At my first job out of college in 1985 I worked for a unknown, unsuccessful mainframe company. I started a TODO.TXT file when I arrived; when I left a year later I put my TODO.TXT (along with ADDRESS.TXT, DATES.TXT) on a 5.25" floppy and took it with me to the next company, and the next, and the next. I didn't buy my own computer until 1997, and those files finally made it to a machine I own and control. Those files have been in continuous use for 39 years. TODO.TXT's icon is the upper left icon on my desktop and I view and edit it multiple times a day.
I now have 46 .txt files for managing things, where each one pertains to some particular topic: food, music, travel, a website, etc. All are listed in my main TODO.TXT and since I use vim, I can just move the cursor on top of any of the files and type "gf" to jump to that other file. When I'm done, I hit Ctrl-O to jump back to the original file. It is hypertext without the html.
Really, my tasks are not lists, they aren't even items to do. They're contexts which I want to switch to, switch between, discard once done (to maintain high SNR), branch off from, etc.
It's context management. A todolist app isn't going to cut it, and in fact, none of them did.
For the last 6 months or so I've been happily using a small tool I developed for myself, to suit my workflows (like the ones above). Even made a GUI for it.
It's the only thing I've used since I started with TODO files in the 90s that gets better at managing my contexts over time. Everything else gets worse over time, because the mismatch between what I want (context management) and what they provide (TODO items management) can easily be negligible when first using it with few items entered, but as that list grows so does the magnitude of the mismatch in what I want and what they do.
It's missing remote sync but I'll eventually add that in (so I can use it from the phone eventually). Easily the best 1 week I've ever spent on a project.
Hey, I've realized the same thing (that my workflows are stack-based) awhile ago, but didn't get to the point of writing a tool yet. Dare to share?
Also, which approach you use to efficiently store and re-store relevant context information? I often find that intricate but important details are lost during context switch.
I used to use Zim and it was splendid. Then I went down a few rabbit holes and explored a more GUI-less approach, but in my case nothing ever approached the level of Zim. It is more on me, than on tools. Now, when I'm doing a job that finally doesn't cause me a burn out I am slowly going back to Zim and I like it.
Full agreement. I use Zim Desktop Wiki for years now and still use it daily, but it has become harder. I also write on mobile and the experience is lacking. I don't mind syncing with Syncthing, but there is no good editor. Markor is able to open Zim files (which are just text files with markup) but it is just not cutting it.
Maybe I need to wait until the itch becomes too large to ignore and start my own little side project :/
Quite similar to how I started too! A single piece of paper with a list of videogames I wanted to finish. Then it kept expanding with time - one txt file, multiple txt files, Evernote, Notion,...
Finally settled with Google Keep (checklists) + Obsidian (~2,700 text files, interconnected and easy to navigate).
I use a similar system, but I duplicate and rename the file at the start of each day. Then I remove stuff that got done the previous day. Or stuff that is old and not relevant anymore.
The system has evolved over the years. The greatest thing about it is how flexible it is. When faced with new requirements (new projects, job change, etc) I can just start taking notes in a different way and see if it sticks.
I also commit it to git every 30 minutes using a cron script. Its awesome.
Doing the exact same thing using Obsidian and the obsidian-git plugin, which allows for automatic git push at a given interval. Works very well and it's very convenient to use.
Same setup here and pretty happy about it, only minor issue is the `Update time on edit` plugin creating some conflicts if I have my vault opened on two machines.
I don't usually take the time to write out a daily to-do list, but I do keep one for long-term projects that I tend to lose track of. Each line is a task and at the beginning of the line is the date it was initiated/requested. It's semi-structured but doesn't take any longer than typing out a note.
At the beginning of the month I duplicate the file and rename it for the new month, then I clean out just like you do.
I've tried apps, I've tried tracking systems, and this seems to work best for me for now. I can keep it open all the time in a tab of my text editor which I would have open anyway and it backs up with the rest of my files.
What are the benefits of keeping it in git? Are the commit messages useful?
