The key to this solution isn’t really the .txt file or the formatting.
It’s the ritual. Any productivity system can be made to work once it becomes a habit and therefore your default action.
I think .txt files or Org mode are attractive to devs because they feel like something we’d be doing anyway during our day. the same system will work with a paper journal or even a fresh piece of paper every morning if, and only if, it can be integrated into your natural daily workflow as an automatic habit. I personally found that paper is better for me because I get to it before unlocking my computer and being confronted with work and communications and notifications that compete with it. However, I have a lot of peers who couldn’t hang on to a paper journal or TODO list during the day if they tried, so digital formats win.
The real key is to make it a habit and learn to stick with it.
Looks like the quote was from Will Durant, based on an Aristotle saying.
>"Virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions," Aristotle said. The writer Will Durant interpreted it thusly: "We are what we repeatedly do… therefore excellence is not an act, but a habit."
https://dailystoic.com/we-are-what-we-repeatedly-do/
I think a more accurate translation of Aristotle's quote is simple, "virtues are actions, not words." It's more about actions speaking louder than words.
There is a distinction here; actions are not by themselves virtuous. Two people can seem to have the same actions/habit but only one of them does it from the heart. Getting back to the quote from Durant; just because you ace the test or have your peers eating from your hand, does not mean you have acheived excellence.
What Aristotle talks about in Ethics is not only a habit or actions but also what drives that.
I used to have that quote posted on my bathroom mirror - now it's just ingrained. It applies to so many parts of life, whether it's exercise, productivity, starting a business or building relationships.
Related is that motivation is fleeting and only leads to individual acts. Discipline on the other hand is what builds habits. It's what you do day and and day out that leads to success or failure.
I think the "motivation" that people consider fleeting is actually inspiration (like when you have a new project idea and stay up overnight excitedly working on it).
Discipline is important, but without motivation you will end up doubting why you are working so hard on something you don't care about. In my mind, motivation is continually reminding yourself of what outcomes you're working towards, so you don't lose sight of why you're working so hard.
For example, motivating yourself to work out by thinking of that sporting hobby you'll be able to take up or thinking about how great you'll feel when you've reached your goal weight.
Professional artists are really interesting to listen to when they talk about their productivity routines. Since many of them work alone, they are more prone to not accomplishing anything.
The successful ones have a repeatable process for balancing creativity with the time required to produce a work of art. They tend to have a daily practice of challenging / improving their skills. They setup a dedicated studio, and work at reducing disruptions and so on.
I am a professional artist and I have to disagree with this. Once creative work becomes the thing you spend a large part of your life doing, you cannot rely on just sitting around waiting for inspiration.
Creative workers regularly discuss the ways to get ourselves to work when we feel a total lack of inspiration for something with a looming deadline, as well as ways to create conditions where some kind of creative inspiration is more likely.
There is also the fact that sometimes "inspiration" can lead to a long process, I am finally nearing the end of a multi-year process of grinding away at drawing a comic book that came from the simple idea of "what if I told a story from two sides, with the characters changing designs to ones that scream 'Good Guys' or 'Bad Guys' depending on which side we are currently following".
> I am finally nearing the end of a multi-year process of grinding away at drawing a comic book that came from the simple idea of "what if I told a story from two sides, with the characters changing designs to ones that scream 'Good Guys' or 'Bad Guys' depending on which side we are currently following".
That sounds cool.
Game of Thrones was like that. You just got a good hate on, for one of the characters, and they went and spoiled it, by telling their story.
The Boltons were bad news, though. Even the author hated them.
I'd still say it's correctly attributed b/c it was based on Aristotle's thoughts. One way or another, his words need to be translated because he didn't speak English.
Agree. I made this realization when at the end of every month I needed to submit my daily work log along with my client invoices I would cobble together notes scattered in different apps, conversations, notebooks, etc. I ended up building an app that would text myself (at the same time every day) a reminder to log what I had done for the day. After a while I didn't need the reminder, I would open up my phone a few minutes before the text would come through, jot down a few things and done.
I ended up releasing the note-taking/reminder app as a subscription service [0], for reasons most obvious. Over time I wanted more from these notes...
I wanted a way to separate notes of different clients -- folders.
I wanted a way to categorize all notes related to different topics of interest -- tags.
I wanted an email to send me a summary of notes in a folder to submit my invoice or produce a weekend reading list -- email summaries.
I wanted to do all my bookkeeping in my notes, and on..
I ended up releasing the parser for the notes as an open source lib [1]. Which could add a nice layer on top of any plain-text note system running locally.
This is quite a nice platform -- I was looking into the SMS space recently as well and thought a similar UI (using SMS to get notifications around) would work.
I'm curious, do many people use the SMS note save feature? Or is many people the wrong unit of measure for an SMS service? (I've wondered if users would have a reversion to things like this as well...)
SMS has been a surprising key to success. I think because messaging is such a routine, having the note-taking ability embedded creates more surface area between the note-taker and the thing that saves the notes. The named contact that shows up in your recent messages or the share menu listing recent contacts are areas you might trigger the impulse to save something.
My favorite system for knowledge management is Google Docs(due to obvious advantages- online drive, WYSIWYG etc), and for metadata/task-management tasks(GTD, working things out, mind maps, todo lists, solving software problems) is a plain cheap notebook and a pen.
If you study GTD the hardest aspects of GTD are sticking to routine, and it's very easy to fall off the GTD routine. Its hard to do weekly reviews, its hard to create next tasks etc etc.
