What tools do you use to keep track of your daily tasks, projects, and other obligations?
What do you like about these tools and what would you like to change?
Readit NewsReadit NewsWhat do you like about these tools and what would you like to change?
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.
I built dly (https://github.com/wsw70/dly) to make one line notes taking faster.
I find it easier to follow tasks if I can scroll up a bit to the previous day and see if any tasks are being left undone for a couple days. I can just drop that task if I realize it's not important, but having it right there in front of me is very useful I've found.
Dropbox-like tools can also ensure it gets backed up to the cloud.
Still hit the cli though and grep/ripgrep all the time, it’s just so fast.
Also remembering to have fun and enjoy life always (surprisingly!) seems to help
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_tablet
- Things (♥) and Reminders for todos (the latter for location based reminders or when I need to use Siri to set them), to put reminders so they are captured
- Notes end up in Dropbox Paper (for work), Mac Notes (for home, sharable within, iMessage users), Notion for specific projects
- Polymail for inbox zero, on iOS and Desktop (I'm biased, but Superhuman never stuck for me and Gmail isn't as effective, feels distracting and unintentionally designed)
- Fantastical for calendar (home, work, although I'd like to break these up more so that I can share them by project/team)
- Openphone for throwaway cell phone for orders, 2fa, etc.
- Arc for web browser
- 1Password both for work and private passwords
- News Feed Eradicator to remove/limit feed distractions on my laptop, Screen Time on iOS
- Turned off all notifications except calendar on Apple Watch
- Slack for work chat, but intentionally been spending less time here for more deep work time. Conversations seem to get more efficient if forced to happen on SMS and phone calls.
- Just bought a Remarkable, which I intend to finally use to replace carrying around paper journals for notes and journaling
- Google Suite (surprised by this, but I no longer need the MS Office Suite any more)
- Google Meet (some people make me use Zoom, but GMeet has gotten much better, no software downloads or updates, it just works and the quality is far better than it was when they launched)
- Like @ggwp99, I also plan my week either Sunday evenings or Monday mornings (I intentionally ignore email Monday mornings since people seem to volley their problems, which may not be correlated with my priorities)
- Start every day by asking the question, "what one thing would make a massive impact on my day or week or month," and start there. It's usually the thing I don't want to do.
- Workout classes 5-6 times a week, 7:30am, pick your poison... F45, Barry's whatever motivates you to leave soaked in sweat. I fought this for years since I didn't care about the superficial reasons for working out. Now I find that I am 100% energy at 9am, flushed with endorphins, and I feel better with 6 hours of sleep than I did with 9.
Everything else (TODOs, notes, etc.) becomes much easier without social media/news/etc. in the background.
[1] SelfControl -- website blocker for Mac, cannot be bypassed. https://selfcontrolapp.com/
[2] News Feed Eradicator extension -- hide social feeds when going on Twitter/Facebook/Instagram, etc., to prevent being sucked into endless scrolling when you just go there for one thing. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/news-feed-era...
I really love Todoist. It's really simple to enter tasks -- extremely low friction with browser extensions and Android widgets, etc. It has all the features I want in a tool like this -- simple tasks, sub tasks, categorization, tagging, attachments, recurring tasks, prioritization, and apps/widgets/integrations galore. And it's free, or cheap for the pro version (I do pay, like $50/year).
It also gives great flexibility with a simple query language to create custom views/filters. Like work tasks due in the next 3 days, etc.
For me, the low friction is the biggest benefit of the tool -- so many times each day I'll have a thought of something I need to do, and if I don't capture it, I will probably lose the thought. I used to keep a physical notebook with me during the work day, but in the evening, or in the early morning, or while walking to get coffee, etc, I would think of something and be without my notebook. Todoist is always with me, on my phone, computer, or voice assistant.
It is actually my business. It started as a side-project but I kept working on it and now I make a decent living from it. So I like I can keep tweaking it to adapt to my personal system and feedback I get :p
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Looks like it's exactly what I'm looking for and I love supporting tiny projects, but it's difficult for me to commit without knowing I can get my data out of it easily.
Also, you can use the API but I haven't publicly documented it! Some people use it to do their own stuff with their data :)
It is a work in progress!
For work notes, a Markdown file in VS Code. I have my to-do list in Markdown format like this:
Jun 2
* [~] Task A
* [x] Task B
* [ ] Task B
This free-form (but still semi-structured) helps me add long free text notes to a task and thoughts-in-progress, which most Todo lists don't really support.
Finally, I use Logseq to record fragments in a topic area that I'm ideating or trying to learn. Logseq's bullet point as an element is reminiscent of Lisp, where everything are atoms and lists. The list is a very powerful data structure, and certainly Logseq's querying and tagging abilities have enabled me to combine the "dump it first, sort it later" workflow to the "let's try to make sense of everything I dumped" without a lot of work needed to pre-tag everything.
I've always been a fan of "dump it first, sort it later" because it doesn't presume any kind of structure (most people tend to overinvest in developing a system). With Logseq, you can pretty much freely dump without developing a system that AND STILL be able to retrieve information in a useful way. Such is the power of the list (as most Lispers already know).
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")
I always thought it was funny that there was a non-serious quip in the universal capture segment that you could someday say:
“Computer! Yes David? I need milk! Yes David.”
If you set an Alexa’s wake word to “computer,” that joke is now basically reality.