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

After experimenting with dozens of different products in order to become 'more productive' I've ended up doing something similar, but I use Apple Notes instead. At one stage I was experimenting with Trello, Todist, GTD, Zettelkasten, Wikis, Notion, Emails, Calendars, Workflowy...You name it, I've tried it, and combinations of it with other products.

Then one day I started using Apple Notes to start a journalling practice and then I realised I could use it for just about every other thing that I was using all these pieces of software for. I now use it and a calendar exclusively and it handles my todo lists, my random thoughts, my personal relationship management, my checklists, pretty much all the things that are actually important to me. The reason I prefer this over a single text document is simply because I can categories my files into folders. That's it. Same thing could be achieved with text files and folders but I like having this synch on all my devices.

Plain old text is amazing in its simplicity and power.

Someone once left a comment on a Zettlekasten thread and it's something I've always thought about now whenever I get the itch to complicate my system. [1]

"I had the realization yesterday while waiting for a train that the Notes app on iOS contains all the functionality I'd need in order to be able to build a small organization/business .. as long as I standardized my form of note-taking and rigorously applied policies on how Notes are transformed from one Folder to the other"

And I find this applies in my personal note taking life as well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21222150

This comment fascinates me. I hope you don't mind a very candid reply: You already know exactly what you need to do. You need to get away from the screen that you're looking at right now. Disconnect. Get to where you can see the clouds in the sky, and see how they move - spontaneously. Try to do THAT with your life.

It also sounds like a really messy system working between the two, I guess it works for this guy, but no idea why HN is getting so doey eyed about this.

i dont care

Being doing this for years also, occasionally emailing to myself as a backup, mine is at nearly 60k lines.

Top tip is to add meta tags. I suffix them with a colon to help with searching. For example, the section containing my git notes begins with this line: Git notes: / Git: / Git commands: / Github: / Git bash:

And any time I search for something I didn't have a tag for, then I add a new one, even misspellings.