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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

#271

Post by runxel »

chrisweekly wrote: post #170

There's beauty and power in simplicity. Thanks for sharing! Also, take a look at Roam ( https://roamresearch.com ) which almost comes full-circle to a place of simplicity (just write instead of worrying about where to put things or how to organize them) while providing all kinds of benefits. There are many tradeoffs and valid reasons to prefer your .txt (or my .md) file(s), but I highly recommend playing w Roam to se…

Roam is totally cool, but at the moment not very polished.

Even worse they're loosing a lot of data, which stopped me from using it – sadly. I still think it's superior to anything else, but loosing data is a show stopper.

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

#272

Post by mackrevinack »

loughnane wrote: post #63

I jumped on this bandwagon about 6 months ago and I love it. Like many others I had some levels of success with other apps (trello, RTM, Todoist, Toodledo, etc.), but a single text file is a whole new world. I've been do My setup is a single .md file with typora as an editor. Some things I love about it are: - Markdown checklists that (with custom css) can be faded when checked - When I copy/paste an image in (often…

I never really used typora but been trying out marktext and notable the last while and they both look very promising. both can be found on github. notable is new enough so it still needs a bit of work though

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

#274

Post by wj »

raziel2p wrote: post #233
OnACoffeeBreak wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you handle a file like that on mobile? I separate my job journal from my personal journal. Job journal starts on a backed up work drive and I don't care to have mobile access to it. I must have access to my personal journal at work, or while I'm out and about and mobile is the only way.

not OP but I put this file on Dropbox, their mobile app has an editor that works for markdown or plain text.

The Dropbox web app not having that same functionality is my biggest pet peeve with the product.

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

#275

Post by Groxx »

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,…

I'll toss in my setup too, which I started semi-recently and has been working well:

In my .bash_profile I essentially just `open --background -e "...$(date +%F).txt" &`.

Since I'm in the CLI daily for work, I get day-stamped files passively opened without having to think about it. It's a nice quiet reminder to keep notes throughout the day, and it all just goes into a folder in dropbox that I can trivially `grep` or add with other tools or add side-files (typically "date - stuff.ext" so they appear next to the day's notes).

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

#276

Post by mmhsieh »

would be nice if lousy systems were not foisted on us by enterprises. very glad and liberating to be an IC now. sometimes i don't answer emails on our shitty enterprise email system for months but i warned them i don't like that ever-crashing, one-9 of uptime hunk of garbage.

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

#277

Post by galfarragem »

DantesKite wrote: post #116

The 21st century has burdened the human psyche with a wonderful array of problems—most of which are invisible, abstract things. It's taken some time figuring out how to make them real. Doesn't feel like anybody created a tool to help manage these abstract monsters. We still do not know ourselves that well. Not in this strange world. Whenever I hear someone say, "Just use paper", part of me agrees. Paper is simple. It…

Some hints: https://github.com/slowernews/hamster-system

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

#278

Post by AstroJetson »

You might want to look at Tiddlywiki https://tiddlywiki.com/ It's got text file storage and different ways to get into and edit pages. I like that there is formatting things you can do to make the "pages" look better. The ability to link to items makes structuring / finding things a little easier.

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

#280

Post by mattbk1 »

jstummbillig wrote: post #213

Where/How would I jot down a brand new todo? The way I understand it right now is, that everything is immediately being scheduled into an appropriate calendar spot, but that seems so very wrong that I feel I must be mistaken. (To elaborate: To me it is critical to have swift todo entry with minimal effort to account for the random and probably inconvenient times new tasks and thoughts pop up. Having to also deal with…

In markdown, I use [ ] (a square in my physical notebook) for an un-done todo and [x] for completed. So to keep track of current todos, search on [ ]. For physical notebook, I take some time every day to flip back the last several pages and make sure I haven't missed putting something in a more formal list.

I'm using GitLab issues for tasks at the moment, but I really like this concept...

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