I’ve never really gotten into “productivity” apps. Typically my email inbox and calendar combine as my to-do list. Anything in the main inbox still needs to be dealt with. Anything else shows up as a reminder when I need it to. Literally everything work related lives in 1-2 work applications. I intentionally don’t integrate those with my home life. Sometimes I’ll keep a scratch note open in VS code but rarely do I save anything there.
My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
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Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#32I do a very similar thing except that I have a folder with multiple .txt files named by dates.
Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#33One step up from this (if you’re a vim user) is vimwiki. But it really doesn’t matter what you use, the real benefit comes from having a process/habit of continuous review.
Yes, I retired Evernote when I discovered Vimwiki. I keep wondering, though, am I shortchanging myself by not using org. mode? But I don't know emacs and I am not sure whether it makes sense to make such a costly transition.
Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#34I have been using nvALT. Its very fast and searchable - wish it connected to my iphone though. On my iphone I use notes.
Though it isn't free, I switched from nvalt to bear app and I've been very happy with it.
Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#35Greenspun's 11th Law:
"Any sufficiently complicated note-taking/productivity/GTD system contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Org-Mode."
Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#36A while back I fell out of love with Evernote and migrated all my years of notes out to txt files which are synced to Dropbox. Huge nested folder structures but easily searched via grep or whatever. And then I have a folder called “Captains Log” and I make txt files for as many things as I can during the day. Code snippets, reminders to buy eggs at the store, urls to some dumb thing I want to remember to read later on but can’t bother with right now. Often the only content of the txt file is the title and no content if it was just a quick jot. And now you can use the Dropbox app edit txt files directly inside it which makes for easy note taking when mobile. Been using this method for years now, still going strong.
Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#37I've used a text file with a very similar workflow for a couple years and wholeheartedly agree it's a very flexible and useful tool. The trouble I had was what to do when I'm not in front of my computer. I tried sending myself TODO emails and I'd add them to the list later. That works pretty well. Although typing more than a line on a phone is kinda painful. And it requires the discipline to add the item to the list…
I've been using notebooks for years to write things down, but only recently I found one with a table of contents area at the front that has been immensely helpful in finding things later on.
Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#38A while back I fell out of love with Evernote and migrated all my years of notes out to txt files which are synced to Dropbox. Huge nested folder structures but easily searched via grep or whatever. And then I have a folder called “Captains Log” and I make txt files for as many things as I can during the day. Code snippets, reminders to buy eggs at the store, urls to some dumb thing I want to remember to read later o…
One thing I want to try is having a cron job that exports all my Linux command line commands that I ran that day and dumps them into a txt file for historical purposes.
Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#39It is relatively recent for me, but my journal, to do list and similar eventually found a home in Zim. At the end of the day, it is just a bunch of text files and it just works for me.
Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#40Grep’ing your notes and todos is a big plus. Nice strategy.