This comment was downvoted when I got here, but it's very very relevant. Thank the creator that I've never been locked out of an account, but I've seen it happen enough times to be terrified of putting critical infrastructure on a single provider.
GP should be diligent to download his spreadsheets periodically.
Most work related knowledge should go on work place infrastructure online document store, at the same time its a total waste of time to re invent a clone of stack overflow. Any general knowledge information I'd want to look up, is already available on the internet. Work information, tribal knowledge- should never go on a personal Google Drive.
At the same time my notebook information is a mix of personal things, work things and lots of other notes, scribblings, and free form information(mind maps, doodling, random writing), I need this just because creating a meta-data knowledge graph, list in the brain is just too much work, stressful and its like a offline store for your brain's functions.
Software tools don't work well for this kind of information input and putting it in either GDrive would not be good. Hence the notebook and pen.
Another big thing I've noticed is the personal productivity system is a catalyst that helps you do work, its not your main work itself. There is little incentive in storing what time you went to gym ten years back. Information/Feature pollution is a bug not a feature.
Unfortunately, Org-mode in emacs, like anything in emacs is a full time project in itself, a huge time sink that has little return on time investment. Use a tool to make your life better. Don't spend time wandering in sub goals trying to make the tool, that makes your life better. The former gives results, the latter is just a long play time sink, where you will forever make the tool better, you will never arrive at making your life better.
How else would you store images if you did it on a text file? Links to your hard drive?
Notice at some point you are just making a wiki. And of course now you have the added effort budget of maintaining the wiki on top of your regular work.
I have seen random posts on the internet where people were migrating their notes systems to org mode or markdown. If you ask me that's too much meta work to do, in order to do your main work.
The entire idea behind making a knowledge system, or a todo system is to help you do things. If you are doing whole project to set these things up, I wonder what the actual goal of this system even is.
Org mode can display images inline. They’re obviously not stored on the file itself, but I keep everything under a single directory hierarchy and it works ok for my use cases.
I migrated to org from Things some 12 years ago and since I started bare-bones (just todo entries, no special config) and grew as my needs arose, I never felt I had to invest lots of time in my setup.
Agree that some people overdo things and the tools become projects on their own though.
I was using Google Docs until one day an inspector demanded my PERSONAL Google account credentials because they were inspecting the company I worked for - for something I wasn't even involved in.
They got a court order, contacted Google, and did a Google Takeout of literally all of my data.
Now I use markdown doc on a remotely encrypted share via WinSCP.
You can write them everywhere, read them everywhere, send them everywhere, effortlessly back them up and copy them. You absolutely own a text file on your computer. They're maximally cross-compatible (barring some quirks like UNIX/DOS linebreaks). Every computer and phone has a basic text processor.
Compare with a dedicated tool like Evernote - I now have to worry about the installing it, maintaining it, having my workflow broken by a new update, the developers selling my data to China, etc.
I'm quite familiar with the CommonMark syntax that I use it without really thinking, so I write down my plaintext notes that way, and if I need to "beautify" it before sending it to someone then most of the legwork is already done.
Definitely true, but sometimes the lack of sane tooling makes it harder to follow rituals. I used to use the same format as the OP in a text editor, but struggled with the daily grind of copying items around and carrying over todos from the last day. Paper is much better for this, but messy (even with scanning).
In the end I wrote a small tool to assist with starting each day with a blank journal and all remaining items from the last day. Syntax is primarily markdown. Everything stays in a single text file.
Yeah, I'm a pen and paper guy. Make a list of things to do each day and start at the top. If I don't finish the list, it's the beginning of the next day's list.
> However, I have a lot of peers who couldn’t hang on to a paper journal or TODO list during the day if they tried
A bit more meta is that the habit itself is primarily all I need. I journal, write things down, etc... and almost never look at them again. The habit of doing is all it takes for me to set my day on the right trajectory.
I've always kept a text file or spreadsheet of things to do, priorities, etc... My biggest problem isn't keeping a list and getting organized, it's remembering to look at my list. I tend to space out for days working on a problem and forget to look at my list.
I've experienced a big productivity boost by using the desktop background of my 43" monitor as a whiteboard (blackboard actually). I have an jpg the size of my monitor that I jot things down on as text on the image. I can store meaningful small images the trigger my memory to do something. I've become so used to visually thinking about what I'm doing that I switched my text file todo list to markdown so I could store images in it.
It's surprisingly quick to keep my large jpg open in paint and jot or paste things to it and then reset it as the desktop background. I learned later this is called a "vision board"
Still, I'm so bad at spacing out that I need more than looking at my vision board monitor all day, so I use the Windows system scheduler to bring up a daily, weekly and monthly html file that reminds me to do things.
I do something similar for language learning, every new tab in Firefox shows a flashcard. If I'm in the middle of something I can ignore it but when my minds already wandering I tend to notice the word there, hopefully it helps.
I'm working on a simple flash card app for learning. People have decided to call those "wisdom cards" and I plan to have a folder of them for my app to bring up once in awhile.
The coolest thing about vision board desktop background is that I save them every two weeks or so and start another. I now have a folder of two years of my thinking in visual form that's easy to review in just a few minutes. It may be that this works for me because I'm a visual person and others need to write it down and rewrite it down often to learn it.
There's a few Firefox extensions to do it, one of which "Flashcard New Tab" I was able to write a bit of javascript to paste into the console to bulk import a word list. It's a hack but it works for me. You might be able to find more complete solutions around.
