Hi, I’m Dhruvir Zala 👋

For as long as I can remember, I have been about as unproductive as a person can be. My university, and my parents before them, did a great job of bringing my unproductive behaviours to the surface from time to time — mostly by challenging me to complete (useless) assignments on time. They always won.

2020 was still manageable, for the most part, thanks to virtual classes (screw you, Covid). 2021, however, was a breaking point. After the lockdown ended, the university resumed teaching in hybrid mode, meaning those who wanted to attend offline classes in person could do so.

I was one of them. I took the transition far more lightly than I should have. I thought it would be fun, a welcome change from attending classes on camera while having to clean my room just because the professor might ask us to turn it on. It wasn’t a good change. Offline classes meant every homework assignment, test, and submission had to be completed and handed in, well, offline. And there was no ChatGPT or Claude back in 2021. All in all, I was deeply unproductive in my academic life, completely lost, with no idea what I was doing or where I was headed.

One day, I had enough. I decided to turn my life upside down and told myself these exact words while having my usual blueberry pancake and coffee breakfast at my university cafeteria: “I will be the most productive human being this place has ever seen.”

At that time, I was a sophomore doing my BBA (Hons.) in Marketing at Ahmedabad University. It was 2021, and the new semester had just started. The problem was that I didn’t even know what “being productive” meant. But I wanted to educate myself on it. So I did what literally every one of us does when no one’s home, I opened Google. I read a bunch of articles on what productivity truly meant, how to be more productive, the difference between productive and busy, and so on.

After a while, that Google search led me to something I am grateful for to this day, and something I developed an intense curiosity towards: digital productivity tools and software. A piece of software on your phone and/or computer that actually helps you get things done.

That was fascinating, and kind of a revelation, because before that, I didn’t know what software like Notion, Obsidian, and Todoist were or what they could do for my productivity. No one told me, or I didn’t bother to look. I prefer the former to be true.

I still have a vivid memory of my first productivity software. It was Notion (I still use it to this day). Over time, after getting past the learning curve, I got comfortable using Notion as my note-taking app for all things academic writing. During class, I used to brag about how Notion helped me take, manage, and aesthetically organize my notes, with a folder for each subject. Most of my classmates were surprised because they were seeing it for the first time. Most of them were either laggards or stupid, so they stuck to pen and paper. What a waste.

Over time, still during my university days, my curiosity led me to find and test different productivity software, and to keep using the ones that made sense. I started loving the process of testing the software itself. And whenever I found something worth using, I would Google “[software name] review” to read about what other people’s experiences say about it. Reading those software review articles was a turning point that decided what I want to do for the rest of my life (or for as long as I can, though the rest of my life would be great). While reading, I uncovered a fundamental truth about most of those articles: they were full of it. They contained everything but useful, decision-aiding information. Most read like a promo or a brochure, blindly promoting the software without acknowledging what it sucks at. It didn’t feel like a lived experience. It felt like the writer was paid to say only good things. This invoked two feelings inside me: anger and relief, in that order.

Anger because I was being fed misinformation, so I’d subscribe and become a paying customer without figuring out whether the software was actually right for me. And relief because this was the perfect, validated opportunity for me to enter this space and be different. Be useful. Be helpful. That was the moment I decided I wanted to be a full-time SaaS blogger. When the news went out, everyone was happy except my parents. They wanted me to become a doctor or an engineer, like a billion other Indian parents. It was also hard to explain whenever a guest asked what their kid does for a living. Their best answer to this day is six words long: “he gets paid to write online.” Fast forward to today: they’re happy, plainly because, like Jerry Maguire, I showed them the money.

If you’re bored to death, I am so sorry. But everything above was trying to explain why this blog exists.

My goal here is simple but not easy: to tell you the truth about any software I’m writing about. I go deep into each one, test every corner, and share what I liked, what I disliked, whether better alternatives exist, and whether the cost is worth it. Especially when free alternatives exist and can do the job just as well. Basically, I want to be the advisor, not the documenter. I want to help you make better software decisions.

If you’re interested in learning more about how I select and test productivity software to feature on this blog, check out my methodology page.

Full disclosure: I never take payment from any company to feature them above their competitors. Never. I only earn money through affiliate commissions, which is when you click one of my links and subscribe to a software, and I may make a commission. That does not cost you anything extra. In fact, the opposite is usually true. I am always working to partner with companies I genuinely think are good and to get you a discount (most often through an exclusive code they give me). You can learn more about that at my disclaimer page.

I want to help solopreneurs (like me) and small distributed teams make confident productivity software decisions.

So if you’re here, which you are, and want to find better productivity tools for yourself or your team, I can proudly say you’re in the right place.

From here, I can send you to a few places depending on your mood:

• Blog: Read the latest articles.
• Newsletter: Subscribe to my free weekly newsletter, where I send you an update every time I publish something I think is worth your time.
• Work with me: If you are a SaaS company trying to grow your blog, I can help with my expertise in writing BOFU (bottom-of-the-funnel) content specifically for SaaS. That’s what I do. The only thing I do. Learn more at my services page.
• Contact: If you would like to contact me for some reason that’s not weird, you can do that from my contact page or connect with me directly on LinkedIn.
• Sleep: If you don’t want to go to any of the above, I encourage you to get some shut-eye. Because at the end of the day, and I’m trying not to sound like a guru here, productivity is not just about doing more. It’s also about recharging yourself for the day ahead.

So get some rest, be more productive, and come back tomorrow, or today.

With gratitude 💛,

Dhruvir Zala