Not trying to knock the idea, I just can't imagine branching or reverting or being curious about the history of a to-do list. Maybe it could be cool for statistics over time.
But I'm really curious to hear how you're using it!
I find that files under revision control have one awesome property:
they can be ruthlessly minimal.
The intermediate note-to-self stuff, the reference material, the stuff that was cancelled, all can be deleted.
But you have the peace of mind that you can get it back.
This might be especially important if it is a text file you run your life with.
My neighbor needs the name of the plumber we used. What was the amount of the bill? When did I order xyz last? What was the size of the wiper blades of my car?
I have a similar setup as far as git is concerned - I use it to push a backup of my Joplin notes (note that I don't sync multiple Joplins, just backup the current one).
Pros: pushes only the differences, keeps history, can be rolled back, works offline (push fails but commit works), offers a time log of changes.
Commit messages are not needed really - the timestamp is enough and rolling back is only for exceptional events (e.g. accidentally deleting important stuff, etc.).
I've landed on a similar process, but one file per sprint instead of one file per day.
I take the last sprint's file, save a copy for the new sprint, summarize what got done to report in sprint meeting, then add the tasks for the new sprint to present at the meeting as well.
Still have JIRA tickets to track tasks in a more formal way. But the text file is far more flexible and easier to quickly edit and view everything at a glance, as well as including things that don't fit cleanly in a ticket.
I do the same in vi/vim/neovim, in a custom filetype with syntax highlighting for TODO items, status markers, tags, code blocks, etc:
"my/work/xxx/201810.notes" 34502L, 1946600B written
5.5 years on this particular file, but I've been using the same system for at least twice as long as that.
The datestamp is the most recent time I thought it might be useful to rotate into a new file. It was not! I find it much more convenient to have everything in a single topic-based file, although I do separate personal from work, and employers from each other.
I'm doing something similar with Obsidian daily notes[^1]. I also have a weekly note that I use to plan the next week.
Similar to how the author talks about scheduling their next day the evening before, I've started planning the big tasks for next on Friday afternoon, as this gives me momentum on Monday morning.
Related: I've found the 3/3/3 technique from Oliver Burkeman[^2] and the concept of open and closed lists to be a great complement for this type of organization. It hits the sweet-spot of flexibility and consistency for me.
Happy Obsidian user here. I love that the "vault" concept it uses is literally just a folder of markdown files, meaning I'm still in full control of my data. I don't use their proprietary sync service, I just drop it into a regular folder and let syncthing take care of cloning it to every device I own and a few extras for backup.
Obsidian itself has got to be the nicest markdown editor I have ever used, hands down. It gets so many of the little details absolutely right, down to tiny things like a quick shortcut to turn a list item into a checkbox (Ctrl+L) and then into a checked box (Ctrl+L again), without needing to even think about the underlying syntax. But you totally can, if you need that control. It's great.
Vaults are great. I compartmentalize all notes surrounding each consulting job as a self-contained folder/vault - that way I only have to search relevant information but still have access to it at a later time if I want to open that vault again.
I plan exclusively on paper despite using Obsidian quite extensively for taking notes. I also do weekly and daily planning.
Initially I tried to plan on Obsidian as well but it didn't work for me. Writing on paper is slow and not only it calms me down but also directly incentivizes me to state my tasks and goals concisely. Similarly, the limited space on a planning page helps me to be realistic in terms of things I set to accomplish.
Curious, I have starting using Obsidian recently and one of the things that I love about it is that it's lightning fast on my systems, including startup time. Much snappier than other note-taking programs I've used, and than 95% of the programs altogether (only the likes of Notepad are faster).
Maybe it's because I don't have many notes yet and it becomes a behemoth if the vault gets too big?
May I suggest giving Trilium notes a try? It's like opensource obsidian plus typed notes plus self hostable sync plus a web frontend for places where you can't install it.
> Every night before I go to bed, I take all the items on my calendar for the next day and append it to the end of the text file as a daily todo list, so I know exactly what I'm doing when I wake up. T
This is a key win. Most of the rest he describes is support (also cruicial). But setting up your day the night before is amazingly powerful. Many of the things I plan for the day I actually schedule into my calendar (12:30-13:00 read and respond to those three unanswered messages from Jane).
