Hacker News Reader

Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

The key to this solution isn’t really the .txt file or the formatting.

It’s the ritual. Any productivity system can be made to work once it becomes a habit and therefore your default action.

I think .txt files or Org mode are attractive to devs because they feel like something we’d be doing anyway during our day. the same system will work with a paper journal or even a fresh piece of paper every morning if, and only if, it can be integrated into your natural daily workflow as an automatic habit. I personally found that paper is better for me because I get to it before unlocking my computer and being confronted with work and communications and notifications that compete with it. However, I have a lot of peers who couldn’t hang on to a paper journal or TODO list during the day if they tried, so digital formats win.

The real key is to make it a habit and learn to stick with it.

View on HN

One of my favorite quotes, is one [incorrectly, probably] attributed to Aristotle:

    We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

I used to have that quote posted on my bathroom mirror - now it's just ingrained. It applies to so many parts of life, whether it's exercise, productivity, starting a business or building relationships.

Related is that motivation is fleeting and only leads to individual acts. Discipline on the other hand is what builds habits. It's what you do day and and day out that leads to success or failure.

I think the "motivation" that people consider fleeting is actually inspiration (like when you have a new project idea and stay up overnight excitedly working on it).

Discipline is important, but without motivation you will end up doubting why you are working so hard on something you don't care about. In my mind, motivation is continually reminding yourself of what outcomes you're working towards, so you don't lose sight of why you're working so hard.

For example, motivating yourself to work out by thinking of that sporting hobby you'll be able to take up or thinking about how great you'll feel when you've reached your goal weight.

From Rear Window:

Lisa: Where does a man get inspiration to write a song like that?

Jeff: He gets it from the landlady once a month.

https://blogs.umb.edu/quoteunquote/2012/05/08/its-a-much-mor...

That makes sense. I don’t really care who said it. It’s a great thought.

Another one that I like, and it isn’t clear who said it first, is:

    Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.

I'd still say it's correctly attributed b/c it was based on Aristotle's thoughts. One way or another, his words need to be translated because he didn't speak English.

Looks like the quote was from Will Durant, based on an Aristotle saying.

>"Virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions," Aristotle said. The writer Will Durant interpreted it thusly: "We are what we repeatedly do… therefore excellence is not an act, but a habit." https://dailystoic.com/we-are-what-we-repeatedly-do/

I think a more accurate translation of Aristotle's quote is simple, "virtues are actions, not words." It's more about actions speaking louder than words.

There is a distinction here; actions are not by themselves virtuous. Two people can seem to have the same actions/habit but only one of them does it from the heart. Getting back to the quote from Durant; just because you ace the test or have your peers eating from your hand, does not mean you have acheived excellence.

What Aristotle talks about in Ethics is not only a habit or actions but also what drives that.

Professional artists are really interesting to listen to when they talk about their productivity routines. Since many of them work alone, they are more prone to not accomplishing anything.

The successful ones have a repeatable process for balancing creativity with the time required to produce a work of art. They tend to have a daily practice of challenging / improving their skills. They setup a dedicated studio, and work at reducing disruptions and so on.

Inspiration often comes after starting any given creative process.

I am a professional artist and I have to disagree with this. Once creative work becomes the thing you spend a large part of your life doing, you cannot rely on just sitting around waiting for inspiration.

Creative workers regularly discuss the ways to get ourselves to work when we feel a total lack of inspiration for something with a looming deadline, as well as ways to create conditions where some kind of creative inspiration is more likely.

There is also the fact that sometimes "inspiration" can lead to a long process, I am finally nearing the end of a multi-year process of grinding away at drawing a comic book that came from the simple idea of "what if I told a story from two sides, with the characters changing designs to ones that scream 'Good Guys' or 'Bad Guys' depending on which side we are currently following".

> I am finally nearing the end of a multi-year process of grinding away at drawing a comic book that came from the simple idea of "what if I told a story from two sides, with the characters changing designs to ones that scream 'Good Guys' or 'Bad Guys' depending on which side we are currently following".

That sounds cool.

Game of Thrones was like that. You just got a good hate on, for one of the characters, and they went and spoiled it, by telling their story.

The Boltons were bad news, though. Even the author hated them.

There's a pithy take on this that I like, usually attributed to William Faulkner:

> I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.

I said inspiration often comes AFTER starting. You are arguing the point I made.

Agree. I made this realization when at the end of every month I needed to submit my daily work log along with my client invoices I would cobble together notes scattered in different apps, conversations, notebooks, etc. I ended up building an app that would text myself (at the same time every day) a reminder to log what I had done for the day. After a while I didn't need the reminder, I would open up my phone a few minutes before the text would come through, jot down a few things and done.

I ended up releasing the note-taking/reminder app as a subscription service [0], for reasons most obvious. Over time I wanted more from these notes...

I wanted a way to separate notes of different clients -- folders. I wanted a way to categorize all notes related to different topics of interest -- tags. I wanted an email to send me a summary of notes in a folder to submit my invoice or produce a weekend reading list -- email summaries. I wanted to do all my bookkeeping in my notes, and on..

I ended up releasing the parser for the notes as an open source lib [1]. Which could add a nice layer on top of any plain-text note system running locally.

0. https://www.tatatap.com 1. https://github.com/tatatap-com/sowhat

This is quite a nice platform -- I was looking into the SMS space recently as well and thought a similar UI (using SMS to get notifications around) would work.

I'm curious, do many people use the SMS note save feature? Or is many people the wrong unit of measure for an SMS service? (I've wondered if users would have a reversion to things like this as well...)

SMS has been a surprising key to success. I think because messaging is such a routine, having the note-taking ability embedded creates more surface area between the note-taker and the thing that saves the notes. The named contact that shows up in your recent messages or the share menu listing recent contacts are areas you might trigger the impulse to save something.

