> Every night before I go to bed, I take all the items on my calendar for the next day and append it to the end of the text file as a daily todo list, so I know exactly what I'm doing when I wake up. T
This is a key win. Most of the rest he describes is support (also cruicial). But setting up your day the night before is amazingly powerful. Many of the things I plan for the day I actually schedule into my calendar (12:30-13:00 read and respond to those three unanswered messages from Jane).
This is the challenge of the modern manager, especially in remote jobs. You turn on the computer with a plan, and then 345 Slack messages and 10 Zoom meetings later, you consider working on it. As an EM, I really miss that state of flow and productivity.
I’m whinging because I see other managers that have nailed this so much better than me and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.
I look at my mail when I get up and normally at three other fixed times.
Sometimes there's something complicated going on via mail and I have to be more responsive. Today I'm trying to debug something with a prospective partner who is in Japan (normally in NYC) so I check for messages from them between tasks. But otherwise it's systolic.
I also run a lot of automation over my mail most of which causes me not to see as much.
For slack, we have a culture that it's either transient (doesn't matter what someone wrote yesterday) or, depending on channel, archival ("here's the documents from partner P") which means you search for it but don't otherwise follow in real time. We're relatively hardcore about channels so that you can ignore ones that aren't germane to you. So I skim them in the same times I check mail.
Zoom meetings...I have the luxury of mostly only attending meetings with agenda and objectives published ahead of time. We try to do as much as possible asynchronously though we have one outside partner who doesn't do any homework and tries to use meetings to get work done rather than just use them for things that can't be handled asynchronously.
And also: certain topics are only handled on certain days, e.g. patent (bletch) related stuff I only work on tuesdays and fridays. Otherwise it will just sit in my inbox or wherever.
Heavily guard your morning time, and don't even open your email/chat programs until closer to lunch. At least for me (maybe it's the caffeine rush), but that morning block is the most valuable/productive time of my day and going down a rabbit hole early can kill the rest of my day's accomplishments.
In my previous role, I worked with a primarily West Coast team (being East Cost, myself), and it was wonderful having that first 3 hours of uninterrupted time to do deep work before the 'other' stuff crept in. The downside, of course, was then needing to be on-point in meetings where everyone else was caffeinated/ready-to-go and my brain was losing steam.
I used to work like this with email, to the point that I’d intentionally not sync emails for a few hours. But in my company, everything is done through “SlackOps”. Incidents (including alerts) line management duties, deployments, getting access to environments. Plus lots of information I need is in Slack.
Maybe some combo of Zapier, extracting into local text, and strict observance of non-slack time and I could make it work.
I used Slack at that prior role, and I know I had a bunch of notifications rules and schedules to mute channels that didn't require immediate action. As often written about, Slack can be a productivity killer with the constant chatter on various channels. I also aggressively pruned my channel memberships to ensure I actually needed to see all the chatter contained in them.
I'm doing something similar with Obsidian daily notes[^1]. I also have a weekly note that I use to plan the next week.
Similar to how the author talks about scheduling their next day the evening before, I've started planning the big tasks for next on Friday afternoon, as this gives me momentum on Monday morning.
Related: I've found the 3/3/3 technique from Oliver Burkeman[^2] and the concept of open and closed lists to be a great complement for this type of organization. It hits the sweet-spot of flexibility and consistency for me.
Happy Obsidian user here. I love that the "vault" concept it uses is literally just a folder of markdown files, meaning I'm still in full control of my data. I don't use their proprietary sync service, I just drop it into a regular folder and let syncthing take care of cloning it to every device I own and a few extras for backup.
Obsidian itself has got to be the nicest markdown editor I have ever used, hands down. It gets so many of the little details absolutely right, down to tiny things like a quick shortcut to turn a list item into a checkbox (Ctrl+L) and then into a checked box (Ctrl+L again), without needing to even think about the underlying syntax. But you totally can, if you need that control. It's great.
Vaults are great. I compartmentalize all notes surrounding each consulting job as a self-contained folder/vault - that way I only have to search relevant information but still have access to it at a later time if I want to open that vault again.
Curious, I have starting using Obsidian recently and one of the things that I love about it is that it's lightning fast on my systems, including startup time. Much snappier than other note-taking programs I've used, and than 95% of the programs altogether (only the likes of Notepad are faster).