Ah, the OBTF or "One big text file" meme was making rounds 10-15 years ago. I ditched mine out of curiosity for other systems -- but I'm still surprised how well it actually worked. Calendar, links, drafts of stuff I wrote -- it was all there. I was kind of proud when, at one point, my file (brain.txt) reached 1 MB.
I'll just share some of those old links for new kids on the OBTF block.
I've tried to set up a Zettelkasten many times, but in practice, loosely structured flat files, maybe utilizing the OS' file system (folders) and occasional ad-hoc hierarchies, still beats everything else for me.
I used a plain text file for about 5-6 years before finding org-mode in 2009. Of course, I technically still use a plain text file since that's what Org uses, just with some extra features that make organizing things specific to productivity easier.
That said, I'm not sure I'd exclusively use a plain text file or even Org if I had to break my day down into as low as 15 minute chunks like this guy. I find the text-based approach to work best for longer-term planning/strategizing and just keeping yourself from forgetting stuff over the course of days. It also works better if you're already on your computer and using your text editor all day and/or SSH-ing into a box with the file. If I need to remember to make it to 4 meetings today at very specific times, something that pushes notifications and upcoming meeting warnings might accommodate that better.
I've had meeting-heavy jobs, and split off the meeting management into Outlook (or similar) with good results. Useful info that flows out of meetings can still go into your notes to be organized later though. Then I make my GTD list "task-centric", meaning that it focuses on getting discrete activities started and completed, with less focus on times/dates. That requires some level of freedom to manage your own time though, so it's not for everyone.
My productivity app is a Git repository (that happens to be a GitLab wiki git repository at $WORK as well) with my "priority queue" text file and the following bash function. The contents of the text file are similar to what Jeff Huang describes in the blog post (but MUCH less organized). Since it's in version control, I can freely delete old content that's no longer relevant for my day-to-day, and then I frequently use git log -p to search for old text in the file if it becomes relevant. The bash command also pushes and pulls automatically, so it can be used across my devices.
I have something similar, a folder full of text files that gets automatically committed to a git repo. Each file is a note or todo list item. When I want to review or search through things I do `cat *.txt | less` or similar. When I finish an item I just delete the file and commit. That keeps it tidy while also keeping an archive of old items if I need it (in practice I rarely do).
That rebase doesn’t lose any history, it’s just flattening the commit sequence coming from multiple computers. This is a good normal/default workflow for personal repos.
As dahart mentions in a sibling comment, the todo-list doesn't operate with branching - all edits are performed by one person according to the real-time circumstances. Any Git history divergence is a matter of technical accident and not an expression of feature branching/merging.
Does anyone else take notes by sending messages to themselves on Signal or another messaging app? I've been doing that for years. Taking notes in dedicated note-taking apps always seems to involve more friction than sending myself a message. The note-taking apps I've tried also lacked polish compared to messaging apps.
It's important to me that I can take notes on my phone because it's the thing I have on me most of the time (unlike a laptop or notebook). Sometimes a random thought pops up and will distract me until I write it down. On my laptop I can use the Signal desktop app to view, add, or search notes. Every note automatically gets a timestamp and is synced between my devices. Both taking and viewing notes works without an Internet connection.
Notes can't be edited but more information can be added by replying to a note and the new information gets its own timestamp. Sometimes I also use emoji reactions as tags. Recently I've started to use groups in which I'm the only member as note categories (e.g. ideas, thoughts, journal, work).
> Does anyone else take notes by sending messages to themselves on Signal or another messaging app?
Yes. I use email - text/plain, on Thunderbird. I save the unaddressed email in the local Drafts folder (doesn't depend on internet). If I need to edit, I can open it, edit it, and save it in-place (it replaces the original). I own a smartphone, but I don't carry it around.
TBird has a tasklist, but it's pretty bad - a lot worse than a textfile.
I have a one-liner bash alias that stores whatever I feed it into a file by todays date,
alias "note"="echo $1 >> ~/.notes/`date+'%Y-%m-%d'`.note"
So you end up with a folder of files formatted like this 2021-11-02.note.
Then to view them I either just cat it, or jump in to a text editor. I have an alias to cat todays .note
alias "notes"="cat ~/.notes/`date+'%Y-%m-%d'`.note"
I have sometimes considered fleshing it out, but like other commenters have pointed out, it's the habit more than the tool that makes it useful. Simple is key.
I accidently opened a second copy of todo.txt and made edits and I didn't have a good way to merge the changes across both so I just saved the second one as todo2.txt and now everything is fucked and I'm just sitting here waiting for the singularity to arrive and kill us all. wasabi.
This kind of reminds me of the "One Big Text File" thing that was a popular subject a while ago[1][2]. I haven't attempted it, but if I did, it would probably be a "One Big Markdown File".
Hey there!! I've been doing "One Big Markdown File" for about three years and I can highly recommend it [1]. Do it in a highly responsive text editor with Markdown highlighting, like Sublime. You get the simplicity and responsiveness that keeps you writing at the speed of thought, and the highlighting provides a perfect balance of "just enough structure to keep you sane" while "minimizing formatting distractions".
I have so, so much to say about how to make this approach work. Please AMA if you have any interest in this.
[1] OK, full disclosure, my main file does sometimes spawn child Markdown files for particular projects. I don't apologize for this! A lot of the challenge around sustaining a useful to-do list over multiple months and years is managing the cruft of your thought. If the document gets too crufty or weedy, it becomes an impediment to thought rather than an aid, and you will let it languish. I have a pretty detailed system for mitigating this risk. Spawning child documents for the weedy stuff + "link" to the child in the main is an important technique here.
