Ask HN: Productivity tools that need to exist? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Productivity tools that need to exist?

16 pointslbr13 comments

The landscape of productivity tools is littered with dead bodies. But what else needs to exist? Where are the biggest inefficiencies in your day? Or what would you have a personal assistant do, if you had one?

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I think the reason they're so many dead bodies in this space is that there's not much a productivity tool needs to do, and any attempts to create a new one is just repackaging an existing tool into a nicer UI.

Basecamp is Asana is Evernote is Trello. You have tasks, you assign them to people, and I think 99% of the time the reason people go with a certain tool is the look and feel.

I've found the main driver for productivity (and I know this sounds flippant) is to actually make an effort to be productive. If you aren't making an effort (or your team members aren't making an effort) the tool won't change their behaviour.

I find this to be largely true as well. If your team is making an effort, the project management tool's utility is a symptom - it will never be a cause, one way or the other. The only way for me to be productive is to find somewhere relatively quiet (but not silent), get comfortable, and convince myself that working on X is the most productive use of my time right now. Usually opening the editor and firing up the terminal is enough to get me in the swing of things. If playing with whatever I'm working on and finding broken stuff to fix isn't enough to kick-start my brain into problem-solving mode, checking the issue tracker is a good crutch. After the first commit, I can usually start flying. It's all about momentum.

Only mildly sarcastically:

I need a natural language robot that can attend meetings for me and produce minutes and an artificial intelligence that can write an executive summary of those minutes, calling out anything should care about.

Alternately, I need a robot attached to the back of my task chair that smacks me upside the head every time my brain segfaults and crashes to reddit.

Alternately, I need a supervisor who doesn't need daily written status updated because we use a task management tool that is worth a shit.

What task management tools have you tried that don't work for you? I use YouTrack from JetBrains and find it meets 99% of my needs (an alternate unit for estimates, e.g. stars instead of hours, would be nice). What are the features that matter most to you in such an application?

Your supervisor wants daily updates because he does not trust the task mgmt tool - quite rightly because I doubt it is linked to the user acceptance and unit test runners and so is no indication of reality. Looking at you and hearing your voice is a better proxy of reality than a gang chart but nothing like tests

As for the NLP of meetings - yes please !!!

I just started a contract at a major bank, and have found an area (Dev tooling nothing bank related!) that was missing obvious parts and dove in.

I think productivity is partly good people, good open systems and partly leaving folks to get on and find the biggest pain points whilst not stuffing architecture up.

I think this works for non devs too and has next to nothing to do with productivity tools. I could have been using notepad and a shell and would have done as much useful work.

For me is the best important tool password manager. I can't imagine my work without it, it stores all my passwords, fills forms for me and I can focus only on work. Currently I am using Sticky password manager because I don't like to store my personal data to clouds. I am also using Toggl for time tracking because I used to waste my time a lot :) .

All of my best projects have been effectively coordinated over email - no other productivity tool involved. In my experience, if a small, nimble team can’t effectively coordinate over email - any tool will only exaggerate their problem.

I'm looking for a simple team task management tool (I like Flow) for the terminal. Or better: One that works like Flow, but has both a GUI and a CLI.

I'd like a good dashboard for my life.

The comments are all great. And I appreciate them. But I suppose I'm most curious about the last question: what would you have a personal assistant do, if you had one?

I would have them handle all my email and attend time-wasting and useless meetings.

A new Gmail.

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