In this post I’ll be sharing the apps, websites and tools I use on a daily basis. What’s the point? Well, I’d like to look back to this lineup on a yearly basis and see whether I can improve the way I work online.

Moreover, maybe you’ll find a new app/website listed here and you’ll decide to try it out based on my recommendation.

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I have a fairly structured morning routine that I’ve developed over the years. It goes something like this:

1. Wake up and take a shower immediately.
2. Brew a cup of coffee and do a ten-minute meditation.
3. Foam roll for 30 minutes while listening to a podcast.
4. Study a language for 15-20 minutes on Duolingo.

It takes around an hour and a half, and I try to be up by 7am on a good day, so by 8.30am I’m ready to start my day with some good wins in my bag.

As a morning person with the Lion chronotype, I have no trouble waking up and getting out of bed in the morning. I tend to wake up without any alarm clocks after 7.5 to 8 hours of sleep, and I’m immediately ready to jump out of bed with lots of energy and start the day.

I like to take a shower as it makes me feel fresh and ready to approach the day. The act of showering is more than just an act of basic hygiene; it gives me an extra boost psychologically, so I rarely go without it, even though I usually shower again during the day after training or in the evening before I head to bed.

The brewing of coffee is a meditative process in itself and gets me primed for the structured meditation that comes after it. By using a moka pot and manually grinding the beans I would have previously selected from a local roastery, I’m injecting a bit of art and manual work into the process, and it definitely means more and feels more satisfying to finally drink the brewed shot of coffee while I start my meditation, compared to if I had just used a Nespresso machine.

For meditation, I use the Calm app and adopt a zen meditation pose. The ten minutes of meditation give me the chance to heighten my awareness and build resilience for the day ahead.

When that’s done I move on to foam rolling, which is an essential way for me to iron out the knots in my muscles and stretch them out. Since I train so much, I tend to wake up with sore muscles and overall a stiff body, and foam rolling works wonders for that. I follow a number of podcasts so I’ll just pick up where I had left off the previous day or select a new episode that I fancy from the list of available ones. If my wife and son are awake by this time, I’ll skip the podcast and chat with them while I foam roll.

After foam rolling, I do the last part of my morning routine, which consists of studying a language using the excellent Duolingo app. There’s not much to say about this, except for the fact that it’s a compounding exercise. Although I do just 15-20 minutes a day, when you add it up over a year or two you can really get familiar with a language and be able to make practical use of your new skill.

In May this year I was in Toronto to attend Collision, North America’s fastest-growing tech conference. I was really looking forward to this conference, after having attended Web Summit in Europe for several years and having thoroughly enjoyed that sister conference.

I wasn’t disappointed by the conference. Toronto turned out to be a great location for such a conference.

I met a lot of interesting startup founders. In comparison with Web Summit I would say that I enjoyed the talks at Web Summit more; they were more interesting to me than those at Collision, however that might just have been due to my particular interests.

The majority of startups focused on North America, so if you’re a European startup that wants to promote your product or services I would recommend attending Web Summit over Collision.

If you want to have a taste of the kind of presentations given at Collision, you can head over to the Facebook page where you can watch various videos of these presentations.

Here are some of the highlights from this year’s edition:

• Oculus co-founder: I got fired from Facebook for no reason at all
• Tech conference ‘Collision’ focuses on women in industry
• Twitter is trash. But Ev Williams still wants to save the world
• Senso.ai announces $1.5 million CAD raise at #CollisionConf
• For venture capitalists at Collision, the big question is: “What’s left to disrupt?”
• Mark Zuckerberg should hire a new Facebook CEO, former Facebook exec says

If you’d like to attend this year, you can make use of the 2 for 1 offer and get 50% off your tickets.

One thing I’ve realized during the past 5 years or so is the mind-boggling amount of crap information that’s passed around as absolute truth. Of course, the arrival of the internet only hugely magnified this problem, so we live in an age where it can be extremely difficult to know what’s true and what’s not.

It seems like everyone around is trying to manipulate our thinking, taking advantage of human biases and weaknesses in logic to convince us to believe what they are trying to sell. Politicians do it, companies do it, religious organizations do it, etc etc.

In this post, I’ll list a number of great resources that have helped me in this journey to really understand how things work and cut through the crap. I’ll keep updating this list over the years.

• Science-Based Medicine – Discusses popular health-related topics like vaccines, homeopathy etc.
• PainScience.com – All about pain and associated treatments. Learn what works and what doesn’t.
• Skeptic.com – Many topics covered and also a great podcast (Science Salon)
• LessWrong – Deep resource into philosophical arguments, rationality and logic.
• Behavioral Scientist – Discusses many current topics from a behavioral science perspective.

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