This rings true to me. I decided to make a thing that keeps that text right in your face as often as possible though:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/goal-board-vision-...
Maybe other folks will be into it too.
My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
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Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#22Notepad++ for me, love the auto save and tabs for other temp notes. Sync with OneDrive so its always backed up
Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#23I have been using nvALT. Its very fast and searchable - wish it connected to my iphone though. On my iphone I use notes.
Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#24"One big text file" was a big deal a while back. Here's a post by Merlin Mann:
http://www.43folders.com/2005/08/17/life-inside-one-big-text...
For notes, I keep trying all kinds of apps and approaches, but I always come back to a single big text file. It's surprisingly easy to search. The main thing is it's just so convenient.
Edit: This is a better link https://danlucraft.com/blog/2008/04/plain-text-organizer/
Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#25I have been using nvALT. Its very fast and searchable - wish it connected to my iphone though. On my iphone I use notes.
Switch to Simplenote for iOS and then you can sync your Simplenote folder inside Dropbox via nvALT settings.
Now you’ve streamlined your notes.
Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#26For work I used to use Evernote, but these days I just have a folder of markdown files named by date. (20200208.md)
Anytime I run a new command, SQL query or work on a new issue I try to write it down in the note before running it. Then I commit+push everything at the end of the day.
At least for me, knowledge degrades quickly. So having a history of that command I ran to fix X three weeks ago is a life saver.
I've found that better organization isn't really needed because find is good enough and I usually have a vague sense of where I'll find what I'm looking for anyway.
Also these day private GitHub repos are free. So it doesn't cost anything to setup.
For teams you can use runbooks as the same concept. Anytime you on work on an on-call issue record the steps you took to fix it. At Datadog we just used GitHub issues in a dedicated runbook repo, but almost anything could work. The point is to reduce friction as much as possible and eliminate decision points. You can always clean it up later but if the barrier for entry is too high developers won't bother doing it.
Remember this is a developer at their worst - it's 3am, they're fixing something they might know little to nothing about, and they're working as fast as possible under pressure. Any additional procedure needs to be as lightweight as possible.
But if you get it right, man does it make on-call and onboarding easier.
Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#27I've used a text file with a very similar workflow for a couple years and wholeheartedly agree it's a very flexible and useful tool. The trouble I had was what to do when I'm not in front of my computer. I tried sending myself TODO emails and I'd add them to the list later. That works pretty well. Although typing more than a line on a phone is kinda painful. And it requires the discipline to add the item to the list instead of leaving it in my inbox.
Recently I switched to a physical journal that I carry everywhere. I find a zen like joy in physically writing my thoughts and the portability can't be beat. I do miss the search though. Wish there was a way to combine these two systems without creating more work for me.
Ultimately the best system is whichever one you find it easiest to keep up to date. It's almost like negotiating with my lazy side. "Ok lazy brain, if you're too lazy to keep a list in google docs, let's see if you can get excited about this journal. Look it's got a picture if space on the cover!"
Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#28Same here, though I use a combination of permanent and transient TXT files. The latter I use like physical post-it notes.
Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#29Mine is a piece of paper. I can even write things to the side, draw diagrams in place, erase, create tables easily.
Paper real estate is also not nearly as limited.
I also use a bug tracker and sometimes a text file, but always have the minutiae on a piece of paper.
Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#30I've done something similar. Since 2001 I've used txt files, but I broke them up by having 1 file for each month.
It really does work nicely without getting in your way.
I tend not to include specific time logged entries tho. I just free form drop things in. That's why I like having it split up per month, it's so I can look back and get a high level picture of "oh, that's what I was working on 6 months ago" or in this case almost 20 years ago.