As IndieHackers, Founders, Intellectuals in the 21st century we are all reading books, blogs, coming up with ideas, building projects, cultivating habits. There are so many things to do. So my question is how are you guys organizing your lives.
What kind of system or an app or a set of apps are you using to organize all of this, keep yourself on track and move towards your goals in multiple areas of your life?
I've spent a lot of time figuring out something that works for me, so forgive the long response...
Probably the center of things for me is Microsoft To-Do, similar to Wunderlist, which they bought. It's quite good without being over-complicated. Rather than filling up my calendar with various recurring items such as which supplement to take on which day, I put them in To-Do and they show up across devices for me.
For personal note taking and web clipping I use Evernote (free version). For keeping track of client-related stuff, I use OneNote stored in OneDrive.
I use the cheapest Office 365 subscription, a fantastic value. It hosts my email, and that alone would be worth the $6. The cheap tier works well for me since my wife's employer has the Home Use Program, so we get the latest version of Office for ten bucks or so.
For time tracking, I settled on Toggl. I use LastPass to manage all passwords, and back up everything important with CrashPlan for Small Business.
One of the items that pops up on my to-do list every day is to check certain channels on the various Slacks I belong to. I only keep one Slack "workspace" logged in on the Slack desktop (Electron) client to save it eating RAM.
For code, Gitlab (private repos for free). For a git GUI, SourceTree (I'm trying Fork too). For issue tracking, either Gitlab Issues or Azure Boards. Meistertask can be used for this as well, so I am thinking of using Meistertask to handle both to-do's and work items.
And, not app-related but I do 15 minutes of meditative breathing practice after having coffee in the morning, and spend half an hour in the gym before lunch. (Lunch is actually breakfast as I don't eat between 9pm and noon.)
I don't claim to have it all figured out but I'm definitely less disorganized, less unhealthy and less inefficient than before!
Hey Shawn,
Thanks a lot for the detailed response.
I can notice it's a system that evolved over time with different apps being added to fulfill specific purposes.
I haven't any of the Microsoft apps you mentioned, I should try some of those.
I see you're a fellow breakfast skipper/intermittent faster. That's given me one of the biggest productivity boosts as well.