mrpink essays

Digital Tools to Protect Your Mental Health

Immersed in a sea of digital stimuli, mastering our tools is critical to turn them into allies—not burdens.

Introduction

Since launching MrPink, I’ve paid more attention than ever to designing my work methods to improve efficiency and preserve my mental health. Being a VC founder might sound glamorous—but it really isn’t. The team is small, the operating budget minimal, and the work endless.

Although it surprises many when I say it, I’m naturally disorganized, with a creative, divergent personality. Over the years—and with a lot of effort—I’ve learned to hack my default tendencies to improve my performance.

Experience-Based Tips

This post is based on my personal experience. I’m sharing it in the hope it’s useful—either by adopting some of my techniques or as a spark for you to develop your own.

KEEP EMAIL UNDER CONTROL

Keeping email under control is crucial: it’s a universal channel for urgent matters, updates, investor intros, advertising, and spam. Checking it is inevitable and hard to delegate—even for big-company executives. Keeping it tidy is a global challenge in business, regardless of hierarchy.

It’s dangerous when our focus depends on whoever happens to write to us. Ideally, we would check email only a couple of times a day. Nothing that arrives by email should be so urgent that reviewing it at the end of the afternoon would make a significant difference. It’s useful to communicate this clearly to teams and family. In my case, everyone knows that if something urgent comes up, they should call me. The same applies to WhatsApp or any messaging platform.

There are two common mistakes:
- Using email as a repository for tasks or issues to address later
- Attacking the inbox chronologically

The inbox should ideally stay clean—if possible, no more than a dozen emails at any given time. But that doesn’t mean responding immediately to every message. On the contrary, you need to learn to review quickly and prioritize.

The goal is to ensure that no important or urgent email gets lost. But the solution is not to respond to everything immediately—that would put us into a strictly reactive mode of work.

Personally, I use Superhuman as my email client, but these suggestions can be implemented in Gmail or almost any decent email manager.

When reviewing email, ask yourself: can I respond in a couple of minutes? If so—do it. If it requires a more elaborate response or action, or you simply can’t deal with it right now, snooze it until the appropriate time. If it’s not urgent, when in doubt, snooze it and move on. The objective is to reach inbox zero: nothing left unreviewed.

For those who like reviewing email chronologically, keep in mind that this is even worse than doing it randomly—because priority becomes determined by time of arrival, which rarely matches actual importance.

Finally, it’s essential to create templates for recurring responses. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel every time.

PRIORITIZING WORKFLOW

After trying different productivity systems, the only one that truly helped me is time boxing and scheduling every task that takes more than 15 minutes (an arbitrary but useful threshold). At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how many tasks are in your kanban, sprint, or backlog—the only things that get done are the ones that make it onto your calendar.

Time boxing is liberating: it means creating blocks of time for deep work. I use blocks of 1.5 hours, which I believe is the minimum duration for this to work effectively. Each block should focus on a single type of task to avoid context switching costs.

I have specific blocks for reviewing startups, administrative work, reading, and study.

I use Akiflow for task management—it’s fast, has great UX, and captures tasks directly from Gmail. When I capture a task, it goes into my backlog. I review it at the end of the day or the beginning of the next and then schedule it. This helps control my impulsiveness because I know I already have dedicated weekly blocks for each topic.

When defining time-boxing blocks, self-awareness is key:
- When am I most creative during the day?
- When should I remain available for team meetings?
- How long can I sustain deep work before quality declines?

For example, I only take first meetings with entrepreneurs between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. I chose that window because my energy is highest, my mind is clear, and I’m usually in a good mood. It works for me because I start the day with meditation and exercise, and by then I haven’t yet been bombarded by the inevitable challenges of running MrPink.

I also rarely take in-person meetings in the morning, which helps me stay on schedule and avoid unnecessary stress.

MINIMIZING DISTRACTIONS

Silence notifications

Avoid all notifications on both phone and computer. Recover agency over what you’re doing at any given moment instead of being dragged around by distractions like leaves in the wind.

Maintain a very frugal information diet. Don’t give in to FOMO. Unsubscribe from newsletters that don’t genuinely add value.

Review these decisions periodically. If most of the time you’re not getting value from a source, unsubscribe. Information overload can be harmful—especially when it comes to news. Often it leads to obsessive tracking of topics that have little practical impact on our lives or work.

Overcoming FOMO

Information is only valuable if it improves decision-making. For example, if you’re deciding whether to open operations in Chile or Peru for your B2B SaaS startup, does knowing the percentage of football fans in each country matter? If it doesn’t affect your decision or increase your chances of being right, it’s not useful.

Before researching something, assume you already have the information and ask yourself whether it would actually change your action.

