Ask HN: How do you organize your life?

Calendar, large plain text notes file, VA helping with things, travel agent

I think I organize my life to require less organization.

Organization is a tool not a goal.

What does it take to make a task self-organizing?

Can I delegate organization to habit, routine, or ritual?

In the past, I thought "I will sit at the computer and organize the N problems of my life."

Thus I had N+1 problems.

YMMV.

Good luck.

Large plain text file, with Things app to take on-the-go notes.

Email. All my notes, plans, todos, reminders (via snooze/send later) are in the email. I also use calendar to keep the family in sync. My current "life database" (i.e. inbox) is on the iCloud (like everything else, so it is good for Legacy Contact, when I pass away), though it was in google workspaces before and it can be on anything else in the future (including self-hosted server).

Perhaps my answer is a bit unconventional. I try to run my life around the idea of "challenges", and internal/external obstacles I need to "overcome" to get to the next stage. I try to put everything I am doing under a larger "overcome challenge" framework. When there is a concrete story I want to complete, something I wish to accomplish, it is just much easier to get going. Also, I encourage the people around me to identify and take challenges seriously. Humans are natural problem solvers and story addicts.

Email + Calendar on my own domain, with Google Workspace.

Edit: domain is .com (I don't trust ccTLDs) and paid for 10 years.

GitHub issues. I have a repo called `me` and I create issues in it.

It all revolves around labels, and I store just about everything there, from lists of web design inspiration to random ideas I come up with (each labelled appropriately, in those cases with "list" and "Idea" respectively). It's particularly useful for tracking todos, since I can just close the issue once I finish the todo.

text files + Tasks app on android + Notally

I like to keep it simple and purge what's no longer needed. It probably looks heavy to anyone else than me, but I find it pretty compact.

Work wise, I have started just keeping a running google doc (I guess any doc would work) and I log whatever I do. I do share it with my boss but I have found it really personally motivating and helpful as a record.

I am less worried about getting things done on schedule in my personal life. For better or worse. I block out time on my calendar sometimes or create an event on my calendar in the future. I will also sometimes schedule send an email to myself as a reminder.

Todoist (https://todoist.com) for me :). Though wish it also had Notes, or other persistent non-task based storage as one can sometimes close out an item that was meant to be informational/lookup (such as family info, or other persistent notes). That issue aside it's still my instant go-to for adding tasks, reviewing what's next, and generally seeing how far behind I am on all my goals :)).

There are some nice self-hosted open-source alternatives/copycats (https://alternativeto.net/software/todoist/), but I've been too lazy the last few years to try and the price is generally reasonable enough that I haven't been too motivated.

I basically don’t. For work I track in-flight items and a backlog of possible things to do next in a text file. Meetings are in the work outlook calendar. Other than that I just wing it. I’ve found anything else just takes time and doesn’t improve my success or happiness.

Calendar for appointments but that's about it.

I try to make my life a little more free-flowing so that it doesn't feel like work.

I live with a bit more spontaneity. Text my friends out for a spontaneous dinner, go out spontaneously with wife, make spontaneous weekend trips. Life seems more fun this way.

GTD, using a ring binder and a paper agenda.

I've being developing my own micro-cloud for the last ten years - There I've wrote my own email client, password manager, finance book, OTP, movies, music, notes, calendar, backup... and a lot of other micro apps. It works fantastic for me, and I'd recommend you to try setting up an instance of NextCloud, which can achieve similar results. My problem with org-mode, Obsidian, etc is that they are attention black holes, you focus all of your time installing plugins and configuring your workspace that by the time you're done with that you don't really feel like doing the real work. If that's your case, you might consider removing apps that hinder you ability to control your life and just use a simple, plain, gigantic markdown file and grow organically from there, with the focus being simplicity and 0 config.

I highly recommend org-roam. I also tried and did not stick with plain Org, because it becomes unwieldy trying to maintain structure as it grows large. Org-roam minimizes the friction for inserting information, which made it much easier for me to actually use it.

GTD with simple .MD files on Obsidian. Keep it simple. Make your reviews every week.

i use a combo of trello and onenote

I have three layers in my life, alongside a document silo.

On the bottom level, I use Trello with my wife. Longer term tasks are stored there, in a modified kanban-style board (multiple backlog queues, in progress, done, canceled). This is visited semi-regularly and updated. Also we plan bigger events like long travels and things involving both of us there.

On the day to day level, I use Pagico. Pagico is a personal "project management" application which can track multiple projects and store data about them. Work life and personal life has different spaces, and I can mix them together in Pagico to handle tasks in both places.

