There’s no magic formula here. It’s just what keeps my routine running and my head in place. Five practical things, and one idea that, to me, matters more than all of them.

1. Get your finances organized

Messy finances take up space in your head. You don’t know how much you spent, you don’t know how much is left, and every decision becomes a guess.

I use Visor. It connects bank accounts and cards through Brazil’s Open Finance, categorizes spending automatically with AI and shows everything in one place. What won me over was the MCP integration: instead of keeping a spreadsheet, I ask Claude to build a report or cross-check my numbers, and it works from my Visor data.

It’s a subscription, but for me it easily pays for itself.

2. Learn English, more than ever

Everyone says it because it’s true. Documentation, jobs, community, the best talks and most of what’s new in tech show up in English first. And if you want to work remotely for companies abroad, it’s not optional.

A shout-out to my teacher, Daniel Cavalcante, who helps me keep leveling up.

3. Subscribe to Claude Code, and use it for more than writing code

Claude Code writes code, sure. But what’s helped me most is using it as a guide: putting together a study plan, reviewing what I understood about a topic, organizing ideas, challenging a decision before I commit to it.

This site is an example. It was built, published and tuned by talking to it, and I understood each piece along the way.

4. Get everything out of your head and into Notion

What you’re studying, what you’ll do, what you’ll stop doing, plans, goals. If all of that lives only in your head, it turns into noise.

I dump everything into Notion. It doesn’t have to be pretty or perfect, it just has to be out of your head. Your head is for thinking, not for storing to-do lists.

5. Subscribe to YouTube Premium

A lot of what I study goes through YouTube: talks, classes, tutorials. And it’s a pain to get interrupted by an ad every few minutes when you’re trying to focus.

Premium fixes that. But the bigger win isn’t the time, it’s not being bombarded with buying stimuli all the time. For your brain, that’s a blessing.

The most important one: keep thinking

There’s a line from Blaise Pascal, in Pensées, that I keep coming back to:

“Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.”

“O homem não passa de um caniço, o mais fraco da natureza, mas é um caniço pensante.”

All the tools above help. AI helps a lot. But no matter how far things go in that direction, there’s always someone behind it doing the thinking: deciding what to do, what to prioritize and what doesn’t make sense.

That’s the whole point of getting organized: to leave room in your head for what matters. So insist on thinking.

What’s essential on your list right now?