The 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.

This is what I use with Logseq. A new nie created every day and the added before of tags to gather the various points together.

I built dly (https://github.com/wsw70/dly) to make one line notes taking faster.

I do this except with only one text file, with a separator for M/D/Y so I can always have the date

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.

The simplicity of this is remarkable.

Dropbox-like tools can also ensure it gets backed up to the cloud.

I basically do this too but also do it in markdown and use Obsidian to link to others, etc.

Still hit the cli though and grep/ripgrep all the time, it’s just so fast.

Vimwiki essentially does this for you with the diary feature, and it also allows some nice wiki markup, including todo items you can mark as completed.

A notebook and pen seems to do the trick. In the beginning of the day, write an entry of what I'll aim to accomplish and when. At the end of the day, judge myself on my productivity and write a plan for the next day. That alone has been a force multiplier of productivity for me

Also remembering to have fun and enjoy life always (surprisingly!) seems to help

For a while I hipstered out with a wax tablet*, but these days I'm back to a succession of boring A8 notebooks.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_tablet

sca?

no, just a bit of an information technology nerd with a Walden complex.

(They're dead easy to DIY build, feature instant boot and infinite battery lifetime, and therefore work really nicely for ephemeral data. An anachronistic solution for non-ephemeral is to preserve data via phone snapshot ... I maintain scribing and erasing are both far easier via wax than via app, but I have thumbs from the last century; YMMV)

Context: 3x startup founder/CEO, focusing more on impact than constant work

- 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.

Mostly distraction minimizers: [1],[2].

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 use Todoist for my own things, and Trello for collaborative things.

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.

I love the Quick add, but if I don't review soon enough, I will lose the context and can't understand 50% of the entries. Do you take the time to write the task/note properly or try to review soon enough?

I usually add enough detail to know what I meant, but I also regularly triage my "inbox" list at the end of each day to sort things into urgent/important quadrants, and organize into my projects/tags.

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.

Another +1 for Todoist.

I use https://everyday.app as a habit tracker :P

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

Is there any plan for an API or an option to export your data?

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.

You can already export your data!

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 :)

Just installed this app on mine and my partners phone. We've been trying various apps but your app's UX is amazing. Thanks a lot for sharing!

I hope it helps a lot! :)

It is a work in progress!

For keeping track of time-sensitive stuff, just my Apple iCal synced to Google Calendar so it's on all my devices.

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).

As 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")

> I follow GTD's philosophy pretty closely… and some of the concepts are dated at this point

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.

I’ll volunteer Taskwarrior (https://taskwarrior.org), since I don’t see it from anyone else just yet. It’s a CLI oriented task management system which (once you learn it) can be very quick and easy to use. It’s not perfect but they’ve done a better job that I would have for sure, and have really thought about reducing friction.

I love taskwarrior so much some years back I got a pr in for the user defined fields. It’s a great project!

I've been using the same OneNote notebook for like 20 years. It syncs across all my devices, so I'm constantly using it to look things up, add things to lists, write down random ideas, track projects, etc.. Once in awhile I just go through and re-organize, prune and sort things. I'm sure soon enough AI will be helping me out with that. 20 years of notes is a lot to manage.

The most important productivity tool that I use is Alfred[0] for MacOS. Nothing ever came close to increase my productivity as Alfred did. The two features that are essential for me are the clip board manager and the so called "workflows" which is basically a script launcher. The user experience is an absolute joy, it is deeply customizable and you can do pretty much anything you want. Just to name a few:

* encode / decode strings from any encoding to any encoding

* access Jira tickets by only entering ticket numbers

* instant access to all my dot files

* HTTP status codes explanations simply by entering the status code

* list and kill any process

* Docker management

* port killer: enter port and kill the service that uses it

* timestamp converter - from any format to any format

* UUID generator

* super fast access to 100s of weblinks (repos, miros, wikis, documentations, etc.)

It has a free base version but if you want to use the good stuff you have to buy a license for £59. I cannot recommend it strong enough, I even gifted licenses to colleagues, friends and family. [0] https://www.alfredapp.com/

I have a custom CLI specifically for my daily workflow. It takes care of a lot of tedious procedures like creating branch near and PRs with the appropriate title formats, transitioning Jira ticket statuses, spinning up and down servers, Git shortcuts, requesting reviewers, opening all changed files on a branch, showing the status of all my Jira tickets, etc. That way I can do I can do things the right way at my company without having to think much other than by remembering a simple command I wrote.

Similar but I mostly use shell aliases (cross project) and Makefiles (mostly proj specific) for these kind of things.

Another example, creating a merge request already filled out from the current branch is a few chars away.

I block the orange site on the company firewall.

Sorry. Newbie here. Which one is the orange site? Is it hacker news?

This one.

You still have access to it, of course.

Workflowy.com has been a tool I’ve religiously used for the past 7 years. (I’m a startup founder/CEO)

It’s a simple bullet-points-only app/site to track things.

I follow a toned down structure of Getting Things Done by David Allen. Categories: Inbox, Today, This Week and then a few other longer term buckets.