This is the challenge of the modern manager, especially in remote jobs. You turn on the computer with a plan, and then 345 Slack messages and 10 Zoom meetings later, you consider working on it. As an EM, I really miss that state of flow and productivity.
I’m whinging because I see other managers that have nailed this so much better than me and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.
Heavily guard your morning time, and don't even open your email/chat programs until closer to lunch. At least for me (maybe it's the caffeine rush), but that morning block is the most valuable/productive time of my day and going down a rabbit hole early can kill the rest of my day's accomplishments.
In my previous role, I worked with a primarily West Coast team (being East Cost, myself), and it was wonderful having that first 3 hours of uninterrupted time to do deep work before the 'other' stuff crept in. The downside, of course, was then needing to be on-point in meetings where everyone else was caffeinated/ready-to-go and my brain was losing steam.
I look at my mail when I get up and normally at three other fixed times.
Sometimes there's something complicated going on via mail and I have to be more responsive. Today I'm trying to debug something with a prospective partner who is in Japan (normally in NYC) so I check for messages from them between tasks. But otherwise it's systolic.
I also run a lot of automation over my mail most of which causes me not to see as much.
For slack, we have a culture that it's either transient (doesn't matter what someone wrote yesterday) or, depending on channel, archival ("here's the documents from partner P") which means you search for it but don't otherwise follow in real time. We're relatively hardcore about channels so that you can ignore ones that aren't germane to you. So I skim them in the same times I check mail.
Zoom meetings...I have the luxury of mostly only attending meetings with agenda and objectives published ahead of time. We try to do as much as possible asynchronously though we have one outside partner who doesn't do any homework and tries to use meetings to get work done rather than just use them for things that can't be handled asynchronously.
And also: certain topics are only handled on certain days, e.g. patent (bletch) related stuff I only work on tuesdays and fridays. Otherwise it will just sit in my inbox or wherever.
I used to use a .txt file like this for over 10 years that I edited with Vim and could also edit on my phone using Dropbox. And then I used the Mac Notes app and realized the search, sync, autosave experience, and other properties made Notes way more useful for me.
Similarly, for over 10 years I used to compile my CV with LaTeX using a fancy template I designed, until I realized the time it took to edit it was just not worth it. So I pasted it into a Google Docs file with Arial font and just text bullet points and no rich text features. My life became way easier and my CV looks way less annoying.
(This may be irrelevant to the original post but) I found that a lot of the optimizations I thought were good for me were stemming from an unnecessary attachment to a minimalist technical aesthetic.
> Similarly, for over 10 years I used to compile my CV with LaTeX using a fancy template I designed, until I realized the time it took to edit it was just not worth it.
I went the opposite way - trying to typeset[1] in word processors just became too hard as changed CV to emphasise some things over others.
My CV[2] in LaTeX was extremely quick to adjust for someone else who wanted an identically formatted CV.
[1] I like the ability to do proper boxes all over the page for things that require box-models, like advertisments, which is what your CV actually is!
The same exact thing happened to me and I came to the same exact realization. I moved all my dot files to an archive and started using built-in software. It's been great.
I tend to format my plaintext notes as markdown to add a small amount of organization. I also have some light folder/file organization to break things into categories/topics/days, depending on what it is. That gives me a nice clean slate to work from each day, but lets me pick up where I left off on more long-term stuff. Finally, I push it all to a private Github repo so I can get to my notes easily from wherever I am.
Overall this system works for me for several reasons. First, I hate pretty much every note taking app out there. Second, I like having control over my files. Most importantly, though, I don't actually need to write notes all that often, and this way of doing things is convenient. When my brain is so crowded I need to overflow some thoughts or tasks for the day/week somewhere, this system is there. When I'm managing it all in my head just fine, I don't have to worry about keeping notes up to date, and I can count on my own system not to send me a push notification bugging me about it.