Maybe it's because I don't have many notes yet and it becomes a behemoth if the vault gets too big?
I currently have 147 community plugins installed. Is your shitload bigger than my shitload? :-)
I don't have all of them enabled though. Only about 2/3. :-)
It's not only the number of enabled plugins that matters. Some graphical plugins eat almost no resources. But then there are other plugins that are constantly rescanning files and O is not necessarily "n", but worse than that.
You can start with setting up the following plugins to their full potential and see how it goes. :-)
Breadcrumbs
Dataview
Dynamic Table of Contents
Filename Heading Sync
Juggl
Link Favicons
Linter
Omnisearch
Spaced Repetition
Supercharged links
May I suggest giving Trilium notes a try? It's like opensource obsidian plus typed notes plus self hostable sync plus a web frontend for places where you can't install it.
I plan exclusively on paper despite using Obsidian quite extensively for taking notes. I also do weekly and daily planning.
Initially I tried to plan on Obsidian as well but it didn't work for me. Writing on paper is slow and not only it calms me down but also directly incentivizes me to state my tasks and goals concisely. Similarly, the limited space on a planning page helps me to be realistic in terms of things I set to accomplish.
You can go through a text to be published 5 times on a computer, print it out and for any text of decent length, I guarantee you will find a ton of stuff you missed. I have never tried using an e-ink device for that to see if it has the same effect, but I would be curious of the feedback on that if anybody here has done so.
OP uses their calendar as a supplement for their the todo file. There is a lot of functionality implied in that decision:
- calendars have mobile apps which enable quick and precise entry
- calendars understand time spans
- calendars have many options to display events
- calendars have cloud syncing
- calendars are backed by a queryable data store
Not saying using a text file is good or bad, but I think a more accurate title would be “my productivity app is a never ending txt file and a calendar app”
Indeed. The calendar app really is doing the heavy lifting in their case, not the txt file.
I can kind of understand the author not really registering just how much the calendar app does for their organization, since calendar apps are so ubiquitous.
I love using my calendar as a data store. The "notes" section of the calendar is often full of info. E.g. for travel it includes my itinerary, confirmation codes, links to my boarding pass, etc. One stop shopping for an event.
However it's limiting for detailed lists of things to do (e.g. great for travel, lousy for packing list), and it's terrible for time-independent data: notes from talking to my heating contractor, screenshots of setting for my media player, etc.
I actually sent this to my friend as he always thought I'm crazy for doing this. Mine one is a bit simpler though, just a big .txt file with TODO and DONE sections. Some of TODOs just have dates next to them if they're urgent, otherwise it's just it's just a simple list.
That being said, I do use my calendar-equivalent app on my phone for very time-sensitive stuff, just in case.
Interesting. I've been using Things (similar to Apple Reminders) for 10+ years, which I thought was really minimal, but a .txt is about as barebones as you can get. Makes me want to give it a whirl. Curious about the use of Remote Desktop with a mobile device. Being an iPhone user, I'd prefer putting it in iCloud Drive or something more easily accessible natively.
This really is the way. Just one long append-only dump of all pertinent information. It’s the perfect complement to what’s in my head because I know where everything is!
I use a format[1] that's _slightly_ more structured, in that files are divided into explicit entries with headers to indicate whatever metadata I want, and I also use this same format for storing other information (metadata about my music[2], workshop projects, orders, whatever).
This is how I run all my one-on-ones, just an append only list where every meeting just gets appended on top of another with a date. If there are kaban tasks/external documents/etc that are relevant they still get linked into this page. It very amazing to see what we're working on now, a week ago, a month ago, etc. And as a collaborative free-form document it gives both the manager and their report the ability to craft a story of what's happening (and check in on progress in a way that dashboards fail to represent correctly!).
I have multiple files, by the way. And as a recent org user I’m not quite sure what is better. It feels like org designed with huge files in mind, although for me it works with multiple files as well.
I just kept getting lost and having an org agenda with missing files, so I just have the one file and my org agenda pulls up all the TODO’s I have from across 1000’s of lines. That way I am sure if my org agenda adds anything then I have everything in one place (since its one file its all or nothing)
Lots of code and data ends up in my .txt files. Also I just checked actual stats. Only three client/project files are over 10MB. Most are in the 2-4MB range.
