Since leaving Techstars in November, I've been rebuilding how I work from the ground up. Working for someone else meant using their tools, defaults, and opinions about how information should flow.
Now I get to design my own again.
Safari is where I spend a lot of my time. It's fast, lightweight, and clean. For programming, I've gone from TextMate to Sublime Text to Zed. But now most of my coding happens in conversation with Claude Code running in the terminal.
Hey handles all my emails and calendars. And Basecamp handles everything else. My writing, planning, multi-project management, and files are all there. It replaces what used to require Slack and Notion and Google Docs and a dozen other things I no longer think about.
That's the mise en place. The screenshots below are my actual screens.
There's a philosophy behind it.
Ruby is a programming language famously "optimized for programmer happiness." The idea is simple: tools that feel good to use make you more productive than tools that are merely powerful.
I think the same should apply to how we organize our work.
Most of this setup isn't "AI-native." That's part of why it works for me. These tools are grounded in doing real work, not promising to do it for you. AI lives in my terminal, where I'm building and coding. Everything else is deliberately calm. My setup looks plain because plain is the point.
When I've used tools that can do anything, I spend more time configuring than working. Every workspace I've inherited that promised infinite flexibility looked like someone's junk drawer exploded into a wiki. I'm sure those tools work for some people, they just don't work for me.
I prefer crisp defaults over endless flexibility. When I open my laptop I need to start working, not decide how to work. Right now there are zero emails, messages, or follow-ups living in my head instead of a system.
This won't last forever. I'm building tools that might reshape what you see here. But everything has a place. If you've found a setup that works, I'd love to hear about it.