The biggest advantage of Pagico is its "Dashboard" views, which allow me to divide tasks into days and "forecast" my week, and anticipate crunches and deadlines before things become too problematic. Of course Murphy finds a way, but seeing what's coming goes a long way.

On the shortest term (minutes to hours), I use pen and paper. I always have an affinity to writing, so taking notes, writing sub tasks, etc. allows me to work with a lower mental load. This notebooks are scanned and shredded when they are full.

All important documents are stored in Evernote, shared with my wife.

This is the third or fourth iteration of my personal system, last revamped during the pandemic, in 2020. Before that I had a bullet-like journal I started before bullet-journalling craze, and overgrown it.

Please feel free to ask any further questions.

Dont't "organize" your life. Live it!

you dont't organize eating, sleeping, shtting, loving,... Did you ever forgot to eat or hug your beloved one and organize a birthday party for your wife / children / whoever?

so why do you want to "organize" the other aspects of your life?

The only things i need to push me forward in the important aspects of my life are values*.

The values are working like a compass and pushing me fully "from self" in the right directions.

If one value is punctuality then you will find a natural way to reach this value.

If the Value is your own and it is real, then you will find various ways to reach it.

So go and look out for the real important values in your life. If you need "lists" or "organisation tricks" to reach goals, then, maybe, these goals are not your own goals.

Find them and the rest will follow :)

Apple Notes, syncs between phone, tablet, computer. I have a folder hierarchy there and I use checkboxes. It's not as structured as I would like but I have shortcuts to find the most commonly used documents.

The insight that worked for me is that it isn’t about the tools. Rather, it’s about having a solid plan, or methodology, that works for you, which can be implemented using whichever tools are convenient. Many folks, including me at one point, hop from one tool to another, looking for one that “feels right” and which will magically fix and organize your life.. or make you want to do that. Ain’t no such thing. But once you figure out the methodology, the rest slides into place.

Here[1] is the methodology that works for me. It enables long and short term planning and organization in accordance with my changing priorities and values.

[1]: https://sagar.se/blog/a-task-management-model/

Microsoft To Do for short stuff, Google Keep for long-form stuff, and Google Calendar for events. That's all I need really, and they're free.

> now I am using Obsidian

Me too. Ever since starting on plain text methods that I read about a professor using on here, I have experimented with capturing a log of my todos using emacs along with other methods such as iOS Notes, Excel and email.

At the end of the day, I settled on Obsidian because I can sync the vault across my iOS devices and even create separate vaults for work to isolate notes or reminders. It has become a repo for a lot of my notes, ideas and is also designed well.

For day to day, I am able to keep reminders and tasks in the Things app (which shows my calendar, creates tasks from email and make tasks linkable)

I used to track things in Evernote, but now I have fallen in love with Obsidian and never looked back (migrated all notes there).

The UI is simple, so I focus on the content. As it is Markdown-based, I am not afraid to be locked in, and I back up everything with git.

I use the Calendar plugin, making creating daily (and weekly) notes easy. With each daily note, I write things in the style of Bullet Journal (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hLnY9L1c-M) - all things to do, but started from scratch (so I don't accumulate any TODO debt, which is a nightmare for many of us and people with ADHD in particular). I add all I did that day anyway (whether planned or not) - sometimes an "unproductive" day was full of chores and errands that I had forgotten about but were necessary.

Also, I have folders for drafts (of blog posts and long emails), practical notes (e.g. checklist for traveling), the archive (of re-usable things (e.g. my FB posts I might want to keep).

For me, large files containing everything make me feel lost and confused - all in all, you can easily search Markdown files - be it with Obsidian built-in search, Visual Studio Code, or anything else. YMMV.

I use text files. One text file per day, named `yyyy-MM-dd.yml`.

YAML! Shudder! But it's the best way I found to enter Markdown with some metadata at the top.

Each day file has multiple Yaml documents, with ids like `yyyy-MM-dd/number`. I use [ ] for todos and turn them into [x] when they are done. This way, searching/grepping for `[ ]` gives me a list of stuff not done yet. I sometimes have a list of things to do in my day. I move the `[ ]`s to the next day at the end of the current day (or start of the next).

I use Visual Studio Code snippets to enter the metadata.

Example:

    ---
    id: 2023-10-13/1
    links:
    tags:
    project:
    text: |
        This text field is **Markdown**, not **YAML**.

        - first note
            - [ ] todo 1
        - second note
      

The `links` item points to other notes by id (it's an array).

The idea of having ids with daily counters is from https://www.soenkeahrens.de/en/takesmartnotes.

[edits: formatting the yaml, mention 'how to take smart notes' book, mention that the `text` is Markdown]