Ask HN: How do you keep track of all of your productivity tools? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you keep track of all of your productivity tools?

35 pointsStriverGuy18 comments

From slack to evernote to wunderlist to github/jira issues - how do you keep track of everything. Have you ever automated any of this? I am struggling with this from a personal and professional level - the more I lean on these tools, the more disorganized and chaotic my workload feels.

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IMHO you need a good workflow and as few tools as possible. It sounds like you're using many different tools. Is there a reason for that? Do you have a workflow you routinely use?

Suggestion: Treat one tool as your "canonical" todo tracker (these could be separate tools for home / work). Take todos from other sources (slack, email, meetings, whatever) and routinely consolidate them into your canonical tracker. When you're working, work exclusively off of the tracker.

Offline, I keep a simple paper bullet journal during meetings. I'll note action items with a bullet point (other notes get a hyphen). After meetings are done, I review the bullets and either complete them or commit them to my canonical tracker. Bullets get crossed out when this happens - full cross if I completed the bullet, half-cross if I committed it to tracker.

I have a similar system but with the addition of an easily searchable 'reference' system. It serves to extract ideas from what I would normally confuse with tasks, in order to keep my task system lean and approachable.

I took it from David Allen's 'Getting Things Done'. I'd recommend it for anyone looking to start or adopt a similar system.

If the tools don't work, try to not use them. (Unless you're forced to, obviously).

Perhaps keep a paper notepad/planner (Like a police officer or fighter pilot etc.), for tasks that aren't that important this would save a lot of mental effort.

In terms of automation, it strikes me as just another learning curve (which may well be worth it, e.g. learning emacs) but it would be wise to cut down before automating if possible.

I'm used to living in chaos. I have a bunch of SOPs standard operating procedures for which tools I pick, how I organize those tools, and then what tools I use to organize those tools.

Sounds silly but it makes sense to me

Every tool I use serves a different distinctive purpose so its easy for me to remember.

I organize my chrome bookmarks A-Z, its a single location that links all my favorite webtools together. As things change I compact and reorganize these folders, they all point to different tools and links.

https://i.imgur.com/axyETpk.png

Like computer science, just remember what information resides where. Use pointers for everything, find out whats at that address afterwards. I am always constantly optimizing where those pointers should point too, so its always organized to me.

Things change all the time so I rarely setup a wiki and rarely ever use tools like IFTTT either. Most times, there's a wiki that already exists specific to your needs. I learned to keep things really simple starting out (paper and pen, no computer, traditional file folders) and evolved it, slowly adapting to new tools per my use cases over the years. So every decision I make is based off compounded decisions and history made previously

I developed Centask to address the chaos you are describing including Gmail. The idea is to organize and schedule Gmails, todos, links, ideas, etc. in one master outline/todo list. The tools you are describing are online tool so each of their tasks has a unique link which you can add to Centask with a click on a bookmarklet which adds it to Centask Inbox. you can then schedule it, add subtask to it, drag it as a subtask to other tasks, add notes to it etc. The key is that all items including links and gmail are treated equal and have exactly the same set of features

Looks interesting. Curious how the feedback has been on this app? Reminds me of tacoapp.com (not sure if its maintained anymore)

Not too much feedback yet (just about to add it to the chrome app store). In general people that works on multiple projects or with multiple clients are more likely to get it and try it. If they manage to avoid the habit of processing emails in Gmail inbox they are more likely to convert and love it.

I use exactly three productivity systems. Jira for anything involving code. Trello for collaboration on bigger picture topics. And a personal to-do tracker.

Tools don’t solve productivity problems. Systems do. Figure out your system and then use only the minimum set of tools you need to implement the system.

Dokuwiki with a daily Journal produced by the monthcal plugin, coupled with the TODO plugin to aggregate all tasks across journal entries and project wiki-pages.

1) dokuwiki - https://dokuwiki.org

2) monthcal - https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:monthcal

3) todo - https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:todo

The tools you use should work for you and they need to complement one another. Most tools can be used together by integrations and that's really cool sometimes.

But the main point should be to reduce the number of tools. They are a lot of great tools but they mostly focus on one area. But there are other tools, like our own https://zenkit.com/ , which combines several other tools to give you one place to work in.

Use simple tools with plain text files as much as possible

Write your own shell or whatever scripts to customize and automate (git, rsync etc)

To keep distractions to the minimum, stay away from gui apps and try to rely on cli for productivity as much as possible - it takes time to find stuff that works for you but it's usually worth it (check out some awesome cli & ncurses tools)

How do you keep track of all of your productivity tools?

Sounds like you have wayy too many if you have to ask this. Doesn't it?! Maybe you would be more productive if you didn't use any 'productivity tools' at all.

Basically the same question, discussed at considerable length here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17892731

This seems more a way to organize a personal Wiki. I am concerned with day to day management of personal ToDo's/tasks/reminders etc.

To me, it's all the same thing. I have a repository of reference material, and I have a repository of tasks to accomplish, but most of the tasks require the reference material. So having it all in one heavily linked and searchable pool seems to obvious thing to do, with a queue of "pages" that come to hand, or get put back into the queue.

Separating them just gives me two unrelated pools that I then have to cross-correlate.

There needs to be a productivity tool to help you keep track of productivity tools. I'm surprised there isn't a startup yet for that

This looks like it https://tacoapp.com/

if you start needing a tool to manage your tools, something is wrong.

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