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Ask HN: How do you organize your life?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your life?

#71

Post by Eggsellence »

LiquidPhD wrote: post #51
fafhnir wrote: post #24

Dont't "organize" your life. Live it! you dont't organize eating, sleeping, sh tting, loving,... Did you ever forgot to eat or hug your beloved one and organize a birthday party for your wife / children / whoever? so why do you want to "organize" the other aspects of your life? The only things i need to push me forward in the important aspects of my life are values*. The values are working like a compass and pushing…

Not very helpful advice for any folks with ADHD. We forget to eat, organize parties, go to the bathroom, etc. It is unfortunate but entirely outside our control. There is no "natural way" for me to reach the things I value because my brain is a dragon trying to find more new and shiny gold to horde while ignoring everything else around him. If I leave myself to "natural ways" then I play video games, watch videos, or…

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Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your life?

#72

Post by PurpleRamen »

I just build my own solution. I've dabbled with many tools, services and methods over the years, but they all suck in some way, because they are not custom-made for my demand and personal situation, and I will always find some critical unfixable flaw which will nag me. Also, humans are lazy, and organization is a low-level job where little flaws can make a big difference.

So at the moment, my solution is to generate daily a markdown-file with routines, unfinished routines from the previous day, and links to visit that day. It also has a section for notes, and a dataview-query for filtering urgent and due tasks from my vault (dataview is an extension for obsidian). For the regular tasks, I have either Google Keep, which I use to collect notes, links, photos for later, or markdown-files, for which I have a routine to review them regularly, or just use on the spot if work leads to them.

It's not perfect, has some flaws and lacks features, but it's my system, and I can work on fixing the flaws because everything is open and accessible. Before this, I used todoist, which is also quite good, but it had some critical flaws for my workflows, so I moved away after some years.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your life?

#73

Post by huijzer »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #72

I just build my own solution. I've dabbled with many tools, services and methods over the years, but they all suck in some way, because they are not custom-made for my demand and personal situation, and I will always find some critical unfixable flaw which will nag me. Also, humans are lazy, and organization is a low-level job where little flaws can make a big difference. So at the moment, my solution is to generate…

That’s actually a great idea. Now I only need to do it and resist the urge to add documentation, make it open source, implement features that other people want etc etc!

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your life?

#75

Post by Gud »

fafhnir wrote: post #24

Dont't "organize" your life. Live it! you dont't organize eating, sleeping, sh tting, loving,... Did you ever forgot to eat or hug your beloved one and organize a birthday party for your wife / children / whoever? so why do you want to "organize" the other aspects of your life? The only things i need to push me forward in the important aspects of my life are values*. The values are working like a compass and pushing…

I disagree completely. The best thing I did was starting to budget. Something I only started doing recently. It is such a relief to know what my expenses will be for the coming months. It has also had the added effect that I am no longer wasteful. Like a switch went off in my head, I have reduced my daily food expenses to $5 from god knows what.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your life?

#76

Post by skydhash »

jesperlang wrote: post #37

Live a simpler life. Optimize for spare time. Then you don't need all these tools to organize your chaos. Periodically, I get an urge to "organize" my life but when I start writing down digital TODO lists and fill in calendars they end up gaping almost empty, so I stop. Today, if I need to do something I write it down on a post-it and put it on my desk (right now there are two post-its with four bullet points). Those…

Same here. My todo list is mostly a reminder list and “don’t forget” items. Projects may need organizing but it usually just a matter of allocating the time for planning.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your life?

#78

Post by arvigeus »

Hetzner’s Nextcloud instance.

Since Nextcloud supports all *DAV protocols I care, it’s easy to sync it with my iPhone without being tied to Apple’s ecosystem. Todos, calendars, contacts, notes. I hate Nextcloud’s web interface, but it’s bearable.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your life?

#79

Post by adammarples »

If I have to do something at a specific time, I put it in my calendar. If it doesn't have to be at a specific time, I put it in a todo list. Periodically I look at the calendar and todo list. At work I have a piece of paper on my desk and I write down what I need to do that day.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your life?

#80

Post by Beijinger »

Write things down! All the weird things and ideas, put them into categories and write them down. This categories can also have a to do list.

Use some kind of calendar.

Try to not read the news on the internet too much. Use a RSS reader.

Notes:

Simplenote https://simplenote.com/

I use it with nvpy on Linux https://pypi.org/project/nvpy/

Calendar: https://www.rainlendar.net/

Tiny Tiny RSS Reader for selfhosting: https://tt-rss.org/

This is not bad either, 30 USD per year but I decided to go with tiny tiny

https://bazqux.com/

PS, strangely, this app makes me also more productive. Enpass: https://www.enpass.io/

I did not pay, it was available for free in the past. But I may have to buy it in the future. Organizes everything. Passwords. Information. Credit Cards. Certificates. Passportcopies, whatever. But this may be a personal thing.

Most important: Your apps must be snappy. Especially nvpy is nice.

Things like https://obsidian.md/ are on my watch list. But maybe the overhead is too complex. Is somebody here that uses Obsidian?

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