Legend | Hacker News Reader

Legend

legendapp.com

181 pointsrohithkp77 comments

Lots of competitors in this space it seems. I had a similar idea, a todo list + calendar app listed below, but it's interesting to see ideas converging on the idea of timeboxing your tasks.

Ever since Cal Newport wrote Deep Work, it seems like everyone wants to get on the deep work productivity train. I wonder who will win eventually though.

- www.getartemis.app (disclosure, my app)

- www.akiflow.com

- www.oltra.io

- www.levelteams.com

Slight typo in the parent comment should be www.getartemis.app, an extra "w" snuck in. I have now knowledge of the product but was curious to see it.

Ironic that an extra "w" snuck into your post :) "I have now knowledge"

I wish you had written "intow your post", such a missed opportunity of recursive irony :)

Fixed thanks

Looks like Level is dead fyi

https://www.derrickreimer.com/essays/2019/05/17/im-walking-a...

Indeed, I included it to show that even though everyone might seem like they're clamoring for deep work products, the reality is that sometimes people just don't care enough. Level's founder Derrick Reimer had a hypothesis that people hated Slack (and particularly its interrupting notifications) that he wanted to make a product that was async. Turns out people don't actually care enough to change their entire communications workflow.

I think the bigger problem there is missing who the real customer is. Slacks pay-for features are targeted not at the users but at management, and management gets to dictate tools more often than not. Individual developers would absolutely jump on an async platform, but they're not the decision maker.

he's working on savvycal.com now - similar space.

+1 oltra - I’ve been using it recently for focus blocks and organizing my day for impact.

How would you say your product compares or differs for the average(or ideal) user?

I know the founder of Oltra, cool guy. My product is actually mobile first because I found that I liked having it on my phone when I'm out and about. It's still in the building stages though, I've been documenting it on Twitter [0] this month, trying to finish the MVP before the end of the month.

[0] https://twitter.com/satvikpendem/status/1433247453222944768

As someone in dire need of a solution like these, can you help me understand how they might fill my requirements?

1. Completely offline use 2. No separate accounts 3. Stable interface 4. Straightforward payment model

I'm really looking for a next-generation Thunderbird, not some weird ML or smart task aggregator.

Honestly, just make iLife 2.0 while your at it. Just don't hold my hardware hostage this time please.

https://agenda.com fit the bill for me. Offline use (though can only sync today through iCloud and Dropbox, I think, which sucks - but you can sync folders manually), pulls calendar from your system integration, simple payment. You can link your daily agenda items/notes to calendar invites.

Though it does not connect to email, at least today, which was OK for my use cases.

I should mention I am running Wayland, and would like to continue to do so, ideally on my phone as well one day.

Agenda is super interesting, especially their payment model.

For some reason I don't end up using it but I have paid for upgrades once or twice after realizing that, voluntarily :-)

Thanks for sharing.

In my experience, productivity apps have more in common with lifestyle brands than, say, email. In that way, there's no winning any more than one brand can effectively own a space.

If I were CEO of one of these products, I'd quickly diversify into other areas in order to differentiate, add value to subscriptions, and better cater to a particular audience. How I'd do that would depend on the lifestyle brand I'm trying to establish. I've heard this called the law of division in marketing.[1]

1: https://ericsink.com/laws/Law_10.html

I've been using Sunsama for the last few months and have really enjoyed it, I was somewhat surprised not to find it in a cmd+f on these comments.

I recently switched from Sunsama to Amazing Marvin, which is less opinionated, has more features, and is cheaper, but doesn't support teams as far as I can tell.

https://www.routine.co/ is another one I've seen in the space

> Lots of competitors in this space it seems

I run a problem validation platform, The problem which has the most number of solutions is 'Getting things done at individual level'[1].

Just when I think, every possible way to address this has been done there comes another with totally different approach to task management. This is very interesting as each one of them built it because they felt something was missing in their existing task manager.

As long there's a need-gap exists, there's a need for the solution.

[1] https://needgap.com/problems/30-getting-things-done-at-indiv...

Thanks for the survey of similar applications. What I want is (inspired by Deep Work) an application that allows me to do time-blocking for a given day around my typical schedule.

For example, in a given day, since I'm a student, I may have two 75-minute blocks of class and a 45 minute meeting scheduled. I want an app that encourages me to think about what I'll be doing with the rest of my time and fill in the gaps in my calendar with whatever (reading, doing assignments, note-taking, etc.). Does one of the apps you've linked to provide this?

In my opinion, why not use a calendar app for that, like Google Calendar, and fill it out each day yourself? For that usecase I don't see the value in paying for these tools.

A decade or so, I did _everything_ in emacs. I was never more productive and I attribute it partially to the sort of flow that Legend seems to be trying to make.

Smartphones are what killed it for me. As I switched to using my smartphone + tablet more, it broke my emacs setup. I'm still trying to get it back.

