The key to this solution isn’t really the .txt file or the formatting.

It’s the ritual. Any productivity system can be made to work once it becomes a habit and therefore your default action.

I think .txt files or Org mode are attractive to devs because they feel like something we’d be doing anyway during our day. the same system will work with a paper journal or even a fresh piece of paper every morning if, and only if, it can be integrated into your natural daily workflow as an automatic habit. I personally found that paper is better for me because I get to it before unlocking my computer and being confronted with work and communications and notifications that compete with it. However, I have a lot of peers who couldn’t hang on to a paper journal or TODO list during the day if they tried, so digital formats win.

The real key is to make it a habit and learn to stick with it.

    We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

I've always kept a text file or spreadsheet of things to do, priorities, etc... My biggest problem isn't keeping a list and getting organized, it's remembering to look at my list. I tend to space out for days working on a problem and forget to look at my list.

I've experienced a big productivity boost by using the desktop background of my 43" monitor as a whiteboard (blackboard actually). I have an jpg the size of my monitor that I jot things down on as text on the image. I can store meaningful small images the trigger my memory to do something. I've become so used to visually thinking about what I'm doing that I switched my text file todo list to markdown so I could store images in it.

It's surprisingly quick to keep my large jpg open in paint and jot or paste things to it and then reset it as the desktop background. I learned later this is called a "vision board"

Still, I'm so bad at spacing out that I need more than looking at my vision board monitor all day, so I use the Windows system scheduler to bring up a daily, weekly and monthly html file that reminds me to do things.

Ah, the OBTF or "One big text file" meme was making rounds 10-15 years ago. I ditched mine out of curiosity for other systems -- but I'm still surprised how well it actually worked. Calendar, links, drafts of stuff I wrote -- it was all there. I was kind of proud when, at one point, my file (brain.txt) reached 1 MB.

I'll just share some of those old links for new kids on the OBTF block.

Probably one of the discussion starters in 2005: https://web.archive.org/web/20060101001857/http://www.oreill...

Which apparently got inspiration from this: https://craphound.com/lifehacks2.txt

And was passionately discussed by the 43 Folders crowd: https://www.43folders.com/2005/08/17/life-inside-one-big-tex...

Me, I essentially stole and fine-tuned the syntax exlained here: http://www.matthewcornell.org/blog/2005/8/21/my-big-arse-tex...

OBTF vs Zettelkasten (from 2020): https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/1508/zettelkasten-v...

I've tried to set up a Zettelkasten many times, but in practice, loosely structured flat files, maybe utilizing the OS' file system (folders) and occasional ad-hoc hierarchies, still beats everything else for me.

I used a plain text file for about 5-6 years before finding org-mode in 2009. Of course, I technically still use a plain text file since that's what Org uses, just with some extra features that make organizing things specific to productivity easier.

That said, I'm not sure I'd exclusively use a plain text file or even Org if I had to break my day down into as low as 15 minute chunks like this guy. I find the text-based approach to work best for longer-term planning/strategizing and just keeping yourself from forgetting stuff over the course of days. It also works better if you're already on your computer and using your text editor all day and/or SSH-ing into a box with the file. If I need to remember to make it to 4 meetings today at very specific times, something that pushes notifications and upcoming meeting warnings might accommodate that better.

I've had meeting-heavy jobs, and split off the meeting management into Outlook (or similar) with good results. Useful info that flows out of meetings can still go into your notes to be organized later though. Then I make my GTD list "task-centric", meaning that it focuses on getting discrete activities started and completed, with less focus on times/dates. That requires some level of freedom to manage your own time though, so it's not for everyone.

My productivity app is a Git repository (that happens to be a GitLab wiki git repository at $WORK as well) with my "priority queue" text file and the following bash function. The contents of the text file are similar to what Jeff Huang describes in the blog post (but MUCH less organized). Since it's in version control, I can freely delete old content that's no longer relevant for my day-to-day, and then I frequently use git log -p to search for old text in the file if it becomes relevant. The bash command also pushes and pulls automatically, so it can be used across my devices.

        plan-edit() { 
        cd ~/wiki &&
        git diff --exit-code &&
        vim Rav-priority-queue.txt &&
        ! git diff --quiet Rav-priority-queue.txt &&
        git commit -qm 'Update Rav-priority-queue.txt' Rav-priority-queue.txt &&
        git pull -q --rebase &&
        git push -q
        }

Does anyone else take notes by sending messages to themselves on Signal or another messaging app? I've been doing that for years. Taking notes in dedicated note-taking apps always seems to involve more friction than sending myself a message. The note-taking apps I've tried also lacked polish compared to messaging apps.

It's important to me that I can take notes on my phone because it's the thing I have on me most of the time (unlike a laptop or notebook). Sometimes a random thought pops up and will distract me until I write it down. On my laptop I can use the Signal desktop app to view, add, or search notes. Every note automatically gets a timestamp and is synced between my devices. Both taking and viewing notes works without an Internet connection.

Notes can't be edited but more information can be added by replying to a note and the new information gets its own timestamp. Sometimes I also use emoji reactions as tags. Recently I've started to use groups in which I'm the only member as note categories (e.g. ideas, thoughts, journal, work).

I have a one-liner bash alias that stores whatever I feed it into a file by todays date,

    alias "note"="echo $1 >> ~/.notes/`date+'%Y-%m-%d'`.note"

So you end up with a folder of files formatted like this 2021-11-02.note.

Then to view them I either just cat it, or jump in to a text editor. I have an alias to cat todays .note

    alias "notes"="cat ~/.notes/`date+'%Y-%m-%d'`.note"

I have sometimes considered fleshing it out, but like other commenters have pointed out, it's the habit more than the tool that makes it useful. Simple is key.

Me too. 20 years, actually. Mine was called todo.txt. It got unwieldy. I am now on todo2.txt.