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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

#231
post #222
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, you can use scp as a protocol?!

Not generally, but vim can: https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Editing_remote_files_via_scp_in_...

wow, that's incredible. learn something new everyday.

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

#232
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,…

How do you handle a file like that on mobile?

I separate my job journal from my personal journal. Job journal starts on a backed up work drive and I don't care to have mobile access to it. I must have access to my personal journal at work, or while I'm out and about and mobile is the only way.

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

#233
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,…

How do you handle a file like that on mobile? I separate my job journal from my personal journal. Job journal starts on a backed up work drive and I don't care to have mobile access to it. I must have access to my personal journal at work, or while I'm out and about and mobile is the only way.

not OP but I put this file on Dropbox, their mobile app has an editor that works for markdown or plain text.

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

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you handle a file like that on mobile? I separate my job journal from my personal journal. Job journal starts on a backed up work drive and I don't care to have mobile access to it. I must have access to my personal journal at work, or while I'm out and about and mobile is the only way.

not OP but I put this file on Dropbox, their mobile app has an editor that works for markdown or plain text.

I've also had success using syncthing for this if you want something self hosted.

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

#236
I think an ideal system would include voice notes. The problem is, I would really like it if the voice notes were geotagged and timestamped AND really easy to record. I think a smartphone app is to cumbersome. It should be a single physical button, just for that purpose.

What I really would like is a minimal device with a microphone and a button, that stores the notes in my phone.

I have not figured out how yet.

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

#237

The 21st century has burdened the human psyche with a wonderful array of problems—most of which are invisible, abstract things. It's taken some time figuring out how to make them real. Doesn't feel like anybody created a tool to help manage these abstract monsters. We still do not know ourselves that well. Not in this strange world. Whenever I hear someone say, "Just use paper", part of me agrees. Paper is simple. It…

This is a great comment. Over the past years I've created my own system using number of tools to manage my day-to-day life on a long-term perspective. I've decided to kick off a side project and create an app aggregating all the "tools" under one systematic framework. I'm happy to share when its ready. https://forms.gle/db4LXhaPjsapg8vN9

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

#238

I started doing this at my first job in 1985. There is a direct lineage of the file to a few of the text files I use today. "todo.txt", "address.txt", and "dates.txt" have morphed continuously for 35 years. Besides this reminiscence, I wanted remind vim users of a particular feature that allows easily navigating between text files like a hypertext system. The "gf" key sequence (mnemonic: go file). Typing "gf" will ca…

I've-too been evolving the text file for about 25 years. In those days, at the beginning of time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, one would evolve the data format to tailor it for its purpose. txt is just perfect for that. Some indentation, some symbols, some tabular data.

Sometimes just Monday is fine, sometimes you want Monday Week 4, sometimes the format should be 01-02-99 etc etc but after using it for long enough it kind of stabilizes into a format that fits the task. At that point it becomes easy to parse the data (read table) and [if so desired] display it in some more visually appealing format.

I for example keep a work schedule that at some point included the coworkers ill be working with and later it had their full schedule for purpose of trading shifts. (all the way to the right of the screen and beyond)

I publish this as interactive html for them with fancy unicode icons and colors. It is much more compact, convenient and with its rounded corners looks sooooo much better than the excel printout from the planning department. It reveals complex trades like if jim takes joes shift and I take joes shift jim can take mine. To the point I have to assure the coworkers they don't have to understand the complexity of the trade, just work Monday in stead of Sunday.

If a shift is understaffed I call them before they call me if I desire to fill it. Their excel print out ends up on the wall many cpu cycles after my text file is updated. If they get my payments wrong I strip all the extra information from the text file, paste it in an email and color the font in the spots where they should be looking. I could export it as a spreadsheet too I suppose.

The point being, its lovely to have the visuals but I wouldn't want to be working the data in a gui.

(Reminds me to figure out how to morph it into iCalendar files (and perhaps back))

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

#240
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found that using an iPad with the Pencil has been a great middle ground. The OCR in the various Notes apps (including stock) is able to recognize my horrendous writing (it’s really bad).

What notes app have you settled on? Annotating images was a key for me.

I use GoodNotes.
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