Smart devices suck for deep focus productivity and organisation. Ultimately what works is either the desktop Outlook application or some offline gadget that can sync to your PC.

vi todo.txt

the same file served me well for over a decade. :)

Stupid question, but what do you do from your phone? I would like to put my grocery list in the same system as the rest of my notes/todos.

If you had a publicly accessible server, you could SSH to it and vi todo.txt there. But I'm not sure this would be worth the effort of setting up...

I would probably put the file in Dropbox . Easy to read on the phone. Can probably edit it too.

I do this with text files and add them to Dropbox, then mark them as offline files for easy access in the Dropbox mobile app.

I have another todo list in my mac's notes 'app' which syncs to my phone.

However, for non-work stuff, I usually rely on pen-and-paper lists.

It works for me, I've experimented with a few apps but they've never stuck within my workflow.

I strongly recommend Simpletask (disclosure, I've sent a couple PRs). Not visually polished, but functionality is the best, bar none: Lua scripts allow extensive customization of your workflow. Free & open source. Only on F-Droid due to asinine Play Store policies.

That's the thing. I attempted to get into the org productivity zone a while ago but it fell apart the moment I needed mobile support and syncing. Unfortunately, the mobile org clients of the time didn't support syncing well enough to be viable for my use case - not to mention that all the customization I had painstakingly set up within emacs didn't transfer to the mobile clients either.

I suspect it's impractical to adapt the Emacs workflow to the task of syncing data across devices that is now the expected norm, and other services will have to rise up in its place. If all you have is a filesystem, up-to-date syncing across multiple devices is just a really hard problem (coming from someone who could never get Syncthing to work reliably).

However, I have heard of the remoteStorage protocol, which is supposed to be an open-source syncing protocol that replaces Dropbox and the like, but it's still in its infancy. Maybe adding support for it as a plugin to sync directly from Emacs, instead of using a "dumb" polling filesystem monitor, could become an option.

https://remotestorage.io

On Android, there's Markor. It supports todo.txt, and I use Syncthing to keep it synchronized with my various devices and computers.

Our IT dept at work is super strict with everything, to the point that I don’t even bother accessing anything work related on any device other than my work machine. Nor am I allowed to actually (so these tools like Legend are by default unusable). By the same token, I refuse to put any personal info on the work machine. The upside of this is that I’ve been able to go back to using emacs for everything :)

iOS has a couple decent ssh clients, if you are into command line stuff. Blink and Panic both seem fine, although I'm sure I'll get some better suggestions now as that is the inevitable result of publicly airing an opinion on an ssh client. :)

There’s also Beorg to natively access org-mode files on iOS, but I’ve not spent enough time to get comfortable with it, so I mostly don’t bother.

I read this a few times trying to understand this. I guess OP means:

> I was very productive, then, using emacs.

"I was never more productive" isn't wrong, and in context it should be clear. But, I read this like "Never, using emacs, did I experience increased productivity".

It reminds me of that trope, "Couldn't care less".

I believe OP meant it as "I was never more productive than when I used emacs."

Yeah, I agree. That's what I tried to say.

Is there a good screencast series about people doing stuff in Emacs? Not like a tutorial like "press C-x" etc. I just want to know what is possible, or what people mean by "I did _everything_ in emacs".

99% of my incoming work happens in a combination of Slack, an SCM, Zoom and Jira. Maybe 1% of the time I get a task in from email (do this training, etc).

Overall it's a cool idea, but I wasn't able to quickly determine if any/all of those things had support for task import.

Of course, I can just type in the tasks and schedule them that way too.

(I'm an SRE, not a founder or PM, so my workflow is likely a little different than most)

You're right, spoking on email falls flat for me too.

I started an account, but felt it wasn't very compelling to actually get started using it. I've synchronized my email and calendar, but it isn't jumping out at me how this will be superior to my current workflow (I use Things and Calendar on MacOS/iOS, and they integrate very dumbly but well enough).

At the risk of sounding dumb, what is this supposed to offer that my workflow doesn't have? I see it can support contacts and files as well, but I'm not sure if/why I'd need that. I have all of that on MacOS/iOS already, so when I add contacts or references to files it'll come from iCloud or whatever. That's fine for me. Is this for people with more disparate and less integrated systems? Am I missing out on something?

The main appeal to me is having task lists working more like documents; Things doesn't support this and it's fairly inflexible in that regard. I do wish I could plan projects and take notes a little more freely in there. But I'd also worry that having this freedom might be a distraction, too.

Things did add markdown support in the notes field of tasks recently, which might help you out a little bit.

It’s still inflexible compared to something that’s primarily document-based, but it’s a better than plain text at least.

Thank you, this is great! I missed this announcement because I've been on vacation. I agree, it isn't documents (nor should it be) but it's certainly better than plain text.

I wanted to try out the Linux app on Ubuntu (downloaded the .deb file), see how it compared to Obsidian (which is sadly a little awkward in terms of sync and config).

Unfortunately the desktop version is unusable - it automatically maximises itself and then gets stuck in a loop, constantly trying to resize. Trying to make the window smaller makes it go similarly crazy and it will just revert to filling the screen again.