Same. Ever since I had my proprietary rich text note taking application/database corrupt and become inaccessible in the early 2000s I've used a single notes.txt file with filepaths for noting images and other rich media. It is super simple to search within; everything is in one place. And it'll never become corrupted or inaccessible.
My personal approach was that I realized how useful it is for me, and how deeply I appreciate it that I don't forget things. The second thing that helped is to realize how I use my devices, and how the note taking can be set up to accommodate that. For me, this meant a system to sync my notes between my main computer and my phone. This way I have the information everywhere I need it to be, and also it's backed up, which is a nice bonus.
I've had pretty decent luck with `todo.txt` style tracking, but also tend to run into issues with tasks or notes "going stale" so came up with this system. `today` basically opens `~/Desktop/$YYYY_MM_DD-todo.txt`, but it'll start you off with a copy of the most recent (previous) file.
This lets me have "durable" files (I can grep for pretty much anything and get a date-specific hit for it, similar to doing a `git log -S`), and also lets me declare "task-bankruptcy" without any worry (I can always "rewind" to any particular point in time).
The addition of `report` (aka: `diff $YESTERDAY $TODAY`) is helpful to see what I've added/removed. Yeah, there's better ways to do things, but the degenerate simplicity of `open ~/Desktop/todo.txt` is fantastic. Having the equivalent of `open ~/Desktop/$TODAY.txt` (with no ceremony) has been very valuable to me!
$ cat ~/bin/today
#!/bin/bash
TODO_HOME="$HOME/Desktop"
TODAY="$( date "+%Y-%m-%d" )"
TODAY_FILE="$TODO_HOME/todo-$TODAY-todo.txt"
PREVIOUS_FILE="$( ~/bin/previous )"
if [[ ! -f "$TODAY_FILE" ]]; then
cp "$PREVIOUS_FILE" "$TODAY_FILE"
fi
report "$TODAY_FILE"
printf "Press Enter to Continue, Ctrl-C to exit." && read -r PROMPT
open "$TODAY_FILE"
echo "$TODAY"
$ cat ~/bin/previous
#!/bin/bash
TODO_HOME="$HOME/Desktop/"
TODAYS_DATE="$( date "+%Y-%m-%d" )"
MOST_RECENT="$( ls "$TODO_HOME"/todo-*-todo.txt | sed 's/^.*todo-//g' | sed 's/-todo.txt//g' ; echo "$TODAYS_DATE" | sort )"
PREVIOUS="$( echo "$MOST_RECENT" | awk -- "BEGIN { YET=0 } /^$TODAYS_DATE/ { YET=1 } { if ( !YET ) PREV=\$0 } END { print( PREV ) }" )"
PREVIOUS_FILE="$( echo "$TODO_HOME/todo-$PREVIOUS-todo.txt" )"
echo "$( realpath "$PREVIOUS_FILE" )"
$ cat ~/bin/report
#!/bin/bash
TODO_HOME="$HOME/Desktop"
TODAY_FILE="$TODO_HOME/todo-$( date "+%Y-%m-%d" )-todo.txt"
PREVIOUS_FILE="$( ~/bin/previous )"
echo "${PREVIOUS_FILE}...${TODAY_FILE}"
diff -U0 "$PREVIOUS_FILE" "$TODAY_FILE" | grep -v ^@@
- Running `notes` will open this month's notes for YYYY_MM.txt in your default $EDITOR
- Running `notes hello world` will append `hello world` to YYYY_MM.txt
- Running `$stdout | notes` will append another program's output to YYYY_MM.txt (useful for piping your clipboard)
I find this offers the least amount of resistance for quickly adding notes. Every method of input is 2 seconds away on the terminal and grep makes things searchable enough where I can still pull things out from files 5-10 years ago without issues.
I tried YYYY_MM_DD.txt for a while but I found it to be too fragmented. Oftentimes I want to look at a few day's worth of notes at a glance.
Yeah, I use a similar text file journaling system to this and have for years. Let's me know what I need to work on every day, let's me know exactly where I left of debugging, etc, makes status reports a snap, and makes figuring out what I did all year at review time simple.
