the hours first, then scores each income route on how long it takes to pay you anything, how much weekly admin it drags behind it, and how badly it hurts when the platform changes its mind.
Notion Lock-In: What the Export Actually Loses
Notion lock-in is not about whether there is an export button. There is one, it works, and it will hand you a zip file. The real question behind every Notion lock-in export argument is narrower and more useful: do the exported files still run your GTD system on Monday morning, or do you now own a folder of readable text and a broken machine?
The honest conclusion, up front. Your words travel fine. Your structure does not. Databases flatten into CSVs, relations become page-title strings, formulas export as whatever number they happened to show on the day, and the graph you spent two years building is the part you rebuild by hand. That rebuild time, measured in hours, is your actual exit cost. Licence fees are a rounding error next to it.
Best Books for Entrepreneurs: 8 That Change Habits
The best books for entrepreneurs are the ones that change what you do on a Tuesday morning, not the ones that change what you think on a Sunday night. That is the honest test, and most reading lists never apply it. This piece picks eight, pairs each with one specific practice you install the week you finish it, then gives you a reading order and a six-week cycle so the practice survives past the point where the motivation wears off.
Short version of the conclusion: read a capture-and-review system first, read everything else second, and buy books more slowly than you read them.
Measure Productivity by Output, Not Activity: A GTD Guide
The only productivity number worth keeping is the count of loops you closed this week. Everything else measures intent.
This piece shows you how to measure productivity by output, not activity, inside a working GTD system rather than in the abstract. The conclusion, up front: define each project's done-condition as a past-tense sentence someone else could verify, count four things during your weekly review (projects closed, deliverables shipped, decisions settled, loops reopened), and turn off every completed-task total and streak your apps are showing you. That is the whole method. The rest is the detail that stops it going wrong.
Mac Productivity Apps: 7 That Fit a GTD System
The best Mac productivity apps are the ones you still trust at 4pm on a bad Tuesday, when a client rings, your hands are on the keyboard mid-document, and the thought you cannot afford to lose is one sentence long. Feature lists do not help you there. Seconds do.
The honest conclusion, up front: most people need four apps, not fourteen. A capture layer, one action list, one reference store, and one filing rule engine. This piece names seven apps because two of the jobs have a genuine fork in the road, and you pick one side of each. Nobody should install all seven.
7 Best Motivational Books That Change What You Do
The best motivational books are the ones that leave a written next action behind when you close them. That is the honest test, and most of the famous titles fail it. You read something sharp about fear or change or discipline, you feel about twenty per cent more capable for a week, then the inbox refills and the half-started projects sit exactly where they were. This piece names seven books worth the shelf space, and pairs each with the single behaviour it reliably changes, the action to file after the last page, and who should skip it.
The conclusion, up front: a book you convert into three next actions and a one-page mind map is worth more than five you highlighted and shelved.
Evernote Alternatives: 7 Apps Compared (With Real Migration Costs)
The best Evernote alternatives are the ones you can leave again cheaply, because if you are reading this you have already learned that you will probably move once more. So this piece prices the move rather than parading features. Seven apps, judged against the five jobs a note system actually has to do, plus a blunt list of what breaks the moment your notes leave Evernote: flattened tags, dead internal links, unreadable encrypted blocks, and the searchable scans that almost nothing replaces.
The honest conclusion, up front. Joplin gives you the cleanest ENEX import and the lowest exit cost. Apple Notes is the fastest capture if you live on Apple hardware, and its Live Text is the nearest free stand-in for Evernote's OCR. Obsidian wins if you want Markdown files on your own disk. UpNote is the closest thing to old Evernote's shape, with a one-off licence instead of a rolling fee. Notion is the wrong answer for a reference archive, and I will explain why.
How to Make ChatGPT Work With GTD: 6 Jobs It Does Well (And 4 It Ruins)
ChatGPT belongs next to your GTD system, not inside it. That is the honest conclusion, up front: it is genuinely useful for clarifying, planning and interrogating a weekly review, and it is a poor place to keep your actual commitments. If you want ChatGPT work and GTD to sit together without quietly rotting your trust in your lists, the split matters more than the prompts.
Getting Things Done runs on five steps: capture, clarify, organise, reflect, engage. Two of those are thinking problems. Three of them are storage and retrieval problems. A language model is good at thinking problems and structurally bad at storage, because a chat thread has no reliable state, no offline copy and no guarantee that what you told it on Monday is still in the window on Friday.
Best Mac Email App for Getting Things Done (7 Picks Compared)
The best Mac email app is the one that gets work out of your inbox and into your task manager in a few seconds, then leaves you alone. That is a different question from which client has the prettiest interface or the longest feature list. If you already run a GTD-style system in OmniFocus, Things, Todoist or Reminders, your mail client is a capture device and a reference archive. Everything else it does is optional.
This piece compares seven Mac clients against three tests I apply to any tool on this site, explains where snooze and tag state actually lives (the question almost nobody asks before switching), and gives you a migration sequence that will not break your weekly review.
