[bschne]

My single biggest improvement in getting somewhat organized and productive so far has probably come from getting comfortable with some amount of chaos.

I used to try and set up the perfect system for my notes. I got caught in endless cycles of coming up with some structure, finding new tools, etc. — only to then barely ever write down anything because it never quite fit into any of the boxes I'd prepared.

I used to try out a new todo app every other month, enthusiastic that this time I'd find the system that would finally enable me to never let anything fall through the cracks.

I'd plan out the perfect pipeline of bookmark - triage - read/watch/listen so that I could stay on top of every great talk, article, interview or book anyone had ever created and shared with the world. You can probably guess what happened.

Then, for some reason, I just got more... relaxed? at some point. Have a thought? Just make a note, doesn't matter if I'll ever look at it again or it will still make sense in a week. Sometimes I go back and expand on things. Sometimes I event write something out of it. Most times I don't and that's fine. Find something cool? Just bookmark. Maybe I'll look through them in a moment of boredom one day soon, maybe the never-ending influx of hot new content means I'll never get around to it. Whatever. Want to or think I should do something? Make a task, don't set a date, maybe I'll get back to it, maybe it turns out I don't want or need to do it ever. Got something you keep putting off? Maybe just delete it after the tenth time, it'll come back to you if it's worth it.

[midrus]

I followed a similar path.

Nowadays I just use the Notes app from my mac. I keep a primary note named "daily" where I write at the top the date and everything interesting for the day. If there is anything important enough I want to keep it for more days I move it to a separate note. If I realize I need something I did 3 weeks ago it is easy to find too. It syncs with my phone, works offline, and imposes as little structure as possible which is something I like for the reasons you explained.

[mojuba]

Same here! I think at least outside of your day job if you have one, as a tech-savvy person you should use your OS with its standard tools as the TODO app.

Of course you could find a better 3rd party mail client, probably a better Notes app too, but the improvement in terms of your productivity will be marginal (if not negative in some instances). Good OS makers copy many of the good things from 3rd party apps anyway, right?

Team collaboration and productivity though is a different beast of a problem. I hate Trello, Asana, Jira - all of them. Because this kind of tools are generally B2B, the decision to buy is usually made by the wrong people. They are generally made to please the decision makers more than the actual every day users. "Let's use X, it has the timeline feature!". Well how about its UI for actually dealing with tasks (creating, closing, moving, etc) is pretty awful?

All in all it feels so strange when looking back at the decades of the evolution of the PC (and the Internet!) that we still haven't figured out how the computers can help us collaborate more efficiently. But then maybe it's because the way we collaborate changes all the time - just take the move from corporate to modern startup-y way of running companies.

[iamtedd]

Your comment reminded me about a passage from Red Dwarf:

In fact, it was now possible for Rimmer to revise solidly for three months and not learn anything at all.

The first week of study, he would always devote to the construction of a revision timetable. At school Rimmer was always at his happiest colouring in geography maps: under his loving hand, the ice-fields of Europa would be shaded a delicate blue, the subterranean silica deposits of Ganymede would be rendered, centimetre by painstaking centimetre, a bright and powerful yellow, and the regions of frozen methane on Pluto slowly became a luscious, inviting green. Up until the age of thirteen, he was constantly head of the class in geography. After this point, it became necessary to know and understand the subject, and Rimmer's marks plunged to the murky depths of 'F' for fail.

He brought his love of cartography to the making of revision timetables. Weeks of patient effort would be spent planning, designing and creating a revision timetable which, when finished, were minor works of art.

Every hour of every day was subdivided into different study periods, each labelled in his lovely, tiny copperplate hand; then painted over in watercolours, a different colour for each subject, the colours gradually becoming bolder and more urgent shades as the exam time approached. The effect was as if a myriad tiny rainbows had splintered and sprinkled across the poster-sized sheet of creamwove card.

The only problem was this: because the timetables often took seven or eight weeks, and sometimes more, to complete, by the time Rimmer had finished them the exam was almost on him. He'd then have to cram three months of astronavigation revision into a single week. Gripped by an almost deranging panic, he'd then decide to sacrifice the first two days of that final week to the making of another timetable. This time for someone who had to pack three months of revision into five days.

Because five days now had to accommodate three months' work, the first thing that had to go was sleep. To prepare for an unrelenting twenty-four hours a day sleep-free schedule, Rimmer would spend the whole of the first remaining day in bed – to be extra, ultra fresh, so he would be able to squeeze three whole months of revision into four short days.

Within an hour of getting up the next morning, he would feel inexplicably exhausted, and start early on his supply of Go-Double-Plus caffeine tablets. By lunchtime he'd overdose, and have to make the journey down to the ship's medical unit for a sedative to help him calm down. The sedative usually sent him off to sleep, and he'd wake up the following morning with only three days left, and an anxiety that was so crippling he could scarcely move. A month of revision to be crammed into each day.

