Ask HN: What productivity tools do you use?
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?
What do you like about these tools and what would you like to change?
88 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadSimple and works for me.
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...
There is no worse productivity killer than change for the sake of change (looking at you Google).
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.
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?
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.
And it synchs across all my devices, so I have access to this single todo list everywhere.
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.
Also remembering to have fun and enjoy life always (surprisingly!) seems to help
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_tablet
(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)
- 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.
It’s like Motion/Reclaim.ai, except everything is on-device and I can use my CalDav server)
Also use Evernote for all my notes. Works well.
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.
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.
Blue light blocking glasses.
Another example, creating a merge request already filled out from the current branch is a few chars away.
Running a bootstrapped business with 4 million USD annual profit using it.
Along with all my personal stuff.
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.
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
It is a work in progress!
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 :)