Ask HN: How do you organize your life?

Sorry I should've added an /s or something. I was mostly just making a joke about what you said vs what you were responding to about the Obsidian plugin detail where the parent mentioned that being the problem with Obsidian right after mentioned rewriting all basic utilities themselves for some reason lol

Mostly some version of GTD.

A todo list managed by http://todotxt.org/. Items are dated and I make sure I review (remove or modify) items that have become stale. A similar list for non-actionable ideas (called inbox in GTD). I think I end up removing most of these. A text file with dated items for a "waiting for" list( e.g. waiting for an answer to a message), reviewed regularly. A list of "projects" (somewhat vague, but list priorities, reminds me of bigger goals). I don't really do "proper" project management for personal things, I guess I could, but the overhead would be too big for me to keep this consistent over time.

A proper and reliable calendar. I use calcurse (https://www.calcurse.org/) as I like curse-based interfaces, it makes it trivial to use my setup via ssh. I'm always shocked when I find out some people don't really have any calendar and just hope they'll remember appointments and events. It becomes obvious when they inevitably forget to show up somewhere and have to deal with the consequences.

"Notable Plus" (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.icechen1.notable.pro/) for very quick notes on mobile (that I write down properly in one of the previous lists within 24h).

Lately I'm also experimenting with some priority queue based on dates to make sure I do some things regularly. Let's say you do 5 different sports, and you want to do all of them (at the cost of doing any of them less frequently). You could keep track of the last time you did them, and to choose what to do next, you do the one you haven't done in the most time. There are few things I do once in a while, and when I do them, I often think "why didn't do that earlier", and I think this applies nicely to this when time is just limited. E.g. reaching out to people, going to some places...

I edit most of these text files using vim, or Markor on Android (https://github.com/gsantner/markor). Shared via Syncthing on my personal devices. Automated version control via Git (meaning daily automated commits), although in practice I so rarely use this that I could get rid of it. I guess it's cheap so why not.

A mobile app (https://github.com/iSoron/uhabits) to keep track of habits. At this point I have enough of them that doing them all in one day means I had a good day. That removes some thinking when I have little time and I'm not sure what I should do: just try to tick one more habit.

Org-mode looks interesting but I've never managed to migrate to it, I suspect it's because I'm already too efficient with my current setup such that it's too much friction to switch to org-mode and spend months just reaching the same level with it.

Overall whatever works for you, but I'd advise against proprietary apps and services: I've had about the same setup for about 10 years, I can't imagine how many productivity apps were created / deprecated during that time. It's very likely that my setup or a similar one will still work in 10+ years with very few changes required.

I really like Cal Newport's thinking in this area. Basically, yes, you need a system that you trust to keep yourself focused on what matters most in each of your roles. The specific tools don't matter and are often an excuse to distract yourself from doing the work.

Here's a good podcast covering this idea: https://overcast.fm/+b1V3bnLPc

When you're hungry, eat; when you're tired, sleep.

Sounds like a front page of a BS self-help book.

> you dont't organize eating, sleeping

I absolutely do.

There's nothing wrong with making your life more efficient to reach your goals faster.