Lastly, I use Apple Notes (between phone and mac) to note thoughts and longer form writing.

Trying to keep it simple, else the overhead gets too much and the tool starts gathering dust.

I switched IDE's from JetBrains to MS VSCode with some additional tools: -ZettelKasten Note taking(ROAM) via FOAM plugin, yes similar to Bear< Notational etc. -Fork Git client -Krita instead of Gimp or Photoshop -Kanban board as part of my VSCode note taking space via the kanbn vscode plugin

I always run my desktop with one VSCode instance open to my private note taking workspace.

1/ Task planning: https://sunsama.com

Sunsama helps me proactively plan my "big rocks" for the week/day. I like that you can drag tasks to the calendar and timeblock them that way. it also tracks the time on each task which helps me calibrate how long things actually take.

2/ Inbox for Slack https://dispatch.do

I spend a TON of time in Slack. I used to feel distracted by unimportant messages and constantly worried about losing track of important messages. Dispatch helps with both issues:

i. Filtering out distraction: it's much easier to separate out the important messages from everything else. I can set rules and filters to route messages into different "Inboxes". e.g. Important, Clients, Product, Other, etc.

ii. Keeping track of messages: it treats messages much like an email inbox. Messages stay "open" until I explicitly mark them "done".

-Clickup for Agile and Project Management (separate folders for myself and my team). - Google Calendar and separate family, personal and work obligations, helps myself (and others) respect my time. I prepare the week's schedule Sunday night and review the next day's every night to prepare myself for what I have tomorrow.

Simple and works for me.

I use https://foambubble.github.io/foam/

It has all I want for a note-taking app, since it's my editor all of my shortcuts and snippets work, the notes are simple markdown that I can back up easily using git.

To start a daily note, I can write /today and it will set the correct date.

In combination with the Excalidraw extension I can create new digrams, simply by ending the files with .excalidraw.png and quickly embed them on any markdown with preview, while being editable. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=pomdtr.e...

Linking notes and having a connection graph, like obsidian it's incredibly useful, making me go back more often to old note to remember or refine them.

Amazing 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?

Yes it's a problem. There's something wrong with the way they've packaged it with Electron I think. If you use the web version in a browser it's much faster.

You can also turn their web page into an app with a few different Mac apps. I've used Fluid to do this but there's also Coherence and Unite.

I will give it a try - thanks!

I'll put down the obligatory org-mode as my primary productivity tool. Its a steep learning curve and might take a few attempts but its finally stuck for me. Not sure I could really recommend considering the investment but if nothing else fits your brain you might be able to build something with org-mode.

Time 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.

[0] https://planist.app

Notion - great for creating a personal wiki, use this to plan out my day

Mac-centric

Omnifocus - like Things you want a TO DO app to store everything you need to get done sone you can stop worrying you will forget stuff. Although I use Omnifocus a LOT (everything feeds into it) I use Notion to plan my day (with links back to Omni)

Devonthink - store all your papers and find them easily.

Alfred - keyboard shortcuts, custom workflows, clipboard history...

Amazon Echo Clock - the best way I've found to set pomodoro timers (so I can see them, but they don't distract me)

Tools aside though, it's important to create habits. Omnifocus can be tricky to setup in a way that works for you. It takes time to be able to use tools effectively, so only by constantly using them and tweaking processes will you get a great result.

I 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

---

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

I switch tools all the time but the biggest thing is reviewing whatever tool it is you use at a minimum weekly. Without daily/weekly/monthly reviews any system is useless.

Also work out if your a folder or a search person. Daily notes work well for someone happy to use a search bar but if you immediately want to go to a folder or file called python-code-examples then your a folder person! Save yourself some headaches setting things up by working that part out early!

(Tools I'm using obsidian, todoist and google calendarb right now but when I need to work things out or have a busy week out comes pen and paper!)

I use https://conjure.so as a habit, time and goal tracker. I built it for my own needs and to explore some ideas (habit rules engine, completion types, measurements).

I’ve been using https://akiflow.com/ for tasks for several months now (I switched from Omnifocus) and I love it.

I also use https://one-sec.app/ on my phone to add friction to opening apps I want to limit time on and try reduce distractions.

Custom timeboxing app I built for myself. I just create the tasks, set deadlines and let it automate my schedule.

It’s like Motion/Reclaim.ai, except everything is on-device and I can use my CalDav server)

I rely mostly on Obsidian with daily notes (Periodic Notes plugin), tasks and kanban boards (Kanban plugin). I also use it to track progress on my projects, record meeting notes and periodic reviews (weekly, monthly, quarterly & yearly).

I've documented my process, plugins, etc and packaged it for others to quickly get started: https://developassion.gumroad.com/l/obsidian-starter-kit

I'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.

Vim.

It replaced an astonishing number of individual apps. Apart from using it as an IDE, I also have a wiki-style vault where I add ideas, useful commands, to do lists, recipes, lecture notes, etc. I integrate the text files in various bash scripts, e.g for generating notifications related to my to do list. And staying in the terminal dramatically reduces exposure to distractions and dopamine spikes. It also encourages a hands-on attitude, rather than passive consumption.