I've been using what is essentially a single sticky note (Raycast floating notes feature) for a year now and it works great. I put todos, meeting notes, ideas, and everything else in there with zero organization. When I want to remember stuff I read it. When I finish stuff I delete it. Has worked for me better than Notion, Obsidian, Reminders, Tick Tick, etc.
I've found that for productivity tools, there is an inverse correlation between time it takes to setup and how effective it is.
I run into the issue where I’m told to start new things all the time, then things don’t get finished, because of other new things that “need” to start. And no one ever seems to care than nothing actually gets done… but someday they might. So the list of what I need to look through keeps growing with nothing to keep it in check.
I'm not highly organized or disciplined and simple tools still work better, but a single txt file is too simple. I've had good luck using Things 3 as an easy and flexible to-do list for tasks I will forget and I've been using Obsidian as a tool for everything else.
My takeaway is that the effectiveness of organizational tools scales with discipline and the simplicity of the tool removes organizational friction.
Author's approach is basically Org-Mode with fewer helpers.
Org-mode's power is that, at core, it's just a text file, with gradual augmentation.
Then again, Org-Mode is a tool you must install, accessible through a limited list of clients (Emacs originally, but also VSCode), and the power of OP's approach is that it requires no external tools.
I found the hierarchy imposed by Org was more friction for me than it was worth. Adding Org Roam into the mix and making many bite sized files in a directory, and hyperlinking them together has proven to be incredibly useful to me. Notes fall out of my brain and are instantly discoverable. I often find useful notes that I completely forgot that I wrote.
A nice thing about Org-Mode is that you can keep an active todo list in one file for daily tasks and then at the end of the day send all done items to an archive file (C-c C-x C-a). That way, you still have all your tasks in a searchable format if you ever need to go back to them, but the active file — which you open each day — is small and snappy.
271 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] threadThis is a key win. Most of the rest he describes is support (also cruicial). But setting up your day the night before is amazingly powerful. Many of the things I plan for the day I actually schedule into my calendar (12:30-13:00 read and respond to those three unanswered messages from Jane).
I’m whinging because I see other managers that have nailed this so much better than me and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.
I look at my mail when I get up and normally at three other fixed times.
Sometimes there's something complicated going on via mail and I have to be more responsive. Today I'm trying to debug something with a prospective partner who is in Japan (normally in NYC) so I check for messages from them between tasks. But otherwise it's systolic.
I also run a lot of automation over my mail most of which causes me not to see as much.
For slack, we have a culture that it's either transient (doesn't matter what someone wrote yesterday) or, depending on channel, archival ("here's the documents from partner P") which means you search for it but don't otherwise follow in real time. We're relatively hardcore about channels so that you can ignore ones that aren't germane to you. So I skim them in the same times I check mail.
Zoom meetings...I have the luxury of mostly only attending meetings with agenda and objectives published ahead of time. We try to do as much as possible asynchronously though we have one outside partner who doesn't do any homework and tries to use meetings to get work done rather than just use them for things that can't be handled asynchronously.
And also: certain topics are only handled on certain days, e.g. patent (bletch) related stuff I only work on tuesdays and fridays. Otherwise it will just sit in my inbox or wherever.
In my previous role, I worked with a primarily West Coast team (being East Cost, myself), and it was wonderful having that first 3 hours of uninterrupted time to do deep work before the 'other' stuff crept in. The downside, of course, was then needing to be on-point in meetings where everyone else was caffeinated/ready-to-go and my brain was losing steam.
Maybe some combo of Zapier, extracting into local text, and strict observance of non-slack time and I could make it work.
Similar to how the author talks about scheduling their next day the evening before, I've started planning the big tasks for next on Friday afternoon, as this gives me momentum on Monday morning.
Related: I've found the 3/3/3 technique from Oliver Burkeman[^2] and the concept of open and closed lists to be a great complement for this type of organization. It hits the sweet-spot of flexibility and consistency for me.
[^1]: https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Daily+notes
[^2]: https://ckarchive.com/b/e5uph7hx43mn
Obsidian itself has got to be the nicest markdown editor I have ever used, hands down. It gets so many of the little details absolutely right, down to tiny things like a quick shortcut to turn a list item into a checkbox (Ctrl+L) and then into a checked box (Ctrl+L again), without needing to even think about the underlying syntax. But you totally can, if you need that control. It's great.
