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My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)

jeffhuang.com

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Re: My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)

#71

Post by dankco »

I love the idea of using plain text files for note taking and task tracking. As others have commented on specific tools and workflows that make this easy for them to stick with, I thought I'd add mine. I use textnote [0], which is a tool I built for exactly this workflow but is hopefully flexible enough to accommodate many of the similar processes mentioned here. It simply opens a plain text file in your terminal and provides lightweight tooling for tracking by date and rolling up previous notes into archives if desired.

Thanks for opening another great discussion of plain text note taking as a productivity tool!

[0] https://github.com/dkaslovsky/textnote

Re: My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)

#72

Post by JordiGarcL »

ravishi wrote: post #41

I use a similar system, but I duplicate and rename the file at the start of each day. Then I remove stuff that got done the previous day. Or stuff that is old and not relevant anymore. 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 co…

Doing the exact same thing using Obsidian and the obsidian-git plugin, which allows for automatic git push at a given interval. Works very well and it's very convenient to use.

Re: My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)

#73

Post by pchm »

I have a TODO.txt and it’s the only productivity system that I’ve ever been able to stick with. Just a list of stuff I need to do, what’s done gets moved down or deleted. Maybe there’s value in having an archive (a DONE.txt?) but I’ve found that after a while most notes/items lose the context and often it’s hard to decipher what they were about.

One thing I haven’t figured out yet: I’d love to be able to keep this file open at all time, have it pop up with a hotkey. Currently it’s just a TextMate window that I often close by accident.

Re: My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)

#74

Post by intrasight »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #49
ta1243 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's about 2.5-3 million words, 5 times the length of Lord of the rings.

I wonder what astronomical figure they’ve billed the client just to spend that much time on the notetaking part of this project

What astronomical figure does a law firm bill for all their words.

Re: My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)

#77

Post by d--b »

I don't know how to articulate it, but I could never do anything like this.

The ability to organize one's life like this is so foreign to me, it's almost like he's describing what it's like to be an octopus.

I think it may be my emotional state that I can't manage. There is absolutely no way, I could decide what I'd be doing the next day every night. The thing is my state of mind would prevent me from doing half the tasks in the list. So shit would just pile up in that text file, making me every day more nervous about things.

For what it's worth, I think I am more "normal" than the person who wrote that piece. So that's a consolation...

Re: My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)

#79

Post by twothreeone »

I've been using chat apps "send to self" for this exact same workflow.. at work I just use Slack as it supports threads and basic formatting (e.g. render code blocks separately and clickable links). So every day has a few threads on different things I'm working on and I can just add notes on them as I go throughout the day. For my own projects I use a messenger app, which is not as nice because most messengers do not support threads. I was actually considering switching to an external text file for versioning purposes.. and being able to render code blocks would be nice, org mode looks like overkill though.
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