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My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file (2020)

jeffhuang.com

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Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file (2020)

#101

Post by kcartlidge »

Totally agree.

I've got an almost 4,000 line file with the same kind of stuff for work, every day since 27th March 2019. It includes not just what I did, but also things like IDs for data in various environments so I can go straight back to what I was doing if needed.

At the end of one day I add the entry for the next day (mine is Markdown and the latest is at the top) to remind me of things I've discovered that will be relevant, and I update the current day's entry as I go.

I use Markdown because I use bullet lists almost exclusively (brief, with nested children for detail). It's also great for short code blocks.

Having seen my file during remote stand-ups I now have several colleagues doing similar. There really is no need for anything fancier.

But remember - frequent dated backups and if possible (and you're an employee) use networked drives so you are enrolled in corporate backups too.

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file (2020)

#102

Post by lazyjeff »

cookingoils wrote: post #52

I was just talking about this blog post with a friend yesterday. I’m curious to know the file size of the doc after 7 years.

Author of the original article here. It's now year 9 with the current todo/done file I have now. And I'm on line 50473, with a file size of 2.3 MB.

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file (2020)

#103

Post by uglygoblin »

meribold wrote: post #89

Does anyone else take notes by sending messages to themselves on Signal or another messaging app? I've been doing that for years. Taking notes in dedicated note-taking apps always seems to involve more friction than sending myself a message. The note-taking apps I've tried also lacked polish compared to messaging apps. It's important to me that I can take notes on my phone because it's the thing I have on me most of…

This is my favorite low effort note taking. I've been doing this with email for a long time and for work I message myself in Slack.

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file (2020)

#104

Post by awillimus »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #25
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #7

The key to this solution isn’t really the .txt file or the formatting. It’s the ritual. Any productivity system can be made to work once it becomes a habit and therefore your default action. I think .txt files or Org mode are attractive to devs because they feel like something we’d be doing anyway during our day. the same system will work with a paper journal or even a fresh piece of paper every morning if, and only…

One of my favorite quotes, is one [incorrectly, probably] attributed to Aristotle: We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

Looks like the quote was from Will Durant, based on an Aristotle saying.

>"Virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions," Aristotle said. The writer Will Durant interpreted it thusly: "We are what we repeatedly do… therefore excellence is not an act, but a habit." https://dailystoic.com/we-are-what-we-repeatedly-do/

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file (2020)

#105

Post by Tomte »

Has anyone found an iOS app that can do advanced searching in text files?

Everything I've found from 1Writer to all those minimal txt apps just uses Apple's very very basic search UI.

I'd need search through several files, and especially their contents, not just file names or titles, also regexp.

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file (2020)

#106

Post by yosito »

I'm using an .md file that I sync with Nextcloud between all of my devices. I edit it with Obsidian on my laptops, and the Nextcloud Notes app on Android, which also has a nice widget that allows me to pin my todo.md on my homescreen and formats the markdown checklist appropriately.

It's the most flexible system I've ever used. The only missing features for me are the ability to reorder items quickly on mobile and add reminders to a todo. But control over my own data beats both of those features.

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file (2020)

#107

Post by silasdb »

I'm a heavy user of todotxt. For me, the greatest thing about keeping everything in a txt file is that it is very easy to build your own extensions with a combination of sh, awk, grep, etc.

For calendars, the problem is a bit more problematic, though. Yes, there are things like calendar[1] and remind[2], but nobody seems to use them nowadays and in the mobile world there is no app to process them. Do you know of any existing solutions for calendars that work like todotxt?

[1] https://man.netbsd.org/calendar.1

[2] https://linux.die.net/man/1/remind

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file (2020)

#108

Post by K_REY_C »

Just sharing this tool, logseq [1], that I learned about a couple of weeks ago. It traffics in plain text files and does graphically what an org-mode might do after a lot of work.

I figure more people should be aware of this open source tool I hope improves and becomes more robust.

[1]: https://logseq.com/

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file (2020)

#109

Post by da-x »

lambic wrote: post #21
da-x wrote: post #15

I can see why a simple text file is working for many people. Anything that requires you to wait for a program to start, a window to appear, or a webpage to load is very detrimental to the mental mode of note taking because thoughts change even on the slightest of latency. It should be as immediate as picking up a notebook from the table that has a pen attached to it.

Yeah this is important for me. My work day is organised with Jira tickets, and we all know how klunky the Jira interface can be, so I installed one of the Jira cli clients[1] and it's invaluable. I can do all my ticket management from the terminal just as if I was working with text files. Editing or commenting on a ticket opens it in vim for me. I have a few scripts on top of the client to make things even easier lik…

Thanks! I'll try this (I also suffer from Web-JIRA latency fatique).
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