(Once we start talking about links you might imagine we could use a wiki, but the most important property of the system is to stay lightweight and at-the-speed-of-thought - I use it to capture requirements during meetings, for example.)
I used to try various productivity apps because I thought I needed something to help with reducing the "amount of willpower" I needed to keep a to do list.
Ultimately I realized I had been using Sublime Text for years to take temporary notes in a very unorganized manner. Since April 2021 I'm happy with the todo lists/notes I keep in Sublime.
This was one of the few text-based philosophies that helped me settle with a "mostly" plain-text lifestyle.
It is not about the tools that gives you all the features but the freedom to be free of tools and just pick up the raw things right away anywhere, anytime, even if it requires more learning in the beginning.
After a while, the habits, the processes just become muscle memory. One may indeed use a tool on the top when one is comfortable with how the plain text is organized.
At work I have a colleague that is basically a 10x software architect/engineer. You can throw anything at him and he masters it in record time. He's just in another league.
He uses pen and paper for notes and todos. Nothing else.
The other oddity is that he uses the internet read-only, except for email. Zero social media accounts, forums, no mobile apps other than the standard ones. He doesn't exist online.
I admire him. There's no need for productivity suites or "life hacks" when you keep things simple, focus, and remove all distractions.
Besides avoiding personal distractions, he's also my role model in avoiding work distractions. He commits to one or two projects and ignores everything else. He won't answer your email or chat and won't attend your meeting. He cuts through nonsense like a human laser.
ORG-MODE ORG-MODE ORG-MODE
Jeff, everything you do could be done with org-mode by using a key combination.
it would also add a calender with an agenda and schedule and and and
and the main thing:
it's a text file
just like what you are using.
this is a nice how to (no relation to me) https://youtu.be/SzA2YODtgK4
Isn't org mode less portable though? My understanding was that you need an editor plus appropriate tooling for it to really shine, which to me is similar to saying "productivity software" and less like text editing.
I'm working on making org more portable (at least bring parts to iOS), via https://plainorg.com and flathabits.com.
Karl Voit is doing the hard work of rallying folks to promote org markup outside of Emacs and hopefully create a diverse ecosystem under the Orgdown proposal https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown
Plainorg is awesome. Keep up the great work. The app has enabled me to use the org-mode based plaintext productivity system I've found most effective on my phone. Super useful.
Incidentally, the system I use is from Mark Forster's 'Autofocus' constellation of productivity experiments. Unfortunate that his work is not more widely known because it's quite effective (for me at least).
> Plainorg is awesome. Keep up the great work. The app has enabled me to use the org-mode based plaintext productivity system I've found most effective on my phone. Super useful.
Org is pretty rich. Folks often pick and choose different bits. There's a great writeup that gives a fairly extensive tour: Org Mode - Organize Your Life In Plain Text! http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html
Just sharing this tool, logseq [1], that I learned about a couple of weeks ago. It traffics in plain text files and does graphically what an org-mode might do after a lot of work.
I figure more people should be aware of this open source tool I hope improves and becomes more robust.
I actually used it continuously for six months. Once the data and the size of the graph increases, it gets very slow, even text editing gets unresponsive. The features are good, but it will get slow and taking notes feel sluggish
I'm not a logseq user but have toyed around with it and am really hoping it gets to a rock-solid state soon. Development has been moving super fast but I'm not quiteeee ready to trust it with all my notes. I'll probably switch once they release a beta (as it's currently alpha software).
That's unfortunate, since I've been using and enjoying it for about a month now. I was planning to ramp up my usage quite a bit. I suppose they will be working on performance, but there's no telling how soon that comes.
I'm using an .md file that I sync with Nextcloud between all of my devices. I edit it with Obsidian on my laptops, and the Nextcloud Notes app on Android, which also has a nice widget that allows me to pin my todo.md on my homescreen and formats the markdown checklist appropriately.
It's the most flexible system I've ever used. The only missing features for me are the ability to reorder items quickly on mobile and add reminders to a todo. But control over my own data beats both of those features.
Yay! Good to read validation after trying so many: wikis, org, TheBrain, Freemind, etc. It's like a return to the old .LOG in notepad trick.
After a score, I'm came to the same conclusion as the article; plain text just works. I log in vim using ISO 8601 date stamped records in the log format of (priority - datetime stamp - keywords/tag - content) inspired by Randy Pausch https://youtu.be/oTugjssqOT0 others noticed too: https://github.com/nrr-deprecated/todo
Sorting by date, priority or keyword keeps me on track and helps for quarterly summaries.
A simple bash loop runs annually to give me a fresh 365 dashboard of days but inserts are a datetime stamp command - keywords autocompleted - then actual typing the meat of the task/content
Because all text is in a single file, vim autocomplete saves typing as I use CamelCase for keywords; vim dict helps too.
Caveat: For enjoyment, I still use fountain pens and paper for a running top 3 priority and scribbling offline. Backup interop is via TiddlyWiki for reference archive and sync with a plain text Zettelkasten (heavy on vim gf, Rg, FZF and jq for TiddlyWiki json export)
This is why I developed a system that works in both worlds, digital or paper. Also because if you know shorthand, it may even be faster and less distracting to jot than to type.
When I worked, my daily todo list would have been:
* Spend another day working on Project X.
Now it's all domestic tasks, which fall into two categories: tasks that have to be done urgently, and those I can do "when I feel like it".
Guess what? My todo list now consists of one or two things I must do urgently, and getting on for a coupla hundred blue-sky tasks that'll never be done.