Reducing temptation

A useful hack I discovered is to always use applications in full-screen mode and configure keyboard shortcuts to switch between them. This makes transitions more deliberate rather than impulsively cycling through open apps.

On Mac, I use Apptivate to configure shortcuts. It works incredibly well—and it’s free.

ABOUT THE WEB

Few people think about the browser they use to access the web, but there has been significant innovation in this space recently.

A few months ago I left Brave and switched to Arc. Arc’s UX is beautiful, but what I enjoy most is the ability to remove sections from websites or modify their colors. It also makes switching between sites extremely fast without relying on a taskbar. Everything is designed for keyboard shortcut enthusiasts.

Arc also integrates AI tools for summarizing pages and more, but what I value most is its speed and how it helps reduce distractions. My favorite feature is cycling through open tabs (Control + Tab) as if they were local applications.

SIMPLIFY SCHEDULING

This is a well-known topic but still incredibly important. The time savings from tools that eliminate back-and-forth scheduling emails are enormous.

I use Calendly, but there are many alternatives. It’s important to configure whichever tool you choose properly so it doesn’t interfere with time boxing.

If you use it for sales or fundraising, make sure the event description and title are not too obvious.

CREATE ACTIONABLE NOTES

Automatic note-taking tools integrated with video calls are becoming common and increasingly effective. Personally, I don’t like them because they don’t fully solve my problem. Many ideas emerge outside video calls and need editing and enrichment later.

For years I tested dozens of note-taking tools until I recently fell in love with Reflect App. It doesn’t integrate with video calls, and I’d be surprised if it ever does. As its name suggests, its goal is to enhance the reflective aspect of note-taking.

Notes can be created by typing or recording audio that gets converted to text.

Since adopting Reflect, I’ve also started using it as my personal CRM.

Notes can be linked to each other, creating bidirectional relationships, and can also be tagged. The search engine is powerful and integrates AI. The idea is to build a parallel brain that you can consult later so nothing gets lost.

Bonus: it automatically generates a conceptual graph showing relationships between notes.

I try to record a short audio after each call and keep a running log of ideas throughout the day. It has both desktop and mobile apps. The design is minimalist (including a focus mode), and notes use simple markdown formatting.

Since switching to Reflect, I’ve completely abandoned CRM software (sorry HubSpot). Obviously this wouldn’t replace a sales organization, but for my needs it works beautifully.

AUTOMATE

I started programming at 12 and tend to automate everything. Today, you don’t need to know much programming to do this.

This year I replaced my investment tracking system—which previously used HubSpot, Mural, and Google Drive—with a custom tool built in Bubble that saves me a huge amount of time.

The advantage is flexibility and incremental development. Every week I make small improvements that will eventually result in a solid product.

For those of us with a craftsman’s heart, the pleasure of working on something we built ourselves—and improving it little by little—is indescribable.

Many non-technical founders are already writing code with the help of AI. I know entrepreneurs using it to build reports, complex database queries, system integrations, and much more.

As an entrepreneur, your main job is to develop a clear vision and maintain focus. Repetitive tasks that can be automated should be automated.

The risk, of course, is losing flexibility or becoming dependent on proprietary systems that later become expensive to maintain.

For those using Google Workspace, Google Script combined with Calendar, Gmail, Drive, and external systems integrated through no-code tools can accomplish incredible things.

Even if you’re not a technical founder, I believe learning some of these skills is essential for building startups in 2024.

DESIGNING YOUR CONTEXT

In Prompts for Humans, I explore the idea of designing your work environment. In short, the physical space and context we inhabit have a profound effect on productivity and well-being.

If you want to go deeper into that topic, I recommend reading that post.

The Main Tools I Use

Email → https://superhuman.com/
‍Task management → https://akiflow.com/
‍Notes → https://reflect.app/
‍Browser → https://arc.net/
‍Shortcut manager → https://www.apptivateapp.com/
‍No-code platform → https://bubble.io/
‍Documents → Google Script + Google Drive
Scheduling → https://calendly.com/

Final Thoughts

Investing time and budget in designing the tools we interact with daily is well justified. They affect not only our productivity but also the clarity of our thinking and our mental health.

Knowing that my ideas and plans are well organized—and that I won’t miss an important email or deadline—helps me live more calmly.

Your technology stack should never be static. It should be reviewed regularly.

In my case, I have poor memory, I’m naturally disorganized, and I have very low tolerance for repetitive work—which kills my productivity. At the same time, I’m creative, easily distracted, and very comfortable managing software as both a power user and developer. I also love keyboard shortcuts.

The system I describe here works well for me, but it might not work for you.

What matters is not simply following the current or using whatever tools everyone else uses. This is a personal exploration that can significantly improve your quality of life.

So treat it as such—and give it the thought it deserves.