
Ask HN: How do you keep track of all of your productivity tools? - StriverGuy
From slack to evernote to wunderlist to github&#x2F;jira issues - how do you keep track of everything. Have you ever automated any of this? I am struggling with this from a personal and professional level - the more I lean on these tools, the more disorganized and chaotic my workload feels.
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willidiots
IMHO you need a good workflow and as few tools as possible. It sounds like
you're using many different tools. Is there a reason for that? Do you have a
workflow you routinely use?

Suggestion: Treat one tool as your "canonical" todo tracker (these could be
separate tools for home / work). Take todos from other sources (slack, email,
meetings, whatever) and routinely consolidate them into your canonical
tracker. When you're working, work exclusively off of the tracker.

Offline, I keep a simple paper bullet journal during meetings. I'll note
action items with a bullet point (other notes get a hyphen). After meetings
are done, I review the bullets and either complete them or commit them to my
canonical tracker. Bullets get crossed out when this happens - full cross if I
completed the bullet, half-cross if I committed it to tracker.

~~~
simonhfrost
I have a similar system but with the addition of an easily searchable
'reference' system. It serves to extract ideas from what I would normally
confuse with tasks, in order to keep my task system lean and approachable.

I took it from David Allen's 'Getting Things Done'. I'd recommend it for
anyone looking to start or adopt a similar system.

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mhh__
If the tools don't work, try to not use them. (Unless you're forced to,
obviously).

Perhaps keep a paper notepad/planner (Like a police officer or fighter pilot
etc.), for tasks that aren't that important this would save a lot of mental
effort.

In terms of automation, it strikes me as just another learning curve (which
may well be worth it, e.g. learning emacs) but it would be wise to cut down
before automating if possible.

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Kagerjay
I'm used to living in chaos. I have a bunch of SOPs _standard operating
procedures_ for which tools I pick, how I organize those tools, and then what
tools I use to organize those tools.

Sounds silly but it makes sense to me

Every tool I use serves a different distinctive purpose so its easy for me to
remember.

I organize my chrome bookmarks A-Z, its a single location that links all my
favorite webtools together. As things change I compact and reorganize these
folders, they all point to different tools and links.

[https://i.imgur.com/axyETpk.png](https://i.imgur.com/axyETpk.png)

Like computer science, just remember what information resides where. Use
pointers for everything, find out whats at that address afterwards. I am
always constantly optimizing where those pointers should point too, so its
always organized to me.

Things change all the time so I rarely setup a wiki and rarely ever use tools
like IFTTT either. Most times, there's a wiki that already exists specific to
your needs. I learned to keep things really simple starting out (paper and
pen, no computer, traditional file folders) and evolved it, slowly adapting to
new tools per my use cases over the years. So every decision I make is based
off compounded decisions and history made previously

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motiw
I developed Centask to address the chaos you are describing including Gmail.
The idea is to organize and schedule Gmails, todos, links, ideas, etc. in one
master outline/todo list. The tools you are describing are online tool so each
of their tasks has a unique link which you can add to Centask with a click on
a bookmarklet which adds it to Centask Inbox. you can then schedule it, add
subtask to it, drag it as a subtask to other tasks, add notes to it etc. The
key is that all items including links and gmail are treated equal and have
exactly the same set of features

~~~
StriverGuy
Looks interesting. Curious how the feedback has been on this app? Reminds me
of tacoapp.com (not sure if its maintained anymore)

~~~
motiw
Not too much feedback yet (just about to add it to the chrome app store). In
general people that works on multiple projects or with multiple clients are
more likely to get it and try it. If they manage to avoid the habit of
processing emails in Gmail inbox they are more likely to convert and love it.

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cimmanom
I use exactly three productivity systems. Jira for anything involving code.
Trello for collaboration on bigger picture topics. And a personal to-do
tracker.

Tools don’t solve productivity problems. Systems do. Figure out your system
and then use only the minimum set of tools you need to implement the system.

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drannex
Dokuwiki with a daily Journal produced by the monthcal plugin, coupled with
the TODO plugin to aggregate all tasks across journal entries and project
wiki-pages.

1) dokuwiki - [https://dokuwiki.org](https://dokuwiki.org)

2) monthcal -
[https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:monthcal](https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:monthcal)

3) todo -
[https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:todo](https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:todo)

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PeOe
The tools you use should work for you and they need to complement one another.
Most tools can be used together by integrations and that's really cool
sometimes.

But the main point should be to reduce the number of tools. They are a lot of
great tools but they mostly focus on one area. But there are other tools, like
our own [https://zenkit.com/](https://zenkit.com/) , which combines several
other tools to give you one place to work in.

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type0
Use simple tools with plain text files as much as possible

Write your own shell or whatever scripts to customize and automate (git, rsync
etc)

To keep distractions to the minimum, stay away from gui apps and try to rely
on cli for productivity as much as possible - it takes time to find stuff that
works for you but it's usually worth it (check out some awesome cli & ncurses
tools)

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yesenadam
_How do you keep track of all of your productivity tools?_

Sounds like you have wayy too many if you have to ask this. Doesn't it?! Maybe
you would be more productive if you didn't use any 'productivity tools' at
all.

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ColinWright
Basically the same question, discussed at considerable length here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17892731](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17892731)

~~~
StriverGuy
This seems more a way to organize a personal Wiki. I am concerned with day to
day management of personal ToDo's/tasks/reminders etc.

~~~
ColinWright
To me, it's all the same thing. I have a repository of reference material, and
I have a repository of tasks to accomplish, but most of the tasks require the
reference material. So having it all in one heavily linked and searchable pool
seems to obvious thing to do, with a queue of "pages" that come to hand, or
get put back into the queue.

Separating them just gives me two unrelated pools that I then have to cross-
correlate.

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deconstruct
There needs to be a productivity tool to help you keep track of productivity
tools. I'm surprised there isn't a startup yet for that

~~~
wingerlang
This looks like it [https://tacoapp.com/](https://tacoapp.com/)

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amorphous
if you start needing a tool to manage your tools, something is wrong.

