People often ask me what tools I use to run operations. The honest answer is that no tool saves you from bad thinking — but the right ones get out of your way so you can focus on what matters.
Here's my current setup, with reasoning for every choice and affiliate links where available.
Hardware
MacBook Pro (M3 Max, 14")
Operations means living in Slack, Linear, browser tabs, and terminal windows — often all at once. The M3 Max handles this without breaking a sweat. What I value most: the battery lasts a full day of back-to-back calls, the trackpad is still unbeatable for gesture navigation between workspaces, and when I do need to spin up a container or run a data migration, it just works.
Standing Desk (Generic)
I use a height-adjustable desk from a local supplier, but any solid standing desk with memory presets will do. My cadence: 45 minutes standing, 90 minutes sitting. The standing blocks are for deep work — writing, reading, thinking. Sitting blocks are for calls, Slack, and tactical execution. The switch itself is a forcing function for focus changes.
Browse standing desks on Amazon
Ergonomic Chair
I sit in a mid-range ergonomic chair with lumbar support and adjustable armrests. The specific brand matters less than the fit — your elbows should rest at 90 degrees, your feet flat, your screen at eye level. If you spend 8+ hours at a desk, a cheap chair is a false economy. Invest in the one piece of furniture you never stop using.
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Blue Light Glasses
I started wearing blue-light-filtering glasses during COVID, and I haven't stopped. Two effects: less eye strain during late-night incident response, and a noticeable improvement in sleep quality when I wear them after 8 PM. I keep a pair at my desk and a pair in my bag.
Find blue light glasses on Amazon
Noise-Cancelling Headphones
When I need to write a process doc or review a playbook, I put on noise-cancelling headphones with no music. Just silence. The cancellation alone improves my focus by at least 30%. For calls, the microphone quality matters more than the audio — your team shouldn't hear your keyboard, your coffee shop, or your neighbor's dog.
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Software & Tools
Obsidian
My entire operational knowledge base lives in Obsidian. Every process, every SOP, every post-mortem — all linked in a graph that grows more valuable over time. The key insight is not the tool itself but the habit: I write down everything that matters within 5 minutes of learning it. Over a year, that's a second brain worth hundreds of hours of saved context.
n8n
I use n8n to automate the glue between tools — webhooks that create Linear issues from customer emails, Slack alerts when SLAs are breached, automated onboarding sequences. The visual builder means non-technical team members can understand (and modify) workflows without a developer. In an ops context, that's the difference between automation that scales and automation that becomes a dependency.
Resend
Transactional email is the unsung hero of operations. Resend gives me reliable delivery with simple APIs and great deliverability. I use it for customer notifications, internal alerts, and automated reporting. When an ops process depends on email reaching someone, I don't want to wonder if it landed in spam.
VS Code
VS Code is my default editor for everything — scripts, documentation, playbooks, configuration files. The extension ecosystem means I can lint my markdown, validate my YAML, and run SQL queries without leaving the editor. Operations is about reducing friction, and VS Code is the lowest-friction editor I've found.
Linear & Todoist
Linear is where ops work gets tracked — projects, issues, roadmaps. Todoist is where my personal tasks live. The separation is intentional: team work in the shared system, personal commitments in my own. Every week I do a sync pass to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. This is the single most important habit I have.
Books That Shaped My Approach
Three books that directly influence how I think about operations:
Deep Work — Cal Newport
Operations is inherently interrupt-driven. Deep Work taught me to protect focus blocks with the same rigor I protect a budget. I schedule 2-hour focus blocks three times a week, no Slack, no email, no calls. Those blocks are where I design systems, not just react to them.
Atomic Habits — James Clear
The best operational process is the one that becomes a habit. Clear's framework — make it obvious, attractive, easy, satisfying — applies directly to process design. When I build an SOP, I ask: is this the path of least resistance? If not, people won't follow it, and no amount of training will fix that.
Principles — Ray Dalio
Dalio's idea of writing down decision criteria and stress-testing them against reality is a core operations practice. Every process I document includes the "why" — not just the steps, but the principles behind them. That way, when the context changes (and it always does), the team knows how to adapt without waiting for instructions.
Final Thought
Your setup is a reflection of your priorities. I don't chase the newest tool or the flashiest gear. I look for tools that fade into the background — that let me think about the problem instead of the interface. The best ops tool is the one you forget you're using.
If you have questions about anything in this list or want to share your own setup, reach out. I'm always curious how other ops leaders work.