At some point, either your jobs novelty will wear off or your memory will just degrade.
what happened to me is the lack of novelty in day to day and long term plans created a lot of unreliable data. having done a task multiple times, recalling the latest event details became a mixed bag of questionable facts.
I still have the same capacity but now because I had such a great capacity it's redundancy causes issues.
This reminded of the memorable Sherlock Holmes quote. Hopefully it is good advice for those of us who are a bit younger.
"His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”
“To forget it!”
“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
“But the Solar System!” I protested.
“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”
I... what the hell man? I'll turn 40 within the year. The only thing about my brain that's degraded is I sometimes find myself in the pantry with no idea why I'm there. I attribute that more to having 4 kids between the age of 7 and 14 who think I'm their personal assistant half the time. I don't see that getting better or worse in the next 10 months. But whatever, thanks for kicking off a thread of bad assumptions about my mental capacity, age and (this one's not your fault but sometimes you don't know how big the snowball will be when it reaches the bottom of the hill) overall character.
I am currently enduring a home builder who seems to think he doesn’t need to take notes. He has made so many errors and has had to do so much rework that he’s run out of time to fix legitimate problems.
His belief in his ability to retain information way exceeds his ability.
Understanding and accepting my own constraints and limitations helped me to become far better at what I do. People who don’t take notes make me very anxious. (This includes waiters).
This hits hard. As I've gotten older I've accumulated a lot more complexity in my life. Finances that I need to take seriously, properties, family stuff, a decade+ of depth in my career... it takes a lot to keep track of everything, and to make it legible when you come back to it a year or 5 years later.
You make notes, organize them a little, make sure to back them up/synch. them but you don’t make notes for everything? How bizarre. Now let me berate you for being (apparently) young.
I've had pretty decent luck with `todo.txt` style tracking, but also tend to run into issues with tasks or notes "going stale" so came up with this system. `today` basically opens `~/Desktop/$YYYY_MM_DD-todo.txt`, but it'll start you off with a copy of the most recent (previous) file.
This lets me have "durable" files (I can grep for pretty much anything and get a date-specific hit for it, similar to doing a `git log -S`), and also lets me declare "task-bankruptcy" without any worry (I can always "rewind" to any particular point in time).
The addition of `report` (aka: `diff $YESTERDAY $TODAY`) is helpful to see what I've added/removed. Yeah, there's better ways to do things, but the degenerate simplicity of `open ~/Desktop/todo.txt` is fantastic. Having the equivalent of `open ~/Desktop/$TODAY.txt` (with no ceremony) has been very valuable to me!
$ cat ~/bin/today
#!/bin/bash
TODO_HOME="$HOME/Desktop"
TODAY="$( date "+%Y-%m-%d" )"
TODAY_FILE="$TODO_HOME/todo-$TODAY-todo.txt"
PREVIOUS_FILE="$( ~/bin/previous )"
if [[ ! -f "$TODAY_FILE" ]]; then
cp "$PREVIOUS_FILE" "$TODAY_FILE"
fi
report "$TODAY_FILE"
printf "Press Enter to Continue, Ctrl-C to exit." && read -r PROMPT
open "$TODAY_FILE"
echo "$TODAY"
$ cat ~/bin/previous
#!/bin/bash
TODO_HOME="$HOME/Desktop/"
TODAYS_DATE="$( date "+%Y-%m-%d" )"
MOST_RECENT="$( ls "$TODO_HOME"/todo-*-todo.txt | sed 's/^.*todo-//g' | sed 's/-todo.txt//g' ; echo "$TODAYS_DATE" | sort )"
PREVIOUS="$( echo "$MOST_RECENT" | awk -- "BEGIN { YET=0 } /^$TODAYS_DATE/ { YET=1 } { if ( !YET ) PREV=\$0 } END { print( PREV ) }" )"
PREVIOUS_FILE="$( echo "$TODO_HOME/todo-$PREVIOUS-todo.txt" )"
echo "$( realpath "$PREVIOUS_FILE" )"
$ cat ~/bin/report
#!/bin/bash
TODO_HOME="$HOME/Desktop"
TODAY_FILE="$TODO_HOME/todo-$( date "+%Y-%m-%d" )-todo.txt"
PREVIOUS_FILE="$( ~/bin/previous )"
echo "${PREVIOUS_FILE}...${TODAY_FILE}"
diff -U0 "$PREVIOUS_FILE" "$TODAY_FILE" | grep -v ^@@
- Running `notes` will open this month's notes for YYYY_MM.txt in your default $EDITOR
- Running `notes hello world` will append `hello world` to YYYY_MM.txt
- Running `$stdout | notes` will append another program's output to YYYY_MM.txt (useful for piping your clipboard)
I find this offers the least amount of resistance for quickly adding notes. Every method of input is 2 seconds away on the terminal and grep makes things searchable enough where I can still pull things out from files 5-10 years ago without issues.
