By Teresa Torres · producttalk.org · @ttorres on X · LinkedIn
Teresa Torres shares the personal productivity, reading, product-building, and collaboration tools she relies on as a product manager, startup builder, and graduate student. She opens with a caveat that she once over-invested in productivity systems and now values tools mainly for getting real work done. Her picks are grouped by use case, and she explains what each does well and where it falls short. The post is a practical snapshot of one PM's toolkit from 2014, useful mainly for its candid comparisons, such as the trade-offs between analytics platforms and why event-level data matters.
01Key takeaways
- Avoid spending more time tuning productivity systems than doing the actual work.
- Choose a task manager based on whether you need a full GTD system or a simple to-do list.
- Store documents in the cloud so hardware failures do not cause data loss.
- Event-level analytics properties must stay attached to events to show which action caused a change.
- Use scheduling tools like Doodle when coordinating three or more people to avoid long email chains.
- Adopt idea-management tools that match the familiar interfaces employees already use.
02Key sections
- Personal productivity
- She recommends OmniFocus for GTD-style task management and Evernote as a cloud-based replacement for local storage across devices.
- Reading
- Feedly, Instapaper, and the Kindle Paperwhite are presented as the tools that let her consume a large volume of content anywhere.
- Building products
- OmniGraffle covers mockups and diagrams, while she compares KissMetrics, MixPanel, and Google Analytics and argues teams often need to build their own analytics.
- Idea management
- Kindling is highlighted as an easy-to-adopt tool for crowdsourcing ideas from everyone in a company.
- Collaboration
- Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Google Hangouts, and Doodle are endorsed for shared editing, remote video meetings, and scheduling across many participants.
03From the post
“I used to be a productivity nerd. Until I realized that I was spending more time playing around with systems than I did actually doing work. This is pretty common. I’ve outgrown that stage. But I still love to hear about how other people work. And i’m always”
04Frameworks mentioned
Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.