This is such a nice platform, why dont you do a ShowHN for this ? It's super cool.

Edit: Just saw now, you've submitted this on showHN before, maybe tweak the timing for the post and the title for better results ?

This, several times this.

My favorite system for knowledge management is Google Docs(due to obvious advantages- online drive, WYSIWYG etc), and for metadata/task-management tasks(GTD, working things out, mind maps, todo lists, solving software problems) is a plain cheap notebook and a pen.

If you study GTD the hardest aspects of GTD are sticking to routine, and it's very easy to fall off the GTD routine. Its hard to do weekly reviews, its hard to create next tasks etc etc.

Once you establish a cycle that works, its magic.

Until Google suspends account for no reason.

This comment was downvoted when I got here, but it's very very relevant. Thank the creator that I've never been locked out of an account, but I've seen it happen enough times to be terrified of putting critical infrastructure on a single provider.

GP should be diligent to download his spreadsheets periodically.

Most work related knowledge should go on work place infrastructure online document store, at the same time its a total waste of time to re invent a clone of stack overflow. Any general knowledge information I'd want to look up, is already available on the internet. Work information, tribal knowledge- should never go on a personal Google Drive.

At the same time my notebook information is a mix of personal things, work things and lots of other notes, scribblings, and free form information(mind maps, doodling, random writing), I need this just because creating a meta-data knowledge graph, list in the brain is just too much work, stressful and its like a offline store for your brain's functions.

Software tools don't work well for this kind of information input and putting it in either GDrive would not be good. Hence the notebook and pen.

Another big thing I've noticed is the personal productivity system is a catalyst that helps you do work, its not your main work itself. There is little incentive in storing what time you went to gym ten years back. Information/Feature pollution is a bug not a feature.

Unfortunately, Org-mode in emacs, like anything in emacs is a full time project in itself, a huge time sink that has little return on time investment. Use a tool to make your life better. Don't spend time wandering in sub goals trying to make the tool, that makes your life better. The former gives results, the latter is just a long play time sink, where you will forever make the tool better, you will never arrive at making your life better.

For anyone wanting a FOSS alternative, cryptpad [0] exists.

[0] https://cryptpad.fr/

Or until the doc becomes so large and slow that u can't work with it anymore (perhaps around 50 pages if there are images?)

How else would you store images if you did it on a text file? Links to your hard drive?

Notice at some point you are just making a wiki. And of course now you have the added effort budget of maintaining the wiki on top of your regular work.

I have seen random posts on the internet where people were migrating their notes systems to org mode or markdown. If you ask me that's too much meta work to do, in order to do your main work.

The entire idea behind making a knowledge system, or a todo system is to help you do things. If you are doing whole project to set these things up, I wonder what the actual goal of this system even is.

Org mode can display images inline. They’re obviously not stored on the file itself, but I keep everything under a single directory hierarchy and it works ok for my use cases.

I migrated to org from Things some 12 years ago and since I started bare-bones (just todo entries, no special config) and grew as my needs arose, I never felt I had to invest lots of time in my setup.

Agree that some people overdo things and the tools become projects on their own though.

Or your lose your laptop with .txt files and your internet sync to your home server was in a no WiFi zone.

Everything can break in weird ways. What you said is equivalent to, well, if the US internet infrastructure was attacked and disabled.

I was using Google Docs until one day an inspector demanded my PERSONAL Google account credentials because they were inspecting the company I worked for - for something I wasn't even involved in.

They got a court order, contacted Google, and did a Google Takeout of literally all of my data.

Now I use markdown doc on a remotely encrypted share via WinSCP.

What!? In which jurisdiction?

I'm not allowed to talk about it - sorry. F'ing crazy story.

Text files are uniquely good at creating habits.

You can write them everywhere, read them everywhere, send them everywhere, effortlessly back them up and copy them. You absolutely own a text file on your computer. They're maximally cross-compatible (barring some quirks like UNIX/DOS linebreaks). Every computer and phone has a basic text processor.

Compare with a dedicated tool like Evernote - I now have to worry about the installing it, maintaining it, having my workflow broken by a new update, the developers selling my data to China, etc.

I'm quite familiar with the CommonMark syntax that I use it without really thinking, so I write down my plaintext notes that way, and if I need to "beautify" it before sending it to someone then most of the legwork is already done.

.txt is a factor. It makes input much faster than note taking apps and is much easier to search.

This is a good point. It boggles the mind how slow some apps have become, when they are at their core glorified text editors.

Definitely true, but sometimes the lack of sane tooling makes it harder to follow rituals. I used to use the same format as the OP in a text editor, but struggled with the daily grind of copying items around and carrying over todos from the last day. Paper is much better for this, but messy (even with scanning).

In the end I wrote a small tool to assist with starting each day with a blank journal and all remaining items from the last day. Syntax is primarily markdown. Everything stays in a single text file.

https://github.com/coezbek/rodo

Yeah, I'm a pen and paper guy. Make a list of things to do each day and start at the top. If I don't finish the list, it's the beginning of the next day's list.

For some reason, I prefer pens over pencils.

> However, I have a lot of peers who couldn’t hang on to a paper journal or TODO list during the day if they tried

A bit more meta is that the habit itself is primarily all I need. I journal, write things down, etc... and almost never look at them again. The habit of doing is all it takes for me to set my day on the right trajectory.

False dichotomy. The author mentions the use of tags and emails as a reason why this solution works better than others.

If you read it, TFA is more than just a folksy phrase like "make it a habit."

Exactly, a "bad" process followed completely will always outperform a "good" process followed intermittently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com