I tried YYYY_MM_DD.txt for a while but I found it to be too fragmented. Oftentimes I want to look at a few day's worth of notes at a glance.
I've been using what is essentially a single sticky note (Raycast floating notes feature) for a year now and it works great. I put todos, meeting notes, ideas, and everything else in there with zero organization. When I want to remember stuff I read it. When I finish stuff I delete it. Has worked for me better than Notion, Obsidian, Reminders, Tick Tick, etc.
I've found that for productivity tools, there is an inverse correlation between time it takes to setup and how effective it is.
I run into the issue where I’m told to start new things all the time, then things don’t get finished, because of other new things that “need” to start. And no one ever seems to care than nothing actually gets done… but someday they might. So the list of what I need to look through keeps growing with nothing to keep it in check.
Readit News
I now have 46 .txt files for managing things, where each one pertains to some particular topic: food, music, travel, a website, etc. All are listed in my main TODO.TXT and since I use vim, I can just move the cursor on top of any of the files and type "gf" to jump to that other file. When I'm done, I hit Ctrl-O to jump back to the original file. It is hypertext without the html.
Then I used vim using `CTRL-Wgf`, same as you.
Then I added to my .bash_profile:
Then I test drove a bunch of todo apps (yeah, Obsidian too).The problem I found with this, eventually, is that it's really not great at allowing me to perform my most common workflow:
Or Or even Or etc.Really, my tasks are not lists, they aren't even items to do. They're contexts which I want to switch to, switch between, discard once done (to maintain high SNR), branch off from, etc.
It's context management. A todolist app isn't going to cut it, and in fact, none of them did.
For the last 6 months or so I've been happily using a small tool I developed for myself, to suit my workflows (like the ones above). Even made a GUI for it.
It's the only thing I've used since I started with TODO files in the 90s that gets better at managing my contexts over time. Everything else gets worse over time, because the mismatch between what I want (context management) and what they provide (TODO items management) can easily be negligible when first using it with few items entered, but as that list grows so does the magnitude of the mismatch in what I want and what they do.
It's missing remote sync but I'll eventually add that in (so I can use it from the phone eventually). Easily the best 1 week I've ever spent on a project.
Also, which approach you use to efficiently store and re-store relevant context information? I often find that intricate but important details are lost during context switch.
I used to use Zim and it was splendid. Then I went down a few rabbit holes and explored a more GUI-less approach, but in my case nothing ever approached the level of Zim. It is more on me, than on tools. Now, when I'm doing a job that finally doesn't cause me a burn out I am slowly going back to Zim and I like it.
Maybe I need to wait until the itch becomes too large to ignore and start my own little side project :/
Finally settled with Google Keep (checklists) + Obsidian (~2,700 text files, interconnected and easy to navigate).
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The system has evolved over the years. The greatest thing about it is how flexible it is. When faced with new requirements (new projects, job change, etc) I can just start taking notes in a different way and see if it sticks.
I also commit it to git every 30 minutes using a cron script. Its awesome.
At the beginning of the month I duplicate the file and rename it for the new month, then I clean out just like you do.
I've tried apps, I've tried tracking systems, and this seems to work best for me for now. I can keep it open all the time in a tab of my text editor which I would have open anyway and it backs up with the rest of my files.
