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My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

jeffhuang.com

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Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

#141

Post by rhn_mk1 »

endisukaj wrote: post #72
beejiu wrote: post #58

My favourite "productivity app" is not an app at all. It's a plain old notebook. I write down any notes and actions I need to take, and strike through them once finished. It has a nice benefit that I can scribble notes, draw lines between ideas, sketch out diagrams, etc.

I'd agree with you, but the killer feature digital notes have, for me, is the quick and effortless searching.

Paper notes work better for small, in-the-moment things.

For tasks, this might be the plan for the next few days, where everything fits on the same page.

For notes, those might be scribbles to help solve the problem at hand.

Larger and more long term things start benefitting from searchability indeed.

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

#142

Post by dr_kiszonka »

ahnick wrote: post #53

I currently use Google Tasks for Todos and I honestly have never been happier. To make Google Tasks work you have to be using Gmail and Google Calendar (which may be a non-starter for some people), but if you are using those already then Google Tasks is worth taking a look. The beauty of Google Tasks is it lives alongside your email, integrates seamlessly with the calendar, and automatically synchronizes across devic…

I like how you can drag tasks directly to Google Calendar. Do you know if it is possible to drag them as events, not reminders? I prefer to block entire time slots as events in my calendar because it helps me better manage my time. For example, I would add a 3 hour long event called "refactor hello_world" or a 2 hour one "find lost socks" and dedicate these time block to these specific activities. Unfortunately, you cannot change the length of reminders.

Alternatively, is there any other software with this feature? I have been looking for one for a while but no luck :-\

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

#143

Post by aurizon »

I do something similar, a draft gmail on which I list tasks in sequence, and as they are done = ticked. Next day a new one is initiated, undone tasks are promoted to this day, deleted, or just stay queued until done or deleted. Every few weeks I cull the herd, copy stuff not done to a recent one of delete it. I can access anywhere, as secure as gmail 2 factor, and works well

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

#144

Post by Karishma1234 »

kabdib wrote: post #109

I use a single text file, have done this for decades. I dump everything into it and don't worry too much about structure, it's an incredible resource for "remembering" minutia, things like "what was that server that i thought might have had some issues last August?" Just a quick control-S and I'm there. My current 7+ year old notes file has about 100K lines in it right now. I can tell you what I was doing last year,…

For me it has been a notebook and pen.

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

#148

Post by tasty_freeze »

I started doing this at my first job in 1985. There is a direct lineage of the file to a few of the text files I use today. "todo.txt", "address.txt", and "dates.txt" have morphed continuously for 35 years.

Besides this reminiscence, I wanted remind vim users of a particular feature that allows easily navigating between text files like a hypertext system. The "gf" key sequence (mnemonic: go file). Typing "gf" will cause vim to extract the text under the cursor (it doesn't have to be at the head of the string) and open the file of that name. If you have ':set path=..' established, it also searches for the named file using that path order.

For example, in my main TODO I have a section like this for notes on things I want to attend to for various websites I maintain:

    ---------- websites todos -----------
    family website:   c:/path/to/this/todo.txt
    personal website: c:/path/to/that/todo.txt
    resume:           c:/path/to/other/todo.txt
    emulator:         c:/path/to/emulator/todo.txt
Just place the cursor over one I wanted to visit, hit 'gf' then I'm teleported to that document.

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

#149

Post by jvanderbot »

Same, of course. I added some bash aliases to make it much easier to write to the file, and use markdown instead to allow tracking todos easier.

I also added a vim command to push it to github while editing. These just remove barriers to opening and syncing the file, but the concept is the same.

You can see the result here: https://github.com/jodavaho/bashlog

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