That's unfortunately a non-starter.

I tried it on kali too with the deb file, I get a blank screen with the following error, (node:22346) electron: Failed to load URL: https://localhost:8001/#noverify=true&state={%22app%22:true,... with error: ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED

From the quick demos on the website this seems like something I would absolutely love.

However, after signing up, I'm presented with a big, blank, white document and have no clue where to begin or how things are supposed to link together. I closed it in less than 1 minute.

The same here - I think templates would be a good fit!

+1 for templates. The big hurdle I hit with every productivity app is getting it set up.

I'd love to have some templates to play with, to find bits that work for me that I can copy from and stick together to end up with what I want.

I'm certain that almost everything I want an app like this to do can be done; the problem is I have no idea how to do it because I'm not familiar with how the app structures things. It's frustrating to start setting things up one way, only to discover there was a better way to do it and have to re-do everything.

I usually think onboarding flows and tours are annoying, but just nothingness sounds a lot worse!

Legend developer here. We actually weren't quite ready to do a public launch yet because we're planning to make some videos and overall improve the intro experience. If you're interested, check back in a few weeks. Or the Help page at https://legendapp.com/help/ could help for now.

Interesting approach! Building an "all-in-one" workflow tool is difficult because as the feature list grows the app becomes bloated with user-facing features in form of buttons, dropdowns etc.

It's cool to see a new design approach where user gets just about what they need at the time.

I'm building yet another workflow tool but with NLP doing the heavy lifting for the user. https://acreom.com

Excited to see where this all goes.

I gave this app a spin today and I really like what they're going for. Unfortunately, I use Fastmail for email and calendars so I can't take advantage of one of the key features. I hope they add support in the future. It's a fresh take and I'd be willing to give it a serious try if I could sync my email and calendar!

All I want is a way to add tasks as items in my gmail inbox just like Google Inbox had, before they killed it. Does anyone make a Gmail plugin that adds that? I don't want to use a whole different email client or add tasks to a separate task-only list off to the side.

Just email yourself?

Yeah I do that. It's a pain for small UI reasons, like you can't snooze it before you send it, you can't edit it after you send it, it requires a bunch of clicks and waiting, etc. It's close to what I want but it could be a lot better. That's exactly what Inbox fixed.

That cost hurts

Still prefer Dendron, I get to own my data if it dies (please keep funding them ycombinator). Plus it looks like its going this direction already with api's that are local first for people to build it in if they don't.

Does anyone use notion and legend that can share if they are similar?

I would like to try this out on Android but the link goes to Google Play and I don't link my phone to a Google account.

Any chance of an APK download?

Why is it so common to bunch email, todos, and calendars together? Is this based on some memory of a desk from the 1980s, where one might sit down to write a letter to one's friend, check the calendar to see what date you should suggest meeting, and then mark on a sticky note that you need to get milk when you're at the grocery store?

Is that org-mode for Android?

Here is a free tool that I made for better time-boxing: https://crushentropy.com/

(markdown for planning your day)

Some feedback:

* Your terms of service (as linked on the "Sign-in" prompt when signing up) leads to /terms which doesn't exist.

* It's not very visibly obvious that the sign-in prompt will lead to a sign-up flow.

Thanks, I'll fix these issues

Shit... I had something similar in my side project ToDo List...

It always happens, that some other guy had the same idea and already realized it before I started :-D

I wouldn't worry too much. The market is huge and it's also usually never the first mover of some new way of doing things that wins the big price (look at Amazon, Apple, MSFT, Google, Facebook etc.etc.)

I am seeing "deep work" used more and more often, with many apps promising to help you achieve it. Is deep work the new GTD?

Deep Work is all about large blocks of time allocated to highly creative/in-depth work. GTD is more of a way of handling tasks that are obvious and known in a methodical way. Deep Work is probably more applicable to software developers or other creative fields than it is to say, someone like a secretary that has to manage a huge influx of tasks that fly in from all directions, most of which are trivial to handle, but can be "paralyzing" when not handled.

Have you read the eponymous book by Cal Newport? That's where these tools being labeled for "deep work" are coming from. It's a great book, I'd highly recommend it. Overall though I don't think you necessarily need a tool for deep work, but it can help.

I have not read the book, but I am aware of it. That's why I think it is so similar to GTD: started as a book, became very popular with the tech community leading to a few tools being made for it, became a common sight on HN front page, (we have not gotten here yet with deep work) became clear it was not a silver bullet and lost its lustre, vanished from front page, some people still use it.

Seems interesting! Thinking of trying the free account once I get some spare time this week. Anyone here have experience with it?

I don't get it. Is it a calendar? If you want to have no distractions. The phone has an off button.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/

But also, I applaud this effort at simplifying workflows, recognizing how difficult it is to program around productivity where everyone seems to have a different way of doing things :)

I suspect you are being downvoted because this isn't really related to standards.

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