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Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?

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Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?

#51

Post by jamafu »

The most important productivity tool that I use is Alfred[0] for MacOS. Nothing ever came close to increase my productivity as Alfred did. The two features that are essential for me are the clip board manager and the so called "workflows" which is basically a script launcher. The user experience is an absolute joy, it is deeply customizable and you can do pretty much anything you want. Just to name a few:

* encode / decode strings from any encoding to any encoding

* access Jira tickets by only entering ticket numbers

* instant access to all my dot files

* HTTP status codes explanations simply by entering the status code

* list and kill any process

* Docker management

* port killer: enter port and kill the service that uses it

* timestamp converter - from any format to any format

* UUID generator

* super fast access to 100s of weblinks (repos, miros, wikis, documentations, etc.)

It has a free base version but if you want to use the good stuff you have to buy a license for £59. I cannot recommend it strong enough, I even gifted licenses to colleagues, friends and family. [0] https://www.alfredapp.com/

Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?

#52

Post by cameldrv »

dr_kiszonka wrote: post #35
cameldrv wrote: post #6

Amazing Marvin. It has incredible configurability and a broad feature set. Where it really shines is its ability (contra the David Allen dogma) to help you plan your day/week. The awesome thing about its configurability is that you can start simple and work your way up to more and more sophisticated use of it.

I use it too and love the configurability! One problem I have with it, though, is that the desktop app gets pretty slow on my relatively fast, high-mem, Windows 10 PC. I tried to clean up the database as they recommend online but no luck. Have you had this issue at all?

Yes it's a problem. There's something wrong with the way they've packaged it with Electron I think. If you use the web version in a browser it's much faster.

You can also turn their web page into an app with a few different Mac apps. I've used Fluid to do this but there's also Coherence and Unite.

Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?

#53

Post by mftrhu »

Emacs plus a few org-mode files (personal, work, ledger) that work as my agenda, and extensive journal files that I update constantly throughout the day to provide context.

What I like the most about them is the fact that I can actually change them to suit my needs: I can poke around the source code, extend or overwrite its functions, add my own export backends and just make it do anything I can put into code.

Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?

#54

Post by redhale »

swah wrote: post #26
redhale wrote: post #9

I use Todoist for my own things, and Trello for collaborative things. I really love Todoist. It's really simple to enter tasks -- extremely low friction with browser extensions and Android widgets, etc. It has all the features I want in a tool like this -- simple tasks, sub tasks, categorization, tagging, attachments, recurring tasks, prioritization, and apps/widgets/integrations galore. And it's free, or cheap for t…

I love the Quick add, but if I don't review soon enough, I will lose the context and can't understand 50% of the entries. Do you take the time to write the task/note properly or try to review soon enough?

I usually add enough detail to know what I meant, but I also regularly triage my "inbox" list at the end of each day to sort things into urgent/important quadrants, and organize into my projects/tags.

For me, the low friction is the biggest benefit of the tool -- so many times each day I'll have a thought of something I need to do, and if I don't capture it, I will probably lose the thought. I used to keep a physical notebook with me during the work day, but in the evening, or in the early morning, or while walking to get coffee, etc, I would think of something and be without my notebook. Todoist is always with me, on my phone, computer, or voice assistant.

Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?

#56

Post by dobladov »

I use https://foambubble.github.io/foam/

It has all I want for a note-taking app, since it's my editor all of my shortcuts and snippets work, the notes are simple markdown that I can back up easily using git.

To start a daily note, I can write /today and it will set the correct date.

In combination with the Excalidraw extension I can create new digrams, simply by ending the files with .excalidraw.png and quickly embed them on any markdown with preview, while being editable. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=pomdtr.e...

Linking notes and having a connection graph, like obsidian it's incredibly useful, making me go back more often to old note to remember or refine them.

Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?

#57

Post by input_sh »

mezod wrote: post #30

I use https://everyday.app as a habit tracker :P It is actually my business. It started as a side-project but I kept working on it and now I make a decent living from it. So I like I can keep tweaking it to adapt to my personal system and feedback I get :p

Is there any plan for an API or an option to export your data?

Looks like it's exactly what I'm looking for and I love supporting tiny projects, but it's difficult for me to commit without knowing I can get my data out of it easily.

Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?

#58

Post by flandish »

Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #40

The most simple but one of the most effective tricks I learned from an "old sweat" when I was a green junior dev just starting out... keep a folder called notes, and each day create a date-numbered file in the format YYYYMMDD.txt. Put any code snippets, git links, lessons learned, meeting minutes or basically anything interesting in there each day. Then to access it - you can bash script search, e.g., to find anythin…

I basically do this too but also do it in markdown and use Obsidian to link to others, etc.

Still hit the cli though and grep/ripgrep all the time, it’s just so fast.

Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?

#60

Post by flandish »

nickdothutton wrote: post #46

I’ll volunteer Taskwarrior ( https://taskwarrior.org ), since I don’t see it from anyone else just yet. It’s a CLI oriented task management system which (once you learn it) can be very quick and easy to use. It’s not perfect but they’ve done a better job that I would have for sure, and have really thought about reducing friction.

I love taskwarrior so much some years back I got a pr in for the user defined fields. It’s a great project!
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