Red bull and cocaine.
Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?
31–40 of 90 posts
Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?
#32I use Logseq to take notes, todos, journal learnings, etc. It's amazing and open source!
Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?
#33I'm using Google Keep for actionable checklists, and obsidian as a knowledge-base (consisting long-term goals, notes, resources, links, etc).
For the longest time, I had been looking for something that offered offline support and was lightweight, my use case being limited to text content. The combination of these two has been super effective for me. In the long run, I'll probably migrate the checklists to Obsidian too, but Keep is relatively easier to quickly add stuff to.
Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?
#34Red bull and cocaine.
Last week you asked "Ask HN: Web devs, what are your biggest productivity boosters?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35745953). You benefit from the answers of the other users here.
Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?
#35Amazing Marvin. It has incredible configurability and a broad feature set. Where it really shines is its ability (contra the David Allen dogma) to help you plan your day/week. The awesome thing about its configurability is that you can start simple and work your way up to more and more sophisticated use of it.
I use it too and love the configurability!
One problem I have with it, though, is that the desktop app gets pretty slow on my relatively fast, high-mem, Windows 10 PC. I tried to clean up the database as they recommend online but no luck. Have you had this issue at all?
Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?
#36org-mode
I used to have a ton of tools, aggregation methods, outliners, markdown, todo lists, calendars, etc etc etc. Now I just use a distributed git repo with org-mode. It seems that every extant and new tool just implements an org-mode feature. Often poorly.
Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?
#37As context: I live with a partner and run a SaaS with a handful of contractors. I think this is important context, because most productivity tools and systems fall down when you have to introduce state outside of your control, and half your time is spent syncing your to-do list with your company's JIRA board or whatever.
I run my life pretty much entirely inside of Things (https://culturedcode.com/things/). It has just enough functionality that I can track and record things easily without getting bogged down in the meta-work; I've used it for five years without complaint or wandering eye.
Other notes:
- I follow GTD's philosophy pretty closely (next action, weekly review, that kind of thing.) The book is a little fluffy and some of the concepts are dated at this point, but worth perusing.
- Any state that has to be shared with someone other than me either goes to Apple Notes (friends and family) or Github (https://github.com/buttondown-email/roadmap/issues)
- No productivity system is going to solve all of your problems. It can make you execute better, but you are not One Perfect App away from the ideal version of yourself; when evaluating tools or systems, be sure to focus on very specific, concrete problems ("I am bad at following up with people after meetings", "I don't pace myself throughout the week", "It's hard for me to close out large projects") as opposed to nebulous ones ("I wish I had more time in the day", "I don't know which side project to work on")
Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?
#38I have just started using https://www.sunsama.com/ and it feels super great.
I have adhd and it helps me to stay on the point with my weekly and daily plans. its pretty steep learning curve for first few days. One of the key features for me were:
- automatically schedule task for the day to the empty slot ( like motion or reclaim)
- weekly objectives. I later connect it with each one of my tasks and see how I moved on my goals during review session
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things3 for the inbox tasks.
notion for project notes, apple notes for quick entry
anki + chatgpt for books and courses better recollection
also gestimeter for mac or forest app to set up a quick pomodoro.
tot for mac to keep the notes which are too short term to put ot notion
pastepal to keep my copy paste history searchable
Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?
#39Time blocking method.
My wife used it and I could see first-hand how productive she became very quickly.
Using pen and paper I plan a whole week ahead with this method.
I could not find a simple/nice template for time slots for the week so I made wee app[0] to make me some.
Re: Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?
#40The most simple but one of the most effective tricks I learned from an "old sweat" when I was a green junior dev just starting out... keep a folder called notes, and each day create a date-numbered file in the format YYYYMMDD.txt.
Put any code snippets, git links, lessons learned, meeting minutes or basically anything interesting in there each day.
Then to access it - you can bash script search, e.g., to find anything you wrote in 2022, you'd simple type;
grep "whatever" 2022*.txt
It works like a charm, been using it for fifteen years.