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Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?
71–80 of 90 posts
Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?
#72Notion - great for creating a personal wiki, use this to plan out my day
Mac-centric
Omnifocus - like Things you want a TO DO app to store everything you need to get done sone you can stop worrying you will forget stuff. Although I use Omnifocus a LOT (everything feeds into it) I use Notion to plan my day (with links back to Omni)
Devonthink - store all your papers and find them easily.
Alfred - keyboard shortcuts, custom workflows, clipboard history...
Amazon Echo Clock - the best way I've found to set pomodoro timers (so I can see them, but they don't distract me)
Tools aside though, it's important to create habits. Omnifocus can be tricky to setup in a way that works for you. It takes time to be able to use tools effectively, so only by constantly using them and tweaking processes will you get a great result.
Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?
#73The 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…
Vimwiki essentially does this for you with the diary feature, and it also allows some nice wiki markup, including todo items you can mark as completed.
Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?
#74emacs / org-mode
I like the endless features it has, that I can extend its features and it is not a product that will be phased out an some point.
On change requests: a more modern lisp dialect would be great
Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?
#75I use Todoist for tasks, mostly because its cross platform. Works on my android phone, macbook, windows and the web. It works well for small reminders and todos, not necessarily for planning a complex project. Also use Evernote for all my notes. Works well.
Do you take the time to write proper entries, or review them a few hours later to check if what you dumped there still makes sense?
I write like a few words, thats usually enough. The tasks are usually very simple though.
For more complex tasks or long running projects e.g at work, i usually have stuff written down in Evernote. Then i won't write much in Todoist except maybe to just schedule a block of time.
Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?
#76One thing that works for me is to have a consistent early to bed, early to rise routine 365 days irrespective of what the day looks like. It gives me ample of time to carry out chores, teach my kids, spend productive time at office, and also do personal growth activities such as reading books, walk, gardening, entertainment, etc.
Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I will give it a try - thanks!
Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?
#78For work, I use my inbox as a To-Do list. Threads don’t leave the inbox until they’re “done”, then they are archived.
For personal stuff, I use a combination of XMind (big picture, project structure, etc.) Markdown file (working notes, they get posted on https://taoofmac.com/space/notes weekly) and iOS Reminders (chores).
Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?
#79I switch tools all the time but the biggest thing is reviewing whatever tool it is you use at a minimum weekly. Without daily/weekly/monthly reviews any system is useless.
Also work out if your a folder or a search person. Daily notes work well for someone happy to use a search bar but if you immediately want to go to a folder or file called python-code-examples then your a folder person! Save yourself some headaches setting things up by working that part out early!
(Tools I'm using obsidian, todoist and google calendarb right now but when I need to work things out or have a busy week out comes pen and paper!)
Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?
#80I rely mostly on Obsidian with daily notes (Periodic Notes plugin), tasks and kanban boards (Kanban plugin). I also use it to track progress on my projects, record meeting notes and periodic reviews (weekly, monthly, quarterly & yearly).
I've documented my process, plugins, etc and packaged it for others to quickly get started: https://developassion.gumroad.com/l/obsidian-starter-kit