I’ve never quite found anything that stuck but I’m having a good run with Emacs and Org.

I’ve bound an AppleScript to f3 that copies a link to the currently selected email in mail.app. Being able to link to mail.app from org is pretty cool. The links still work even if the message gets archived or moved to a different mailbox.

This has allowed me to keep track of everything in org.

However if I’m really busy I just use a sheet of paper and a pen and make a plan for what I want to complete that day.

https://histre.com/ (disclaimer: founder) as my knowledge store, especially for web research. I take notes and make highlights with it.

Besides that, I use Emacs org-mode pretty heavily.

I use https://crushentropy.com/ (also mine) to plan my day at high resolution.

I use GoodNotes on iPad to write down thoughts when I get my coffee.

CrushEntropy is awesome, really nice work on it! I came across it a year or so ago, have used it a bunch of times!

I'm very happy to hear that! Thanks!

For business, I use the Personal Kanban Task Organizer. It has an Outlook integration, so the tasks planned for today show up in my Outlook calendar.

I implemented it as a desktop software, it's available for Linux and Windows, it keeps your personal data on your local computer, no cloud communication, FLOSS.

https://gitlab.com/moasda/task-organizer

Red 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.

Exactly why I clicked on it. Hopefully has more responses than mine did!

For work, I use my inbox as a To-Do list. Threads don’t leave the inbox until they’re “done”, then they are archived.

For personal stuff, I use a combination of XMind (big picture, project structure, etc.) Markdown file (working notes, they get posted on https://taoofmac.com/space/notes weekly) and iOS Reminders (chores).

Emacs plus a few org-mode files (personal, work, ledger) that work as my agenda, and extensive journal files that I update constantly throughout the day to provide context.

What I like the most about them is the fact that I can actually change them to suit my needs: I can poke around the source code, extend or overwrite its functions, add my own export backends and just make it do anything I can put into code.

I like to keep it simple. Apple Notes and Notion. Too easy to get hung up on tooling, rather than working on things that matter.

One thing that works for me is to have a consistent early to bed, early to rise routine 365 days irrespective of what the day looks like. It gives me ample of time to carry out chores, teach my kids, spend productive time at office, and also do personal growth activities such as reading books, walk, gardening, entertainment, etc.

Things 3. I have one combined inbox into which all my tasks and obligations go. And when I get the time, these are organised into projects and things that are recurring get setup as recurring tasks.

And it synchs across all my devices, so I have access to this single todo list everywhere.

Not a tool but the biggest thing for me has been silencing notifications unless I'm on call.

I might be a bit slower to respond and miss the occasional question I could have input on or an outage I could solve, but my ability to concentrate is so much better.

org-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.

I use Todoist for tasks, mostly because its cross platform. Works on my android phone, macbook, windows and the web. It works well for small reminders and todos, not necessarily for planning a complex project.

Also use Evernote for all my notes. Works well.

Do you take the time to write proper entries, or review them a few hours later to check if what you dumped there still makes sense?

I write like a few words, thats usually enough. The tasks are usually very simple though.

For more complex tasks or long running projects e.g at work, i usually have stuff written down in Evernote. Then i won't write much in Todoist except maybe to just schedule a block of time.

various gpt integrations.

phind.com for up to date code searches with an ai answer.

Codeium for gpt with context on my code, etc...

Genie sometimes as an alternative to codeium, it isn't free though. so I limit it, gpt4 eats through credits fast. it's best for quick answers when there's a linting or type issue in typescript.

notion for organizing thoughts, and I'm building a knowledge base search system, that will integrate with ides, browsers, and common code libraries and people can create agents trained on a specific area like rails, Django, laravel, nextjs, etc. Planning on having a whole marketplace, but slow going as a solo dev, hoping to find partners someday soon.

http://upbase.io/ It's a project management tool for individuals and small teams. (Disclosure: I'm the founder)

Microsoft Outlook. Only because it has not changed in 25 years (Outlook 97 looks eerily similar to Outlook 365).

There is no worse productivity killer than change for the sake of change (looking at you Google).

A bit late to the game, but this tool allows me to script anything locally: https://www.scriptkit.com/

Pen and paper, with a digital calendar on my personal email. Individual projects have TODO.txt files that are version controlled.

Workflowy for almost a decade now.

Running a bootstrapped business with 4 million USD annual profit using it.

Along with all my personal stuff.

I use Logseq to take notes, todos, journal learnings, etc. It's amazing and open source!

Logseq, Notion for cooperative documents and task assignment, google calendar

Block of paper and the first pen I can get my hands onto.

Blue light blocking glasses.

emacs / org-mode

I like the endless features it has, that I can extend its features and it is not a product that will be phased out an some point.

On change requests: a more modern lisp dialect would be great

LeechBlock to block Hacker News and YouTube during work hours.

This is a really impressive collection of notes.

emacs, mostly.