My productivity system

There are three insights that David Allen had with GTD that I appreciate:<p>- one inbox to absorb tasks you distribute later<p>- lists go into working contexts so you do them while in that context<p>- short term and long term are different<p>The issue I have is that we also have different “recording” contexts. These days I can use an app on my phone, a note in my computer or a notepad in a meeting. I have multiple inboxes that have to be routed.<p>In addition I think the relationship between project and tasks needs to be fleshed out.<p>However I think those 3 insights persist across all good productivity systems.

Was really thrown by all the references to &quot;GTD&quot;. It seems like a heavily commercialized productivity workflow?<p>My entire productivity system revolves around Vikunja[1]. It&#x27;s essentially just a todo list application, but it&#x27;s super flexible (e.g. view as list, kanban, gantt, etc), supports having many lists (I keep one per different idea&#x2F;topic), and so many other features. You can also self-host it for free, which has been a completely painless process for me personally, and gives you the standard peace of mind from being in control of your personal data.<p>Highly suggest checking it out!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vikunja.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vikunja.io&#x2F;</a>

I dabbled with GTD in the late 00s&#x2F;early 10s. This coincided with growing the team at my startup and generally needing to keep more balls in the air from a management perspective. I even used OmniFocus for a while. But as I moved into larger companies where efficient collaboration is the limiting function, I realized that my personal productivity system is not where the value is.<p>Essentially as a leader in a larger engineering org, the productivity systems that generate more value are the ones that are shared. Even though I can&#x27;t control them directly I can create more value by A) getting onboard with the way that collaborating teams want to work and B) influencing people and nudging these systems in the direction that makes sense based on my expertise. This often feels like herding cats, but it&#x27;s a core job of a manager. In addition, all software workers, whether manager or IC, need space for deep freeform thinking. It&#x27;s imperative that whatever systems we use not come in the way of this.<p>With this in mind, my personal system has to be lightweight and flexible so that it minimizes overhead and doesn&#x27;t impose any constraints on how I am working with others. To that end, I&#x27;ve largely reduced to using Workflowy for all tasks &#x2F; notes &#x2F; plans. I do this in a reverse chronological style w&#x2F; regular chunked archiving. I also star every &quot;important&quot; email thread and bookmark every relevant doc or page that comes across my desk. In this manner I can go back and search history comprehensively as needed, but my working space for any given project or domain is always small and generally fits above the fold in the Workflowy context. There are a few little tactical hacks I use (eg. #action hashtag for todos), but those are ephemeral and I will discard or change them whenever it suits me. The key thing overall is that the system requires less than an hour a week of maintenance and is a single source of truth for my personal focus.

My productivity &quot;hack&quot; for 2022 was discovering Sunsama[0] a few weeks ago.<p>I was usually using a single text file from which I was removing done items. The problem was that I then didn&#x27;t remember all those small things I did that added up to big amounts of time. The feeling of time running away without remembering how is <i>really</i> demotivating.<p>With this, I can see on a calendar view when I did what, it&#x27;s very low ceremony, and I can easily plan for the week ahead. It also integrates with a ton of other tools.<p>I switched off all the included rituals to start with, so no opinion about these.<p>It&#x27;s a bit on the expensive side at 20$&#x2F;mo, but if it saves me just a little time every month, it&#x27;s already paid for itself, so yeah.<p>Overall, very recommended, happy user. And I&#x27;m definitely <i>not</i> one of those &quot;maximize my daily productivity and optimize every waking hour around it&quot; folks. I&#x27;ve also tried many other todo list &#x2F; task board tools, but they don&#x27;t really fit the &quot;daily planner&quot; bill.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sunsama.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sunsama.com&#x2F;</a>

I’m always fascinated by people obsessed by productivity and its range of tools.<p>I consider myself pretty highly productive. Typical week had 8+ meetings, calls, follow ups, research, thinking time and sometimes coding. Typical CTO and CPO stuff. I tend to get 90% of important things done. If not more.<p>I’m fairly busy, but just use my inbox with search, Apple notes and Apple reminders. Works fine for me.<p>Am I just missing out on something?

The only productivity hack is to not be terminally online.<p>Every year there are new apps&#x2F;tools&#x2F;&quot;systems&quot;. There is an entire industry catered to making you &quot;productive&quot;

I used to use Trello for my entire personal KB, but the description editor grows unwieldy with large cards and you only get a few levels of nesting. It&#x27;s still great software.<p>It took a few times to stick, but I&#x27;ve now fallen in love with Obsidian and am migrating everything except a large project&#x27;s task-tracking system to it. The WYSIWYG editor, fully nested hierarchy and fast full-text search is fantastic and makes it better for my personal documentation.<p>I&#x27;m extending my Trello backup project to make the migration easier. Take a look if you&#x27;re considering the same move. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;GSGBen&#x2F;t2md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;GSGBen&#x2F;t2md</a>

I adore Trello.<p>It&#x27;s the only productivity&#x2F;todo list type app that I have ever stuck too.<p>I think it&#x27;s mostly because of the flexibility it overs. I put everything into it.<p>I have a whole board called &#x27;Spark File&#x27; which is just lists of stuff, so whenever I need an idea for something it&#x27;s there. Want to watch a movie? I&#x27;ve made a note of every trailer I saw that looked intreasting, every movie i&#x27;ve had recommended etc, I can find something on there to watch,<p>Want to get someone a gift? I&#x27;ve noted down anything they have said or I have seen that is relevant, so i&#x27;ve got a list of stuff to consider to go.<p>Black Friday? I&#x27;ve already got a list of things I am looking to get sometime, so i can simply check if anything is on offer, etc etc.<p>My main todo list has Inbox, todo, Doing, done. I capture everything to the &#x27;inbox&#x27; and then when i sought through it, it either becomes an entry in the relevant list in the &#x27;spark file&#x27; or I figure out an action i can take on the idea and it becomes a todo.

