41–50 of 272 posts
The system has evolved over the years. The greatest thing about it is how flexible it is. When faced with new requirements (new projects, job change, etc) I can just start taking notes in a different way and see if it sticks.
I also commit it to git every 30 minutes using a cron script. Its awesome.
You put .LOG at the top of the new file with a return. Save and close the file.
Every time you reopen the file, the timestamp is append to the file. Add your notes, save, exit notepad. Open it again when you need to update, rinse and repeat.
Nothing I’ve ever tried has been more effective than just keeping this endless file.
> Every night before I go to bed, I take all the items on my calendar for the next day and append it to the end of the text file as a daily todo list, so I know exactly what I'm doing when I wake up. T This is a key win. Most of the rest he describes is support (also cruicial). But setting up your day the night before is amazingly powerful. Many of the things I plan for the day I actually schedule into my calendar (1…
This is the challenge of the modern manager, especially in remote jobs. You turn on the computer with a plan, and then 345 Slack messages and 10 Zoom meetings later, you consider working on it. As an EM, I really miss that state of flow and productivity. I’m whinging because I see other managers that have nailed this so much better than me and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.
I look at my mail when I get up and normally at three other fixed times.
Sometimes there's something complicated going on via mail and I have to be more responsive. Today I'm trying to debug something with a prospective partner who is in Japan (normally in NYC) so I check for messages from them between tasks. But otherwise it's systolic.
I also run a lot of automation over my mail most of which causes me not to see as much.
For slack, we have a culture that it's either transient (doesn't matter what someone wrote yesterday) or, depending on channel, archival ("here's the documents from partner P") which means you search for it but don't otherwise follow in real time. We're relatively hardcore about channels so that you can ignore ones that aren't germane to you. So I skim them in the same times I check mail.
Zoom meetings...I have the luxury of mostly only attending meetings with agenda and objectives published ahead of time. We try to do as much as possible asynchronously though we have one outside partner who doesn't do any homework and tries to use meetings to get work done rather than just use them for things that can't be handled asynchronously.
And also: certain topics are only handled on certain days, e.g. patent (bletch) related stuff I only work on tuesdays and fridays. Otherwise it will just sit in my inbox or wherever.
I've had pretty decent luck with `todo.txt` style tracking, but also tend to run into issues with tasks or notes "going stale" so came up with this system. `today` basically opens `~/Desktop/$YYYY_MM_DD-todo.txt`, but it'll start you off with a copy of the most recent (previous) file. This lets me have "durable" files (I can grep for pretty much anything and get a date-specific hit for it, similar to doing a `git log…
- Running `notes` will open this month's notes for YYYY_MM.txt in your default $EDITOR
- Running `notes hello world` will append `hello world` to YYYY_MM.txt
- Running `$stdout | notes` will append another program's output to YYYY_MM.txt (useful for piping your clipboard)
I tried YYYY_MM_DD.txt for a while but I found it to be too fragmented. Oftentimes I want to look at a few day's worth of notes at a glance.
I've been doing this long enough now (decades) that some of my .txt files (I have one per client/project) are in the size range of 20mb.
Still works a treat. There's something about writing information down on paper that makes it store in my memory differently. I read volumes of digital text on my monitor every day, but I write very little into the steno book, so almost everything I write gets stored very deeply in my memory and is very easy to recall even when I don't have the original.
My productivity app is just todo.txt in one drive using specificaly notepad.exe. You put .LOG at the top of the new file with a return. Save and close the file. Every time you reopen the file, the timestamp is append to the file. Add your notes, save, exit notepad. Open it again when you need to update, rinse and repeat. Nothing I’ve ever tried has been more effective than just keeping this endless file.
My productivity app is just todo.txt in one drive using specificaly notepad.exe. You put .LOG at the top of the new file with a return. Save and close the file. Every time you reopen the file, the timestamp is append to the file. Add your notes, save, exit notepad. Open it again when you need to update, rinse and repeat. Nothing I’ve ever tried has been more effective than just keeping this endless file.
Oh wow, I didn't realize notepad had that feature. Awesome!
I've been doing this long enough now (decades) that some of my .txt files (I have one per client/project) are in the size range of 20mb.
That's about 2.5-3 million words, 5 times the length of Lord of the rings.
My productivity app is just todo.txt in one drive using specificaly notepad.exe. You put .LOG at the top of the new file with a return. Save and close the file. Every time you reopen the file, the timestamp is append to the file. Add your notes, save, exit notepad. Open it again when you need to update, rinse and repeat. Nothing I’ve ever tried has been more effective than just keeping this endless file.