Not trying to knock the idea, I just can't imagine branching or reverting or being curious about the history of a to-do list. Maybe it could be cool for statistics over time.
But I'm really curious to hear how you're using it!
they can be ruthlessly minimal.
The intermediate note-to-self stuff, the reference material, the stuff that was cancelled, all can be deleted.
But you have the peace of mind that you can get it back.
This might be especially important if it is a text file you run your life with.
My neighbor needs the name of the plumber we used. What was the amount of the bill? When did I order xyz last? What was the size of the wiper blades of my car?
Pros: pushes only the differences, keeps history, can be rolled back, works offline (push fails but commit works), offers a time log of changes.
Commit messages are not needed really - the timestamp is enough and rolling back is only for exceptional events (e.g. accidentally deleting important stuff, etc.).
Hosting private repo on gitlab solves hosting.
I mark completed items with a "+" and items I won't do with a "-".
Simple and works great!
I take the last sprint's file, save a copy for the new sprint, summarize what got done to report in sprint meeting, then add the tasks for the new sprint to present at the meeting as well.
Still have JIRA tickets to track tasks in a more formal way. But the text file is far more flexible and easier to quickly edit and view everything at a glance, as well as including things that don't fit cleanly in a ticket.
I do everything in vim and it's more keystrokes to search across separate files.
I've been using one file for 2-3 years now and it's only 1mb.
The datestamp is the most recent time I thought it might be useful to rotate into a new file. It was not! I find it much more convenient to have everything in a single topic-based file, although I do separate personal from work, and employers from each other.
Similar to how the author talks about scheduling their next day the evening before, I've started planning the big tasks for next on Friday afternoon, as this gives me momentum on Monday morning.
Related: I've found the 3/3/3 technique from Oliver Burkeman[^2] and the concept of open and closed lists to be a great complement for this type of organization. It hits the sweet-spot of flexibility and consistency for me.
[^1]: https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Daily+notes
[^2]: https://ckarchive.com/b/e5uph7hx43mn
Obsidian itself has got to be the nicest markdown editor I have ever used, hands down. It gets so many of the little details absolutely right, down to tiny things like a quick shortcut to turn a list item into a checkbox (Ctrl+L) and then into a checked box (Ctrl+L again), without needing to even think about the underlying syntax. But you totally can, if you need that control. It's great.
Initially I tried to plan on Obsidian as well but it didn't work for me. Writing on paper is slow and not only it calms me down but also directly incentivizes me to state my tasks and goals concisely. Similarly, the limited space on a planning page helps me to be realistic in terms of things I set to accomplish.
It’s also dare-I-say-it too customizable for me. I just want it to look nice and do standard notes stuff without having to spend hours tinkering.
The only thing keeping me is that it is just markdown. I don’t like the idea of being locked in with the proprietary formats of other apps
Maybe it's because I don't have many notes yet and it becomes a behemoth if the vault gets too big?
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This is a key win. Most of the rest he describes is support (also cruicial). But setting up your day the night before is amazingly powerful. Many of the things I plan for the day I actually schedule into my calendar (12:30-13:00 read and respond to those three unanswered messages from Jane).
I’m whinging because I see other managers that have nailed this so much better than me and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.
In my previous role, I worked with a primarily West Coast team (being East Cost, myself), and it was wonderful having that first 3 hours of uninterrupted time to do deep work before the 'other' stuff crept in. The downside, of course, was then needing to be on-point in meetings where everyone else was caffeinated/ready-to-go and my brain was losing steam.
I look at my mail when I get up and normally at three other fixed times.
Sometimes there's something complicated going on via mail and I have to be more responsive. Today I'm trying to debug something with a prospective partner who is in Japan (normally in NYC) so I check for messages from them between tasks. But otherwise it's systolic.
I also run a lot of automation over my mail most of which causes me not to see as much.
