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Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?

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Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?

#23

Post by 082349872349872 »

imranq wrote: post #10

A notebook and pen seems to do the trick. In the beginning of the day, write an entry of what I'll aim to accomplish and when. At the end of the day, judge myself on my productivity and write a plan for the next day. That alone has been a force multiplier of productivity for me Also remembering to have fun and enjoy life always (surprisingly!) seems to help

For a while I hipstered out with a wax tablet*, but these days I'm back to a succession of boring A8 notebooks.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_tablet

Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?

#24

Post by ravenstine »

I have a custom CLI specifically for my daily workflow. It takes care of a lot of tedious procedures like creating branch near and PRs with the appropriate title formats, transitioning Jira ticket statuses, spinning up and down servers, Git shortcuts, requesting reviewers, opening all changed files on a branch, showing the status of all my Jira tickets, etc. That way I can do I can do things the right way at my company without having to think much other than by remembering a simple command I wrote.

Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?

#25

Post by swah »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #19

I 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?

Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?

#26

Post by swah »

redhale wrote: post #9

I use Todoist for my own things, and Trello for collaborative things. I really love Todoist. It's really simple to enter tasks -- extremely low friction with browser extensions and Android widgets, etc. It has all the features I want in a tool like this -- simple tasks, sub tasks, categorization, tagging, attachments, recurring tasks, prioritization, and apps/widgets/integrations galore. And it's free, or cheap for t…

I love the Quick add, but if I don't review soon enough, I will lose the context and can't understand 50% of the entries. Do you take the time to write the task/note properly or try to review soon enough?

Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?

#28

Post by bottlepalm »

I've been using the same OneNote notebook for like 20 years. It syncs across all my devices, so I'm constantly using it to look things up, add things to lists, write down random ideas, track projects, etc.. Once in awhile I just go through and re-organize, prune and sort things. I'm sure soon enough AI will be helping me out with that. 20 years of notes is a lot to manage.

Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?

#29

Post by dnh44 »

I’ve never quite found anything that stuck but I’m having a good run with Emacs and Org.

I’ve bound an AppleScript to f3 that copies a link to the currently selected email in mail.app. Being able to link to mail.app from org is pretty cool. The links still work even if the message gets archived or moved to a different mailbox.

This has allowed me to keep track of everything in org.

However if I’m really busy I just use a sheet of paper and a pen and make a plan for what I want to complete that day.

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