Task #1: weed the todo list (high priority)
I've never been much good at time-management, as you can see.
Since 2012 I've been keeping task files to document all the stuff I work on. Most are job related. This comes in handy when I need to re-visit something I've worked on previously, sometimes going several years back in time. The task files are plain text files which are quick to create and update, and I use Sublime Text or VIM to edit. I do both development and operational related tasks, and can work on many tasks during a day. The trick is documenting in the task files right away before the details are wiped from my memory. When looking things up, I usually search by file name, or content, or both. Having documented a task previously can save time when returning to a similar task at a later date.
I use a naming format for the task file, including the date and a short task description, e.g:
task.2021.12.23.short.task.description.txt
Number of task files created since 2012:
Task files: 18231
Total size: 350 MB
For each day I also create a worklog of the tasks I've been working on that day (including minutes spent).
Since 2012 I've registered 2540 daily worklog files:
ls -l task.????.??.??.worklog.txt |wc -l
2540
The worklog files are also used to estimate time necessary to complete similar or recurring tasks.
I do something similar but with apple notes. Still simple but I get a bit of formatting and some checkboxes, tags and decent search. I can also create reminders that link back to highlighted parts of a note.
Same here. The best part is that I spend zero brain cycles in thinking where to file a note before I write it; pretty much every note is in a generic Notes folder.
I have one exception: any 1:1 meeting with a person gets its own note and those go in a specific folder. One note per person and a bullet list under a date, with talking points. I also use this ahead of meetings; when I suddenly think of something I need to discuss with someone, I add it to their note. Then when I meet them, it's part of my agenda.
It's also searcheable so if I need to refresh my memory about an older discussion, whether it took place and when, it's a few keywords away.
You can also add images, scan in documents with your phone or tablet camera, you can sketch with the Apple Pencil (on an iPad), and it does OCR on images you paste in so you can take a picture of a whiteboard and the text on it will be indexed.
My big complaint is that there isn't a decent Windows client. I sometimes will use the web version, but it's maddening because some of the keystrokes for things like word left or word right (ctrl-arrow) don't work.
I've got an almost 4,000 line file with the same kind of stuff for work, every day since 27th March 2019. It includes not just what I did, but also things like IDs for data in various environments so I can go straight back to what I was doing if needed.
At the end of one day I add the entry for the next day (mine is Markdown and the latest is at the top) to remind me of things I've discovered that will be relevant, and I update the current day's entry as I go.
I use Markdown because I use bullet lists almost exclusively (brief, with nested children for detail). It's also great for short code blocks.
Having seen my file during remote stand-ups I now have several colleagues doing similar. There really is no need for anything fancier.
But remember - frequent dated backups and if possible (and you're an employee) use networked drives so you are enrolled in corporate backups too.
Since the post describes relying upon a single text file, and makes passing mention to the problem of email ...
IIRC Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface, which expounds in part on his Canon CAT features and philosophy, proposed [and/or "stole" w/o credit] integrated email within the editor hard-wired to a single file.
I still use Google Docs but I take notes in Markdown in VS Code. The advantage of Markdown is I can create lists of lists of lists that VS code will indent correctly. (emacs does that too but that’s another story). Checkboxes in list items is another nice touch.
But what have been most compelling of Markdown is that I can create flow diagrams with Mermaid syntax and type math like LaTeX. Not to mention insert code snippets. It all works.
And Markdown is portable too. Couple it with rclone for replication to the cloud and I’m golden.
Interesting especially with the rise in popularity of productivity apps recently such as Obsidian, Roam, etc..
A single .txt file can work as a to-do-list and a what-done list but it really isn't a knowledgebase like Obsidian or Roam. It is more comparable to a To Do List app like Microsoft To-Do or Amazing Marvin.
It wouldn't work as a knowledgebase because a knowledgebase has copious amounts of text about a topic which wouldn't fit neatly in the by day subdivision.
Although, I don't use Roam Research, I think the single .txt file approach also has similarities with the Roam style of using Daily Notes and Outlines.
Roam Research is an outliner which emphasizes not using paragraphs of text but instead just using bullet points. His single .txt file approach is also using this outline and bullet-style approach and I think it is an underrated aspect of why his approach works.
Using an outline and bullet points helps a lot, to quickly see the forest and the trees; I've only recently realized how powerful this approach is and so I think it's worth mentioning.
On a personal note, I've operated for years without a to do list app and so I can easily imagine someone using a single .txt file and being way more productive with it. But I highly recommend anyone to try Microsoft To-Do or Amazing Marvin or the single .txt approach since I agree that it is better than going without.
Obsidian is an editor. It does a lot of things, and makes no effort to hide it's a markdown editor.
The biggest advantage to me is splitting files, and indexing. I'm only using it on my phone. (Notepad++ makes this easy enough for me at work that i write everything out as separate files, downside being i don't use tags was often as I should for finding things later).
The best system is one which can easily change. By making the backend plaintext files on the system, portability is preserved with no extra steps.
>A text file is incredibly flexible, and at any point, I can quickly glance to see what I've done that day and what's left. When a task is completed, which is the most common default, I just leave it. [...] I use Ultraedit because I'm familiar with it
I've also been using a plain "todo.txt" for 20+ years and also use UltraEdit. So far, it's been better than alternatives such as Borland Sidekick, PalmPilot gadgets, Evernote.
I agree with all the positives the author laid out but I also recognize there are serious limitations with my reliance on "todo.txt".