For slack, we have a culture that it's either transient (doesn't matter what someone wrote yesterday) or, depending on channel, archival ("here's the documents from partner P") which means you search for it but don't otherwise follow in real time. We're relatively hardcore about channels so that you can ignore ones that aren't germane to you. So I skim them in the same times I check mail.
Zoom meetings...I have the luxury of mostly only attending meetings with agenda and objectives published ahead of time. We try to do as much as possible asynchronously though we have one outside partner who doesn't do any homework and tries to use meetings to get work done rather than just use them for things that can't be handled asynchronously.
And also: certain topics are only handled on certain days, e.g. patent (bletch) related stuff I only work on tuesdays and fridays. Otherwise it will just sit in my inbox or wherever.
Similarly, for over 10 years I used to compile my CV with LaTeX using a fancy template I designed, until I realized the time it took to edit it was just not worth it. So I pasted it into a Google Docs file with Arial font and just text bullet points and no rich text features. My life became way easier and my CV looks way less annoying.
(This may be irrelevant to the original post but) I found that a lot of the optimizations I thought were good for me were stemming from an unnecessary attachment to a minimalist technical aesthetic.
I went the opposite way - trying to typeset[1] in word processors just became too hard as changed CV to emphasise some things over others.
My CV[2] in LaTeX was extremely quick to adjust for someone else who wanted an identically formatted CV.
[1] I like the ability to do proper boxes all over the page for things that require box-models, like advertisments, which is what your CV actually is!
[2] In case you are interested in what the output looks like: https://www.lelanthran.com/downloads/resume-1page.pdf
Not to say a picture like that should be happy smiling or linkedin look, but yours look like you are having a bad time.
Although I'm from US where pictures aren't on resumes.
But then it's not Vim.
That was a little tongue in cheek, but seriously, I need Vim when I write/edit text. Currently have a todo.txt that's on iCloud.
Overall this system works for me for several reasons. First, I hate pretty much every note taking app out there. Second, I like having control over my files. Most importantly, though, I don't actually need to write notes all that often, and this way of doing things is convenient. When my brain is so crowded I need to overflow some thoughts or tasks for the day/week somewhere, this system is there. When I'm managing it all in my head just fine, I don't have to worry about keeping notes up to date, and I can count on my own system not to send me a push notification bugging me about it.
At some point, either your jobs novelty will wear off or your memory will just degrade.
what happened to me is the lack of novelty in day to day and long term plans created a lot of unreliable data. having done a task multiple times, recalling the latest event details became a mixed bag of questionable facts.
I still have the same capacity but now because I had such a great capacity it's redundancy causes issues.
just take note.
"His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”
“To forget it!”
“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
“But the Solar System!” I protested.
“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”
I am currently enduring a home builder who seems to think he doesn’t need to take notes. He has made so many errors and has had to do so much rework that he’s run out of time to fix legitimate problems.
His belief in his ability to retain information way exceeds his ability.
Understanding and accepting my own constraints and limitations helped me to become far better at what I do. People who don’t take notes make me very anxious. (This includes waiters).
This lets me have "durable" files (I can grep for pretty much anything and get a date-specific hit for it, similar to doing a `git log -S`), and also lets me declare "task-bankruptcy" without any worry (I can always "rewind" to any particular point in time).
The addition of `report` (aka: `diff $YESTERDAY $TODAY`) is helpful to see what I've added/removed. Yeah, there's better ways to do things, but the degenerate simplicity of `open ~/Desktop/todo.txt` is fantastic. Having the equivalent of `open ~/Desktop/$TODAY.txt` (with no ceremony) has been very valuable to me!
I tried YYYY_MM_DD.txt for a while but I found it to be too fragmented. Oftentimes I want to look at a few day's worth of notes at a glance.
Gives you quite a granular time reference but not too fine like days.
https://github.com/alabhyajindal/today
I've found that for productivity tools, there is an inverse correlation between time it takes to setup and how effective it is.
I run into the issue where I’m told to start new things all the time, then things don’t get finished, because of other new things that “need” to start. And no one ever seems to care than nothing actually gets done… but someday they might. So the list of what I need to look through keeps growing with nothing to keep it in check.