At this point he would start smoking. A lifelong non-smoker, he'd become a forty-a-day man. He'd spend the whole day pacing up and down his room, smoking three or four cigarettes at a time, stopping occasionally to stare at the titles in his bookcase, not knowing which one to read first, and popping twice the recommended dosage of dog-worming tablets, which he erroneously believed to contain amphetamine.

Realizing he was getting nowhere, he'd try to get rid of his soul-bending tension by treating himself to an evening in one of Red Dwarf's quieter bars. There he would sit, in the plastic oak-beamed 'Happy Astro' pub, nursing a small beer, grimly trying to be light-hearted and totally relaxed. Two small beers and three hours of stomach-knotting relaxation later, he would go back to his bunk and spend half the night awake, praying to a God he didn't believe in for a miracle that couldn't happen.

Two days to go, and ravaged by the combination of anxiety, nicotine, caffeine tablets, alcohol he wasn't used to, dog-worming pills, and overall exhaustion, he would sleep in till mid-afternoon.

After a long scream, he would rationalize that the day was a total write-off, and the rest of the afternoon would be spent shopping for the three best alarm clocks money could buy. This would often take five or six hours, and he would arrive back at his sleeping quarters exhausted, but knowing he was fully prepared for the final day's revision before his exam.

Waking at four-thirty in the morning, after exercising, showering and breakfasting, he would sit down to prepare a final, final revision table, which would condense three months of revision into twelve short hours. This done, he would give up and go back to bed. Maybe he didn't know a single thing about astronavigation, but at least he'd be fresh for the exam the next day.

Which is why Rimmer failed exams.

--Grant Naylor, Red Dwarf, 1989

[barcoder]

This comment has put Red Dwarf to the top of my reading list. I was an avid fan of the tv show and never thought to read the books.

I think we all see a bit of Rimmer in ourselves when it comes to preparing for for an exam.

[iamtedd]

Glad you enjoyed it and that it inspired you to read the book! This passage had been banging around in my head since I read it 10-15 years ago. Probably because it was also me. :)

[girishso]

Me three! There should be some book/movie/series where the hero is some average Joe, does nothing heroic, no twists and turns, no rising from the ashes stuff, but lives his life happily.

[blairbeckwith]

You may enjoy various pieces of media labelled "slice of life", although this genre is often misapplied.

[account-5]

This basically describes all the bullet journals you see on the internet.

[throwaway58670]

Fully agree. Have come to similar conclusions with time.

Nowadays the only tool I'm using is https://workflowy.com. It's basically an infinitely nested list that you can expand / collapse or zoom into. Extremely fast to dump items into and delete afterwards.

I use it as a cache or stack for my immediate more complicated developer tasks. Once something's done - delete it.

Here's a referral link if you'd like to get me (and yourself) more free items: https://workflowy.com/invite/200f24b.lnx

[avh02]

The problem with just bookmarking is link rot, I've had a few links 404 or the domain disappear - instead I use wallabag (imperfect but good enough) to pull in the content for another day

[bschne]

That's nice, I generally like setups like this that capture content and give me control over things (I've seen something similar on HN with passively saving any papers in PDF format viewed in the browser and then building fulltext search on top if, or e.g. approaches like this: https://github.com/thesephist/monocle).

That being said, in the spirit of my comment — I honestly don't care too much about what I might be missing due to sites going down etc. anymore. The truly great stuff I save somewhere offline, but that's one or two levels past all the random things I currently use bookmarks for.

[afarviral]

I just discovered SingleFile, a plugin for Firefox which does an epic job at creating an offline copy of the webpage in a single HTML. I'll sync my repo across all my devices for offline/forever access to them.

[mundanemethods]

Seconded. I am continuously astounded at how capable that little extension is. Rarely am I disappointed in the result.

[7ewis]

I have exactly the same problem, I've used Notes, I've used Trello and eventually settled on Notion.

I tried out some complicated templates, tried making my own but in the end I've gone back to a pretty unorganised Trello style list in Notion.

Every time I use it I feel bad that I'm not using it 'properly', in a way it almost has so many features that it becomes too much and I use none of them.

[bodge5000]

I know this probably won't make much sense, but as much as I want to do this, I don't really know how.

[bschne]

That's the point, there is no "method" to discover, it just has to click at some point that it's OK like this. Not sure what brought it about in my case, but hope you'll arrive there as well.

[bodge5000]

> there is no "method" to discover

Exactly, that's what makes it so great, but also so hard. Maybe it'd be easier if I didn't have a load of notes I want to keep already.

If I were to take a guess about why its so hard to know where to start (truth be told I dont really know myself), it would be where those notes go and where new notes go. But I guess the point of this "system" or lack thereof is that it doesn't matter, and if it does my brain will remind me of it until its done.

I've got some nice notebooks arriving tomorrow, maybe using them instead will help me transition (the extra friction to take notes will perhaps make me take less)

[Bellamy]

It's about habits and what's your goal. I use Habinator https://habinator.com to remind myself where I want to end up. Working pretty well after a year...