- no "live" schedule of upcoming events because there's no runtime that turns the text file into active reminders and a countdown of when things are due. A lot of people have a "inner clock" in their head and don't need countdowns but my brain seems to to lack this. E.g. the author has example of "11:30am meet with student Enya" and when I write entries like that, the 11:30am time comes and goes because I got distracted.
- not editable by others. Sometimes, important people in my life remind me I need to do X,Y,Z but I often don't get around to the tedious data entry of adding it to to the text so it gets overlooked.
The issues above are solved better by a cloud or smartphone app but I'd miss the instant access speed and flexibility of the text file. That's why I'm working on some tools to create a runtime that converts my "todo.txt" into something that pings me on my smartphone and gives me a better live dashboard for activities.
Author of the posted article here. You raise fair points.
For live scheduling, I generally have my meetings clumped together so I just go to the next meeting or take a break when one is over. If it's a sporadic meeting day, there's still the calendar on my phone as a backup alarm in case I forget. So far I've missed maybe a handful of meetings over the past 14 years, so it hasn't really been an issue.
People can schedule on my calendar the regular way, but I don't like them editing or even viewing my todo/done file because I make a lot of quick personal notes that I'm not ready for others to read, like my thoughts about someone's talk or paper.
I am glad for this post because it spurred me to open up the paper journal I do my own work planning/tracking in for the first time in a month. I've been getting stuff done in that time but it's been unplanned and meandering and hasn't even felt like a vacation or anything. I took a moment to survey the precise remaining scope of a big project I'm nearing the end of and that felt really, really good to do.
Mine is a notebook and a pen. Whatever isn't in the last 3 pages deserves to be forgotten and not done unless it reappears through another context in which case it gets re-added.
Writing with a pen also has the advantage that working remotely, people do not wonder if you're sending slack messages or emails instead of paying attention because you're typing. My notebook also doesn't need any privacy features.
A commonly stated benefit of the text file is that it's searchable and easy to backup. If you only care about the last three pages, then searching isn't a problem and if you lose it you've only lost three pages of value. That's probably not a huge problem as well.
For your last point about working remotely, I sometimes wonder if I spend a few hours working through some problem on paper, my chat avatar will go to inactive ("last seen 23 minutes ago") and people might think I've wandered off.
>>A commonly stated benefit of the text file is that it's searchable and easy to backup.
Not all data is same.
Personal Knowledge Database is not the same as metadata things like todo lists, often todo lists don't need searching, back up etc.
Also one must look at tools as things to achieve end goals, not as goals themselves. Data pollution is a thing, and having extra things isnt always good.
Highly recommend ClipX (with "Disklog" plugin), one of the few apps I've kept for years. All clipboards go to a text file which can be easily searched.
When I need to save something I just Ctrl-C it. Its my code snippet manager I can instantly find something I wrote years ago. https://bluemars.org/clipx/
Are you me? I've been keeping a txt file for the last 12 years too.
Synced in Dropbox, only available on my laptops (on purpose), only ever opened with Sublime Text, and using my own syntax highlighting, keywords and autocompletions. A new block of text for every day. Nothing is ever deleted. Consistent writing style, lots of checkboxes, and an onthology of tags to categorise everything.
I can see why a simple text file is working for many people.
Anything that requires you to wait for a program to start, a window to appear, or a webpage to load is very detrimental to the mental mode of note taking because thoughts change even on the slightest of latency. It should be as immediate as picking up a notebook from the table that has a pen attached to it.
Yeah this is important for me. My work day is organised with Jira tickets, and we all know how klunky the Jira interface can be, so I installed one of the Jira cli clients[1] and it's invaluable. I can do all my ticket management from the terminal just as if I was working with text files. Editing or commenting on a ticket opens it in vim for me.
I have a few scripts on top of the client to make things even easier like sprint to see tickets in the current sprint, jv to view a ticket, take to grab a ticket, transition to transition a ticket and slackscrum to push the tickets I've worked on today to slack for my scrum update.
I use a simple text file, too. It has four sections: "major", "minor", "done", and a section for random thoughts. Every evening, I copy the file (with remaining unfinished tasks) and give it a new name (for example, "December 23, 2021"). This way I also have a history of everything. It has worked well so far.
For sure. It actually reminded me of when I was first learning QuickBasic. Appending certain words to a hidden text file (I think via TSR?) on boot was how we would casually fill up the hard drives of the lab computers in our electronics class, driving the teacher back into his submarine CPO days and streams of curse words. Fortunately he took it in stride and got us back...
Tangentially-related in terms of organization, something that I've been trying recently is using numbered folders to get organized.
I'd create folders by month like "01 November", "02 December" and inside of those folders I'd create projects like "01 New Project", "02 Another Project".
It functions like a To-Do list in that it reminds me to work on a particular project and when I'm done, I can move it to a _Done folder.
For short-term reminders though, like with an upcoming meeting, I'd just write it down on my Boox Tablet on a weekly calendar template.
For a what-done list, I'm not sure if there is real value with writing down everything I've done for the day. I think short-term memory is good enough and for longer time periods, there are usually emails or commits that can answer the question on what was done.
I'm a heavy user of todotxt. For me, the greatest thing about keeping everything in a txt file is that it is very easy to build your own extensions with a combination of sh, awk, grep, etc.
For calendars, the problem is a bit more problematic, though. Yes, there are things like calendar[1] and remind[2], but nobody seems to use them nowadays and in the mobile world there is no app to process them. Do you know of any existing solutions for calendars that work like todotxt?
I create a new dated file every day and edit it on Vim.
I think this is the ideal middle point: I can easily go back and see old information, but I also don't feel that I'm "wasting" important space if I feel like writing down more things in a particular day.