It’s also dare-I-say-it too customizable for me. I just want it to look nice and do standard notes stuff without having to spend hours tinkering.
The only thing keeping me is that it is just markdown. I don’t like the idea of being locked in with the proprietary formats of other apps
Maybe it's because I don't have many notes yet and it becomes a behemoth if the vault gets too big?
Try to have 50+ plugins and you will feel the slowness even in a small vault.
I currently have 147 community plugins installed. Is your shitload bigger than my shitload? :-)
I don't have all of them enabled though. Only about 2/3. :-)
It's not only the number of enabled plugins that matters. Some graphical plugins eat almost no resources. But then there are other plugins that are constantly rescanning files and O is not necessarily "n", but worse than that.
You can start with setting up the following plugins to their full potential and see how it goes. :-) Breadcrumbs Dataview Dynamic Table of Contents Filename Heading Sync Juggl Link Favicons Linter Omnisearch Spaced Repetition Supercharged links
Initially I tried to plan on Obsidian as well but it didn't work for me. Writing on paper is slow and not only it calms me down but also directly incentivizes me to state my tasks and goals concisely. Similarly, the limited space on a planning page helps me to be realistic in terms of things I set to accomplish.
Edit: I guess even for non-code text files, though I haven't used it for that purpose myself, yet. Bet many authors do.
- calendars have mobile apps which enable quick and precise entry
- calendars understand time spans
- calendars have many options to display events
- calendars have cloud syncing
- calendars are backed by a queryable data store
Not saying using a text file is good or bad, but I think a more accurate title would be “my productivity app is a never ending txt file and a calendar app”
I can kind of understand the author not really registering just how much the calendar app does for their organization, since calendar apps are so ubiquitous.
However it's limiting for detailed lists of things to do (e.g. great for travel, lousy for packing list), and it's terrible for time-independent data: notes from talking to my heating contractor, screenshots of setting for my media player, etc.
That being said, I do use my calendar-equivalent app on my phone for very time-sensitive stuff, just in case.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29661167
Other than that, same, bro.
[1] https://github.com/TOGoS/TEF
[2] https://www.nuke24.net/music/music.txt
I find the act of writing things down with a pen helps me remember them better as well.
This lets me have "durable" files (I can grep for pretty much anything and get a date-specific hit for it, similar to doing a `git log -S`), and also lets me declare "task-bankruptcy" without any worry (I can always "rewind" to any particular point in time).
The addition of `report` (aka: `diff $YESTERDAY $TODAY`) is helpful to see what I've added/removed. Yeah, there's better ways to do things, but the degenerate simplicity of `open ~/Desktop/todo.txt` is fantastic. Having the equivalent of `open ~/Desktop/$TODAY.txt` (with no ceremony) has been very valuable to me!
I tried YYYY_MM_DD.txt for a while but I found it to be too fragmented. Oftentimes I want to look at a few day's worth of notes at a glance.
Gives you quite a granular time reference but not too fine like days.
https://github.com/alabhyajindal/today
Would recommend.
I've found that for productivity tools, there is an inverse correlation between time it takes to setup and how effective it is.
I run into the issue where I’m told to start new things all the time, then things don’t get finished, because of other new things that “need” to start. And no one ever seems to care than nothing actually gets done… but someday they might. So the list of what I need to look through keeps growing with nothing to keep it in check.
My takeaway is that the effectiveness of organizational tools scales with discipline and the simplicity of the tool removes organizational friction.
a simple tool is more likely to help you get organized and stay disciplined, due to the low activation energy to get started and keep using it.
Otherwise, there is a great temptation to futz around with your organization tools instead of making plans and getting things done.
Author's approach is basically Org-Mode with fewer helpers.
Org-mode's power is that, at core, it's just a text file, with gradual augmentation.
Then again, Org-Mode is a tool you must install, accessible through a limited list of clients (Emacs originally, but also VSCode), and the power of OP's approach is that it requires no external tools.
[1] https://orgmode.org
Although I have multiple files for different things: work reminders, abstract ideas, bookmarks, etc.
For time sensitive events I use stock calendar app on my phone because it's the only thing I need notifications for (except email).