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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)

#141

Post by keybored »

cyanydeez wrote: post #121
twodave wrote: post #82

I tend to format my plaintext notes as markdown to add a small amount of organization. I also have some light folder/file organization to break things into categories/topics/days, depending on what it is. That gives me a nice clean slate to work from each day, but lets me pick up where I left off on more long-term stuff. Finally, I push it all to a private Github repo so I can get to my notes easily from wherever I a…

I'm guessing you're younger than 40. At some point, either your jobs novelty will wear off or your memory will just degrade. what happened to me is the lack of novelty in day to day and long term plans created a lot of unreliable data. having done a task multiple times, recalling the latest event details became a mixed bag of questionable facts. I still have the same capacity but now because I had such a great capaci…

You make notes, organize them a little, make sure to back them up/synch. them but you don’t make notes for everything? How bizarre. Now let me berate you for being (apparently) young.

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

#142

Post by charlie0 »

twodave wrote: post #82

I tend to format my plaintext notes as markdown to add a small amount of organization. I also have some light folder/file organization to break things into categories/topics/days, depending on what it is. That gives me a nice clean slate to work from each day, but lets me pick up where I left off on more long-term stuff. Finally, I push it all to a private Github repo so I can get to my notes easily from wherever I a…

Sounds like Obsidian would make a great candidate for you on a note taking app.

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

#143

Post by vunderba »

zeta0134 wrote: post #28
BasilPH wrote: post #5

I'm doing something similar with Obsidian daily notes[^1]. I also have a weekly note that I use to plan the next week. Similar to how the author talks about scheduling their next day the evening before, I've started planning the big tasks for next on Friday afternoon, as this gives me momentum on Monday morning. Related: I've found the 3/3/3 technique from Oliver Burkeman[^2] and the concept of open and closed lists…

Happy Obsidian user here. I love that the "vault" concept it uses is literally just a folder of markdown files, meaning I'm still in full control of my data. I don't use their proprietary sync service, I just drop it into a regular folder and let syncthing take care of cloning it to every device I own and a few extras for backup. Obsidian itself has got to be the nicest markdown editor I have ever used, hands down. I…

Vaults are great. I compartmentalize all notes surrounding each consulting job as a self-contained folder/vault - that way I only have to search relevant information but still have access to it at a later time if I want to open that vault again.

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

#144

Post by riston »

I am using a similar structure a single text file usually split by each day, which also gives a good start to writing my standup notes.

I tried to avoid bringing in some strange formatting rules etc, quite free form. With a single file, it's effortless to go back and find out maybe why something was done in that way or why it wasn't done at all.

Looks kind of like a work diary to me, I have seen people trying to do a similar thing by bringing too much structure/org modes etc and making it so complicated that they forgot at first why they are doing it.

KISS

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

#145

Post by overvale »

plg wrote: post #125

I have been using Apple Notes which is great because I can read/write in the moment on a Mac, on iPad, on iPhone, and everything is (almost always) synced and stored in the cloud. I have been doing one note per day. On the other hand, PTF (Pity The Fool) who tries to export these notes. I know some people have written exporters but of course, whenever Apple decides to change format, PTF. I would like to change to a m…

Text files in iCloud (or whatever whatever) works great. There’s a bunch of good iOS text editors. I like Runestone.

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

#146

Post by al_borland »

troupe wrote: post #103
d--b wrote: post #77

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…

I find it helpful to give myself permission decide NOT to do something. The to-do list is a bunch of things that I thought were important when I wrote them down. If the next day I only do half of them, but feel those were the important ones, then I have success. If I decide that half of them aren't worth doing, the doing those would be failure. The goal of the list isn't to beat you up, but just a tool to make sure t…

Tony Robbins has a todo/project planning system called RPM. The training for it is hours and hours long, and the maintenance of it is also crazy. I wouldn’t recommend anyone use it verbatim, it’s just too much. That being said…

It did bring up the concept you mention. It basically had a person set their goal, then write down everything they could do to get there. From there you pick the ones that will get you the most bang for the buck. And when you hit your goal, you’re done. If that means it only took 5 tasks out of 47 possible, great. Goal achieved, trash the rest of the tasks and move on.

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

#147

Post by mark336 »

I use my own messageboard: https://willashani.com/gigabots/threads Feel free to post! And I use Apple Notes. I like the messageboard because you can see the relationships in a tree-based structure. I store techy things in the messageboard above. I store non-techy things in Notes or when I am in a hurry and its not high priority.

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

#149

Post by al_borland »

plg wrote: post #125

I have been using Apple Notes which is great because I can read/write in the moment on a Mac, on iPad, on iPhone, and everything is (almost always) synced and stored in the cloud. I have been doing one note per day. On the other hand, PTF (Pity The Fool) who tries to export these notes. I know some people have written exporters but of course, whenever Apple decides to change format, PTF. I would like to change to a m…

I’ve gone back and forth between Apple Notes and more portable solutions many times now. It has been awful, but I decided to stick with Apple Notes. If/when it goes away, I will need to suffer one more time. If I keep trying to app hop looking for the perfect tool, I’ll suffer every 3-6 months for the rest of my life and never find peace.

I like that Apple Notes gives me the option to write, easily add images, make tables, etc. While 98% of my notes are just text, and some of these things can be done in markdown, it is higher friction in markdown. So I’m choosing the lower daily friction and extra features, knowing that I’ll probably experience one high friction migration day in the future, but that day could be 10 years from now.

The biggest issue moving notes out of Apple Notes was the extra new lines and spaces all over the place. I have to assume if the app is going to shutdown that some nice developer will make a little tool to take care of this. If not, meh… I’ll use it as an opportunity to clean up some clutter.

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

#150

Post by vunderba »

hu3 wrote: post #64

I use https://joplinapp.org because it allows for pasting images and files. Supports markdown. Has easy sync and also mobile and desktop apps. Free and open source.

Joplin is good but I absolutely hate the way that they structure your notes.

If you have all of your notes in a folder

  ~/my_notes
  ~/my_notes/work
  ~/my_notes/music
etc

Joplin takes them and stores the notes internally as a SQLite table with UUID named markdown files. It makes it very difficult to use bash tools, finding them, other IDEs, etc to work with your files after Joplin has ingested them. Compare this to apps like Obsidian and Logseq (also open source) which don't mess with your markdown file organization.

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