Psychologically, the most important part of txt files, and lists in particular, is writing `* DONE Whatever the task was` when it's finished. Even if you end up deleting the line later on, it still feels great and helps you continue with more items.
I do a paper version of this; there's a particular type of box I draw to highlight a task among all the other notes and doodles, and when it's done, I color it in.
> Prerequisite: A calendar. The one outside tool I use is an online calendar, and I put everything on this calendar, even things that aren't actually for a fixed time like "make a coffee table at the workshop" or "figure out how to recruit new PhD students" — I'll schedule them on a date when I want to think about it. That way all my future plans and schedule are together, and not a bunch of lists I have to keep track of.
On this topic, what calendar software do people use? I'm a very disorganized person, never used calendars to keep track of my life. Maybe I'll try it out. I'd like something independent from Google/Microsoft/$BIGTECH.
I use it to track what I'll have to invoice at the end of the month and why (some customers just pay others want to know what they are paying for) and to plan for the future.
Plus a number of discarded A4 papers with a clean rear side filled with short term todo lists. Occasionally they become not so short term v_v
I'm using Emacs so I should learn Org mode but that simple file bought me so far so I'm unsure what Org mode will actually gain to me.
My experience introducing myself to Orgmode over the last couple of years has been that I can add new features/syntax as I need them, or not. I don’t care whether my one big notes file can be processed by any tooling other than Emacs itself, and Emacs seems to be forgiving of whatever I do with it.
All I really needed to get started was to understand the equivalent syntax to the basic features Markdown would offer.
I use a similar system, albeit organized through Bear for macOS/iOS. But organization aside, it’s just text in a couple key “files” that I can quickly and easily update. They sync from my laptop to my phone so I can jot ideas down any time without effort and have confidence knowing they’ll be there waiting for me when I need them.
The problem I’ve found with many note taking apps is that it takes too long to simply write something down and find it later. Having simple “files” reduces friction and gets out of the way. Sometimes simpler is better.
This made me laugh, as I've done the same thing for years. I just keep a "to do" text file open and put new things into it and move things into the completed section when done. I don't have time for the JIRA method as it is overly complicated and I work on a lot of solo projects these days, so the additional features aren't useful. My boss just wants a weekly status update (email with a few bullet points), so nobody would care anyway. I'd say it is super effective for me.
For solo projects, I still prefer a tracker, but I use Taiga. It's very basic, but that's all I need. I don't want to create a list of fields that I have to fill out on every ticket. Most of my tickets don't even have a description, just a title.
I agree with this one; I only used a notepad to track my productivity and tasks for the day. It's so simple, and there's no complicated UI that you need to memorize.
This is pretty similar how I work also. I use iA Writer but could be any text editor obviously. However I keep this for things that are 'active'. I also use Things as it is a simple todo list but has a few nice feature and can remind me of stuff unlike a text file :)
I keep things very simple though. I never found modern "productivity apps" very helpful personally. They all require too much work to maintain like Notion, etc.
I have a big, append-only TXT file that I keep in Dropbox. Most of my notes and bookmarks go there. I sometimes add hashtags, I use #book for books that I might want to read in the future.
If I have too many notes of some kind, I make a separate file for them, I'm considering moving my to read list to its own file, for example.
I kept a separate file with a calendar until I switched to Mac OS, I use the built-in calendar app these days.
> There's no running "todo" list with items that keep pushed back day after day
Your calendar would easily become that, unless you are always excellent at estimating what you are able to do on each day. Also, what days will you put items on which has no set date? What about when priorities change? Do you then have to reorder items on a lot of days in your calendar?
I'd like to try a better version of using the default notes app on iphone. I keep attempting over the years to keep at it but end up never reviewing the notes. I have half the battle down...I use it for a crazy amount of ideas but yea, definitely need to adopt a more consistent routine. Interesting to see what others do like this article
My productivity app is basically this txt file, but with the vanilla apple notes app + a apple shortcut script that I write that generates the template for that week. It works really well.
That is so relatable. I use Tomboy Notes instead of just plain text file as it is stuck on my desktop and keeps reminding me that downloading and trying out a new github project is something I can spend next 5 minutes on, but not the next hour doing.
I also somehow feel that just listing down tasks on Tomboy in terms of achievable chunks helps my focus.
I have been doing this for about 3 or 4 years too. I wouldn't say it necessarily makes you "productive" unless you work in a very isolated fashion.
By whittling it down to the bare essentials you at least know if you are unproductive it's not because you are faffing around with the tracking of your own tasks.
The author makes some points about the benefits of doing this, but I really think he's making things more difficult for himself. Even a basic note-taking app would provide a much larger number of features and be equally easy to use. It's quirky idea but it's really not that practical.
> The author makes some points about the benefits of doing this, but I really think he's making things more difficult for himself. Even a basic note-taking app would provide a much larger number of features and be equally easy to use.
Yeah, and probably online-only. Or, if offline-use is allowed, probably use as much memory as his system has free...
And, of course, every 2 years it would stop being supported, be sold to another company, turned into online-only and contain non-stop ads, and he'd maybe switch to a new app.
And relearn how to take notes again.
> It's quirky idea but it's really not that practical.
Seems pretty practical to me:
1. Easy and flexible searching.
2. Very quick to add notes to (Double-clicking on a .txt file takes maybe 250ms to open in Vim).
3. Versioning, if you want it (add it to your repo).
4. Online-editing if he wants that (host it on a WebDAV server).
5. Viewable (and likely editable) on every single device he owns, even his TV if its hosted somewhere.
Downsides:
1. No Ads.
2. Not forced into learning a new workflow every few years.
3. Doesn't cost anything.
(Admittedly, the downside is only a downside for those in the business of trrr to replace the text file)..
