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My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

jeffhuang.com

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Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

#211

Post by jliu70 »

gorgoiler wrote: post #140
lostlogin wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m in your camp. Apple Notes somehow fell into this gap for me. For me the ability to format, add images and screenshots and easily share gave it an edge over plain text.

I loved notes for years but switched to Bear in the last few months in order to get sane Markdown export. I couldn’t ever find a nice way of exporting (and backing up) my Notes notes. There was an IMAP storage option but that meant losing formatting options.

You can try Exporter. I've been using it for some time now to export Apple Notes to markdown and then checking into a git repo. Caveat: it doesn't export attachments or tables.

http://writeapp.net/notesexporter/

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

#213

Post by jstummbillig »

Where/How would I jot down a brand new todo? The way I understand it right now is, that everything is immediately being scheduled into an appropriate calendar spot, but that seems so very wrong that I feel I must be mistaken.

(To elaborate: To me it is critical to have swift todo entry with minimal effort to account for the random and probably inconvenient times new tasks and thoughts pop up. Having to also deal with scheduling at that very moment would really not allow for that.)

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

#214

Post by trixie_ »

beastcoast wrote: post #115

I’ve found OneNote very useful for Todo lists. It’s very flexible and supports collapsible nested lists. But the killer feature is the “dock to desktop” feature, which makes the list always visible on my monitor. It forces me to stay on task and reminds me what to do next. I create a new page every week and copy over my remaining tasks from the last week. I’ve been doing this for 3 years now and haven’t looked back.

Same. I've had the same OneNote for over 10 years now. My life is in that OneNote lol

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

#215

Post by tikej »

alpaca128 wrote: post #101
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #35

Greenspun's 11th Law: "Any sufficiently complicated note-taking/productivity/GTD system contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Org-Mode."

In my Emacs setup org-mode has at least two reproducible bugs(that I know of) and one feature that's obviously implemented in a more complicated way than necessary. That said it is a fantastic package with some great ideas.

Can you please elaborate on the bugs and feature?

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

#216

Post by revicon »

noman-land wrote: post #47
revicon wrote: post #36

A while back I fell out of love with Evernote and migrated all my years of notes out to txt files which are synced to Dropbox. Huge nested folder structures but easily searched via grep or whatever. And then I have a folder called “Captains Log” and I make txt files for as many things as I can during the day. Code snippets, reminders to buy eggs at the store, urls to some dumb thing I want to remember to read later o…

Honest question. Does it freak you out to have many years of intimate and detailed notes about all aspects of your life and inner monologue to live in freetext on a stranger's computer?

A stranger's computer meaning Dropbox? No, I've worked in similar companies and know the kinds of rigor they put on limiting access to private user data. The number of audits they have to go through for the certifications they have to maintain means they actually take that stuff fairly seriously. At least enough for me to not feel worried about them stealing my recipe for tuna noodle casserole

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

#217

Post by aidos »

Stevie300 wrote: post #132
ramraj07 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds quite elegant, but seems this is only possible if you work out of a single machine almost always. Perhaps it could be made into a service? As long as explicit effort is taken that there's absolute minimum extra effort as possible!

I handle this by aliasing `todo` to `vim scp://[my website]/~/todo.txt`.

Wait, you can use scp as a protocol?!

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

#218

Post by enigmae »

I basically use web based email clients like gmail, Outlook, yahoo, create draft email , set subject As note.

Then keep my lists, etc.

Easy to search, Easy to access anywhere, and I can send a copy around to get duplicate info. I only use file based text files for actual script driven Workflows.

I can make as many As needed and they are secure. Storing secrets is a challenge, for this I use a Password manager, they can store secrets securely and distributed.

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

#219

Post by cfitz »

kabdib wrote: post #109

I use a single text file, have done this for decades. I dump everything into it and don't worry too much about structure, it's an incredible resource for "remembering" minutia, things like "what was that server that i thought might have had some issues last August?" Just a quick control-S and I'm there. My current 7+ year old notes file has about 100K lines in it right now. I can tell you what I was doing last year,…

I’d love to implement a similar command line program for logging various on-computer activities. Thank you for sharing!

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

#220

Post by vowelless »

Maybe it's just me, but I use everything

* Plain text files to serve as my "ram" while I am working. Jot down ideas, paste snippets of code, results (or paths to results), etc.

* Physical notebooks for different projects

* Todoist for personal projects, long term view

* Evernote and OneNote (yes, both) for structured writings, notes, etc. OneNote for work (extension of physical notebooks) and study about some subjects. Evernote for logging various things, notes from conferences, etc.

* Filing cabinets for old documents that almost never look at now.

I tried todo.txt after learning about it from Cal Newport. But it didn't work for me.

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