I Deleted My Entire Productivity App Stack
Claude Code does most of it now
I used to spend a lot of time in Notion.
Databases. Linked views. Templates. A content calendar. A product tracker. Something that vaguely resembled a CRM. The whole thing.
I also had Zapier running in the background. Some Make automations. Briefly tried n8n (great tool, too much setup). Google Sheets for stuff that didn’t fit anywhere else. Apple Notes for quick captures. A few other apps I won’t even bother naming.
Felt productive. Really wasn’t.
I was maintaining the stack more than I was using it. The automations broke. The Notion databases got messy. Sheets are… sheets. And every few months I’d spend a weekend “fixing the system”.
I don’t do any of that anymore.
The Cool Side Of AI
I started using Claude Code for code and writing workflows. Then for more. Then for more.
At some point I realized I hadn’t opened Notion or sheets in weeks.
Tha wasn’t a real decision. It happened naturally while using AI more and more.
That’s the thing about productivity apps. They’re optimized for their own model of how work should be organized. Notion wants you to think in databases. Zapier wants you to think in triggers and actions. Google Sheets wants you to think in rows and columns.
Claude Code doesn’t care. It works with whatever you have and throw at it.
The Files Are Simple Now
Everything I write lives in HTML or Markdown files. A flat folder. No database, no syncing infrastructure, no app to maintain.
Over 1,200 published stories from Medium and Substack. All in one folder (well two, drafts and published). Plain HTML.
That used to be scattered across Notion, backed up in Apple Notes, some of it only on the platforms themselves. Getting it all in one place was a project. Claude Code did most of it in an afternoon. Deduplication, cleanup, consistent naming. I wrote about that whole system separately.
The simpler the format, the more useful it becomes for AI. And me.
A plain HTML file is readable by anything. A Notion database with custom properties and linked views is readable by almost nothing except Notion.
Simple formats age well. Complex formats don’t.
Automation Without the Automation Software
Zapier, Make, n8n. They’re all good tools. I used them.
The problem is maintenance. Every automation you build is a thing that can break. The trigger changes. The API updates. The service you’re connecting to moves something. And now you have a broken automation you don’t remember building it.
I replaced most of that with Claude Code scripts.
They live in my project folders. I can read them. I can edit them. When something breaks, I know where to look (and Claude realizes it).
The content pipeline is a good example. Every time an article gets revised and published, a small set of scripts runs. Social posts get generated. The blog version gets queued. Affiliate links get inserted. Cross-links get found and verified. The file moves from Drafts to Published.
That used to be manual work. Now it just runs. Scripted. Claude Code wrote most of the scripts. I maintain them.
Context Management Instead of Project Management
Notion was my project management tool. What I actually needed was context management.
There’s a difference.
Project management tracks status. Who’s doing what, by when, what’s blocked. Great for teams. For a solo person working on the same handful of projects every day, that’s overhead.
Context management is different. It’s about making sure the relevant background is available when you sit down to work.
What’s the state of this? What decisions were made? What did I learn last time?
That’s CLAUDE.md files (or memory). A short document in each project folder that holds the context. Architecture decisions, quirks, what to watch out for, what I’ve tried. When I open a project after two weeks away, I (and Claude) read the file. Then I’m back up to speed.
No database. No linked views. One markdown file per project. Claude Code reads it automatically.
Small Apps for Special Cases
Some things don’t fit a general tool.
I used to force them into Sheets or Notion anyway. That’s usually where the friction came from.
Now I build a small app. A few hours with Claude Code. Something that does exactly the one thing I need, nothing else.
A tax calculator for my wife’s job. A specific tracker for outreach. A thing that processes a CSV in a way Sheets could technically do but would take forty-five minutes of formula-writing to set up correctly.
Sounds like more work. But it’s less if you prompt AI right. A purpose-built app with no extra features is faster to use. And building it takes an afternoon. It’s not a commercial project that goes into the app stores.
It also means I’m not paying $12/month for 2 or 3 SaaS product that does the thing plus thirty features I don’t want.
What I Still Use
Apple Notes. Still there. I mean it’s always there on Mac or iOS by default.
I shared family notes.
For quick capture, for things that don’t belong in a “project”.
No Notion, no Obsidian, no Bear. Apple Notes. My business stack is pretty short these days.
And Claude Code itself. Obviously. That’s the whole point.
The Downsides
It’s not for everyone, and I should say that clearly. Also, if you do a lot, Claude is going to get expensive.
The workflow I have requires knowing how to read and write some basic code, or at least being comfortable enough to follow along when Claude Code explains what it’s doing. If that’s not you, this doesn’t apply in the same way.
It also requires trusting that a script does what it says it does. A Zapier automation has a UI. You can see each step. A Claude Code script is just code. You can read it, but you have to actually read it.
And there’s some maintenance. Scripts can still break. File structures drift. Something that worked six months ago might need updating. It’s not zero effort. But it’s better. For me.
The Bottom Line
The best productivity system is the one with the fewest moving parts. Has anybody said that? Maybe…
I didn’t set out to replace my entire stack. I just kept noticing that the new approach was simpler, and the old apps were sitting unopened.
Simple formats. Small scripts. Purpose-built tools when needed. Context files instead of databases.
It’s not perfect. But I spend a lot less time maintaining it.