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Ask HN: What tools do you use for good habits/performance?

30 points by devchris10 ↗ HN
Mine include a combination of calendars, email, to do lists, and OneNote. But I hate the fragmentation personally.

Any pain points?

I also believe that our brains should primarily be used for thinking, and not storage. What would an ideal productivity or personal management app look like?

Esp features that promote task completion and continuous improvement.

37 comments

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enz
Mostly Trello, with a kanban-style To-do list. I feel good when I slide a card from "Doing" to the "Done" column.
devchris10
I have used Trello for a brief amount of time for a team project. Any pain point with task organization around time or calendar integration?
enz
Sorry, but I can't really tell. I work alone most of the time, so I never used Trello in a team context.
tjr
I like using Things on iOS / MacOS. I wish it had a web interface also.
muzani
Sublime + PlainTasks for to do.

Sublime for quick notes and drafts.

Workflowy for nested notes. Not as a todo list. It's a good way to nest notes in notes. For example, I made a list of tropes, categorized them by heroic vs villainous, male or female, personality, description, and so on. And added lots of notes and tags for each. This is a mess if you try to do it in Evernote, but perfect for Workflowy.

Google Assistant is awesome for a variety of tasks, mainly related to reminders and timers. Have to leave the house fourty minutes? "Okay Google, set a timer for forty minutes" No calculations needed.

I would like to see a complex note taking tool that just works. Evernote is a bloated mess. Notion is sluggish. One Note seems to require too much thought. I've been making do with small note takers but I still need something heavy duty.

devchris10
What are some "heavy duty" things that are missing in today's tools?
mephos
At least for me, something important that could be considered "heavy duty" is the ability to read and write notes from both my phone and computer.
muzani
Image, maybe some tables. I've plopped a spreadsheet into Evernote once but a mini calculator will do.

I do use Evernote's business card scanner a lot but I'd rather just pay for a specialized business card scanner app.

Evernote does all this but it lags too much when trying to read from my phone.

devchris10
Have you ever needed image support? That was my main pain point against text editors and Git.
muzani
Only about 3% of the time. Rarely enough that for the most part I'd rather use a tool optimized for typing.
norrisiv
Love this. I always find myself falling into Sublime Text to take notes. I'd add that I also use the default Reminders app in iOS 13, before that I used OmniFocus but they seem to have copied the relevant features I use.
sachdevap
Any org-mode fans out there? I would like to hear how to make habits around org-mode and capturing the information necessary. I want to treat my notes as a brain assistant to free my mind of having to think of future events and tasks.

Particularly, the habits of capturing tasks when off desktop.

stakent
> ...the habits of capturing tasks when off desktop.

* email to myself from my phone

* pen and small paper notebook

I put captured info in appropriate org files when I'm at the desktop.

sachdevap
Hmm. I should do the pen and small paper notebook thing. I had tried to make it a habit once, but maybe I just need to try with a few sheets of paper in my wallet.

Notes on the phone - maybe I need to reduce the number of clicks to be able to capture them faster (Google Keep widget maybe?)

stakent
I've tried using few pieces of paper tied by strong paperclip.

Doesn't work for me - I've lost some notes that way. For me notebook as temporary information storage is better.

sachdevap
Good to know! I'll stick to a tiny diary. Will make a habit out of it. :)
devchris10
What do you think of supporting email/sms to enter items into a master queue?
jpl56
I add a entry in my Google calendar from either my phone or my home PC. Next day at work, I will see it on my phone.
devchris10
how do you manage items you don't get to? and how useful to you would data of task completion by type, time, etc be?
jpl56
The calendar entry is just a reminder, not an appointment. By the way, I also use 'Keep' than allow sharing notes between PC and phone.
nniroclax
I've been wanting to journal more consistently, so I set up an automator task to open up my journal app at the same time everyday (typically sometime during my daily, so I come back to my computer and it's there just waiting for me).
billconan
I use gitlab's project management tool
SN76477
Sloppily I leave it all in trello mon,tues,etc...

Each day had a check list for production.

Each Monday I reset it all.

I don’t love it but it works.

bakuninsbart
Currently doing exactly that, too, but not very happy with it. - As I'm currently trying to get more into web development and looking for a sideproject I thought doing a "Trello clone" focused on this particular approach could be fun. Any non-obvious, specific features you would like to have?
SN76477
I would like to see a calendar organized as cards.

I don’t know what that means exactly.

aguzzi94
I think about the terrible and miserable future awaiting for me if I don't do what I know I have to be doing.
eb0la
Pen (fountain pen) and paper.

I schedule 30 minutes at the end of the week to write down what has happeded, what went well or better than expected, what to improve, and what to do next.

These are the most productive 30 minutes of the week, btw.

SchabrechtsK
I use Spark to have all my mails in 1 place. I could do it with Apple Mail as well but for some reason I like Spark more. It also contains a build in calendar. And thanks to it's syncing feature whenever I'm on a new device I just need to log in with 1 email and everything is synced.

As for my todo's I use Things. I tried to make as much use of Area's and Projects as I can to split up my todo list in a logical sense.

For notes I use the Bear Notes app. Thanks to it's # tag style structure I can easily flesh out my own dir structure on it.

Last but not least: paper + pen. Nothing beats that when I'm working on a feature and I need to keep track of todo's that still need done. All of these todo's are done by the end of the feature off course. Nothing long term on paper.

md8
Visual Code & Tasks+ plugin for the same.
TheSmoke
i use workflowy. [0] it is an incredible tool that lets you build a tree of things to do or note. it's been helping me keep my mind clear as to what to do next.

i have my phone and mac calendars synced so i don't have any schedule conflicts and keep track of events easily.

[0] https://workflowy.com