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What personal productivity systems do you use?

Hi all, wanted to know what system everyone uses to keep track of their daily to-dos (apps, pomodoro technique, etc.).

Especially as more folks are working from home full time, I've found that tweaking my personal productivity system can have a huge impact on how much I get done in a day (my project https://dailyblocks.app was in part motivated by this).

What productivity system or tricks have helped you get more done in a day without burning out?

  1. 2

    I've realized maintaining a todo list isn't a big problem to me. The biggest problem is one task taking forever, giving no time for the rest of tasks. So I've been using calendar to book time slots for tasks. It's been working well. If a tasks exceeds its slot, then I re-evaluate it and the lessons learned will make the estimation more accurate in the future.

    1. 2

      I also use estimates for my tasks; they're mostly inaccurate but I find that just having one motivates me to work more efficiently to hit some deadline

  2. 2
    • Todoist for daily action points / todo's
    • Trello for medium-term planning
    • Google Sheets for long-term planning

    But sometimes pen and paper works best :)

  3. 2

    I use things from this guide - https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_personal_productivity.html
    GTD with pen and paper.

    • 1 task per day (something I really want to finish)
    • and a week plan in Trello(KANBAN board)
  4. 2

    I use Things for personal stuff, Linear for all work-related tasks.

    Initially, Linear was juts for development tasks, but we started using it for everything because we liked how notifications, assigning tasks, priorities etc. worked.

    1. 1

      love the sleek design of Things, thanks for sharing!

  5. 2

    Productivity systems have too overhead and friction for me. Systems feel like work, so I don't use any.

  6. 2

    I've been following Getting Things Done for a long time which really changed my life, and I'm using Nirvana for handling the actions and projects.

  7. 2

    I like to go for a system with as little friction as possible, which can work on top of an existing file system. I have a bunch of notes in my ~/f5/notes/ directory, and use vim to edit them. I have one file called TODO.md where I put my ideas and tasks. I can get to any note I have edited too: using [SPACE h] in vim to open up most recently edited files, then just searching the note name.

    It's a work in progress at the moment - having just made the plunge moving away from Notion. Its good because I can just Obsidian, Bear or any future app that follows the edit-on-system approach - it makes it future proof.

    Hope this was helpful!

    1. 1

      Nice setup! I've worked with some coworkers in the past that a very similar VIM setup for their tasks

  8. 2

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