My working memory file is just a giant txt file that is synced using git to github. It&#x27;s free and fast (because a text file editor like Sublime is fast and can handle a very large text file). You can also use it offline. The conflict is handled by git, which is familiar to a programmer.<p>It also feels more permanent. I used to use other note taking apps where the notes were thrown away after migrating to a new app because it wasn&#x27;t that convenient to transfer between apps. Plain text can&#x27;t go wrong in this matter.<p>I used Dropbox Paper and Google Docs before. Once you reach certain size, it is very very slow.<p>The caveat with the text file is the lack of fuzzy searching capability... but it&#x27;s tolerable so far.<p>PS. I&#x27;ve built my own git sync: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tanin47&#x2F;git-notes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tanin47&#x2F;git-notes</a> -- it is written in Go.

Text files and a paper notebook (squared).<p>Text files are organised in yearly folders with a file per month. Each file is basically an ini setup, each day a section with either free text or boxed tasks: [ ] or [×]. If I need associated files, dated folders.<p>Paper notebook is pretty much a bullet journal without the flowery nonsense you see on Pinterest.

As far as productivity goes, I use a text document to track when I begin a new task and I don’t “start” the next task until I finish the previous one. Doing this has made me really conscious of finishing something before I start something else. As far as studying goes, I use SuperMemo to keep track of useful bits of knowledge and my Notes app on my iPhone to keep track of what goes into SuperMemo. I use Things 3 on my iPhone to keep track of recurring To Dos and I work every day to get that list to zero. I have made sure that my Things 3 to do list gets to zero by the end of the day, and I’ve been doing that for the last 554 days.

On macOS, Tot [0] is a great app that replaces the &quot;working memory dot txt&quot; format that Cal Newport likes. The upshot with Tot is that you get a fixed number of pages, and they&#x27;re synchronized via iCloud. So, you can add to your &quot;working memory text file&quot; from anywhere you have an iOS or macOS device, and it&#x27;s simple enough that it can&#x27;t grow into a more complex system.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tot.rocks&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tot.rocks&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;ve used paper notebooks as working memories for almost 10 years, until I learned about Evernote, which I had adopted ever since. I quickly became addicted to it. I was storing absolutely everything in it. It was around 1000 or 1300 notes when I began to lose track of things, meaning, information and documents. Search stopped being effective to me and I ended of with too many tags. I decided to adopt the model which uses only 2 notebooks: .Inbox and Archive. Everything else is organized via tagging. Today I have around 3500 notes which are mostly a personal archive. I simply gave up trying to be productive finding things in that ocean of information. So I&#x27;m using Google Keep for basic note taking and txt files with long descriptive names in project folders when I need to keep specific notes isolated from all the rest. Nautilus search works fine in finding those files as I type parts of their names.

My productivity system: I turn off the internet

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;checkyourlist.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;checkyourlist.app&#x2F;</a><p>For me this little app is so useful and flexible that it has definitely improved my productivity. It’s not GTD and I use it both for it’s original purpose but also to capture and manage tasks I need to do. Wanted to throw this out there for anyone looking for something super simple but also genius.

I like using Notion + PARA[1].<p>I have a journal where I write notes with daily todos or make notes about systems&#x2F;code, etc. It&#x27;s okay for everyday stuff.<p>Then I have a separate PARA for larger ongoing stuff.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fortelabs.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;para&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fortelabs.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;para&#x2F;</a>

The system I’ve been polishing[0] along the years is similar to the one from this article. I believe that there is an ultimate solution from where is hard to deviate.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;slowernews&#x2F;hamster-system" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;slowernews&#x2F;hamster-system</a>

The name “working memory” is neat. I have been trying to settle on a specific working memory, right now i am on Craft. The woking memory things can change from time to time, I just make sure everything can eventually go to an online note, a Markdown based online “notebook”.

I used Dropbox Paper heavily but ended up migrating all of my documents to Notion.

&gt; Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing else to take away.<p>&gt; Antoine St. Exupery (author of the little prince)<p>&quot;(author of the little prince)&quot; could have been taken away.

I have been using GitHub’s new project for my personal and family use and I enjoyed it so much. The filtering is very good and flexible. I used Things but it seems I prefer Kanban style.

It&#x27;s refreshing to see a productivity system that isn&#x27;t 12 different note taking&#x2F;organisational apps + Notion all strung together with Zapier.

I generally break down goals into tiny actions and try to combine tiny actions to goals to see if there is any confusion.<p>Tasks -&gt; Projects -&gt; Streams -&gt; Goals<p>I think in this format.

I&#x27;ve been using whatboard.app to manage my tasks. I pin ongoing tasks, unpin to-do&#x27;s, archive things I may have to tackle or recall later.

You can do all of this in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;noteplan.co&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;noteplan.co&#x2F;</a>

To be more productive. Be more selective.

I posted my own tracking&#x2F;productivity system, a few days ago[0].<p>TL;DR, I use a PostIt pad.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32799964" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32799964</a>

my productivity system: not having a productivity system

Ah, Cal Newport. Another BS self-help sales person.