[pdevr]

After using a lot of different tools, now I use a plain text file. It works for me. I move things down as I finish them. The top part always have my pending tasks in there. The file is more than ten years old now, and have been the best productivity tool for me that I started using the same approach at office as well.

I had some sticky notes at office, but now with the world having changed, I took a screenshot of all of them and manually transferred them to my text file as well. If I need to refer to a diagram or something, I just add a pointer (the path - local file system or URL) to that in my text file.

[ekkeke]

I keep my notes in notepad++ as plaintext. I've always thought of this as a time saver because it removes any time wasted not actually working. Now I'm reconsidering.

I haven't been using GTD but I used a vaguely similar system of notes to keep track of what I need to do. This article has really focused some of the areas I might be improve this, mainly through giving more information about each task (context, time, energy, priority).

I think this is where a more sophisticated tool might help, because it will be hard to organise that in plaintext and somehting with a columnar way of representing this information in tables will help (btw open for suggestions that aren't excel!).

[kag0]

How do you keep this synchronized between devices? I had tried this with a git repo but pull/pushing before/after jotting down a note on my phone got tedious.

[pdevr]

I have disciplined myself to do it only one way. That is enough, and keeps it simple for most purposes. Copy from the phones and other devices, paste to the main device. It being just one file makes it much easier to do so. It is backed up regularly using rsync, as part of my daily backup of everything.

The hardest part - for me, at least - was to let go of the myth of the need for multi-directional syncing.

[kag0]

I think manual copying would kill it for me. I'm just back and forth between multiple devices throughout the day and it seems like that would amount to a lot of copying. Although there's only one of me, so there's never a need to merge. So it's not really multi-directional syncing, it's more like broadcast from whatever I'm using currently to everything else.

[p0nce]

I do exactly like this. Top task have a small minus sign "-" and bottom tasks get a little plus sign "+" (means: done).