Notes / Tools
The tools we actually use, summer 2026.
Tool lists are usually advertising in disguise, so let me state the rule first: a tool has to remove generic work, or it goes. Process that exists for its own sake is noise, and you know how we feel about noise.
Notion
Planning, production, recycling. One board, the same system for every client, which is exactly why it works: nobody has to learn a new ritual per project. It's also the one we share, because gatekeeping a planning board would be a strange hill to die on.
Claude
For first drafts of variants, for mining call transcripts when we're building a client's voice, for the boring halves of repetitive work. Never for the final word. The test I hold myself to: if you can't tell which sentences the model wrote, it got too close to the end of the process. AI handles the generic. The judgment stays human. That order is the whole point of this practice.
The client's own stack
For scheduling, analytics and reporting we use whatever you already have. Adding a dashboard nobody asked for is how agencies create homework. If your stack has a real gap we'll say so in the audit, with a name and a price, not a partnership link.
What we dropped this year
A social scheduler nobody opened after week three. An SEO suite that produced monthly reports which were read by exactly one person, who wrote them. Both were fine products. They just didn't remove generic work, they generated it.
This list will look different next summer. That's not a weakness of the list, that's the rule doing its job.
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