Sometimes its good to remember that the best method is the one that you actually use - the author clearly uses their method! You could also argue that reducing your number of dependencies to a calendar and a note file is actually quite practical. It depends on your perspective.
Nope. A note-taking application would not work for 12 years. And it certainly wouldn't work for the 20+ years I've been using a single .txt file. The longevity and ease of longevity of simple plain text is the major benefit.
But what about an application wrapper around plain text files, like Obsidian or a Markdown editor? You get some benefits while the files are also saved in plain-text format.
What benefits? My notes are now full of someone elses arbitrary mark-up I get to see with my eyes? That's just clutter. I doubt those programs have existed for more than a handful of years and I doubt they'll exist longer than that into the future.
I had exactly that line of thought for decades. My notes files go back to 1999.
That's why I'm so happy with org-mode. Seriously give it a try. It's syntax is not far from what I was using on my own - though it seems that I independently invented Mardown - just that it uses a * for headings rather than # (which I choose because of C comments). Org-mode has been around since around the turn of the century I think. And I'm happy to open the org-mode files in VIM and edit them there if need be.
It's been working for him for twelve years. I think that's pretty practical.
App require maintenance and are out of your control; right now a chunk of my personal process is a mess because some stuff depended on Evernote. Which was great for about a decade until it got a complete rewrite as an Electron app, and now it's super slow and keeps adding new "friendly" stuff that gets in between me and my notes. I haven't found a replacement that's not full of its own problems and it's impossible to downgrade to the old, perfectly functional native apps on the iThings (and eventually an OS update will break all the apps), it's incredibly frustrating. The parts of my process that depend on writing stuff down in a paper journal, meanwhile, continue to work exactly the same.
Same here, native Evernote has worked fine for me, but the Electron version adds too much latency, and the writing/reading of notes feels different in a worse way.
Apple Notes will let you import directly from an Evernote export, but it is missing some features (no note links, no quick search/jump, hard to navigate nested folders as notes are hidden by default, no export).
For the fellow .txt filists — I made a minimal online notepad https://kvak.io that makes it easier to access your notes anywhere. (With my wife we are also using it as an always-up-to-date shopping list).
A simple no-frills note taking web app seems like it would be incredibly simple to make. Any professional web developer could probably make it in under an hour.
It'd only need two pages. A list of notes, and a single page for editing notes. Perhaps a login page, but you could simplify further and just use HTTP Basic Auth. You wouldn't even need any JavaScript if you don't mind having to click a button to save your note instead of having it constantly updated as you type.
I do that too in txt.
I tried DayOne, AI writer, etc. but the simple text editor is perfect.
Also, I don't want to be relying on someone else to save and backup my info.
I know where my txt is and how I am backing it up. It's portable.
I find it difficult to have one app/file/mode that is my todo, journal, calendar, reminder everything. I function better with multiple apps/tools that do all these things well, each of them doing just one thing at a time.
For another approach of keeping a todo-list in a .txt file one may also look at the syntax of todotxt. I use Todotxt.net on Windows for several years now with nextcloud sync and SwifttoDo on iOS and am quite happy with it.
I use Sublime Text like anyone would pastebin or a simple clipboard manager, but it is slightly more curated and I dont need to save anything. I also sometimes write my schedule / tasks on it but not as often.
I’ve been using the same OneNote notebook for over 15 years. Works online/offline with native clients on the desktop, web, and phone. Has never lost any of my notes and will sync back changes if I’m offline.
Looks like you'd really be best served by an app like Todoist. A .txt file doesn't scale. But beware the productivity trap (becoming more productive means you'll end up even more busy).
I do the same, every day I add a heading with date to my txt file, which is always open. Then I write topics of the day. It works more as a way to remember what I was working and what is missing.
Same here, all I use is a single `notes.txt` file in my cloud storage using the notepad.exe .LOG feature that inserts the current timestamp in the file when you open it.
I think the real insight here is the calendar: it sounds like new tasks go straight onto the calendar, and that's how a to-do backlog is avoided! Interesting.
I've been a happy mutt user for several years also but my understanding is that it is just an email client, so I'm now not sure how it fits into the context of a todo list. Are there more mutt features that I'm not aware of? Or do you mean you manage your productivity with an email inbox? I'm curious to hear what your workflow is like.
Your laptop would also have Mercurial installed. You would clone from and push to the server. You could view the server content from any client using a browser.
I do not ask for any kingdom, but a good friendship is always welcome. ^_^
“A text file is my productivity app” is such clickbait. No one would bat an eye at someone using GTD with pen and paper. But using a digital pen and paper method is somehow noteworthy? (Well maybe, but I didn’t want to click on a baity link…)
It’s the ritual. Any productivity system can be made to work once it becomes a habit and therefore your default action.
I think .txt files or Org mode are attractive to devs because they feel like something we’d be doing anyway during our day. the same system will work with a paper journal or even a fresh piece of paper every morning if, and only if, it can be integrated into your natural daily workflow as an automatic habit. I personally found that paper is better for me because I get to it before unlocking my computer and being confronted with work and communications and notifications that compete with it. However, I have a lot of peers who couldn’t hang on to a paper journal or TODO list during the day if they tried, so digital formats win.
The real key is to make it a habit and learn to stick with it.