I'm in a bit of a productivity rut and whilst I suspect the issue is mainly between the keyboard and chair I'm also interested in what (FOSS) tools there are that people find effective.

One of my issues at the moment is cross managing different workstreams particularly with personal projects which are more in the "if I have time category".

I'm interested in anything that helps manage time or limit distractions or anything that makes it easier to keep track of progress/next steps for project when there may be a bit of a time gap between.

    • zerakith@lemmy.ml
      hexagon
      ·
      5 months ago

      I worry I'm not "hardcore" enough for emacs (I have tried in the past and now mostly use Vim). I will give it a try though as quite a few people recommend here!

      • pingveno@lemmy.ml
        ·
        5 months ago

        It takes a little bit of getting used to, but I found once limited myself to a few useful features I really started using it every day. For the most part I organize myself inside of Jira, but for tasks that I am currently thinking about I put them in a org-mode document. I have a few minor customizations, use a few hot keys, and that's it.

      • Are_Euclidding_Me [e/em/eir]
        ·
        5 months ago

        You could try spacemacs (what I use) or doom emacs. Both have vi-like keybindings as a default and are slightly easier to get going with than vanilla emacs. On the other hand, especially with spacemacs, there's more to learn than vanilla emacs and more that can go wrong.

  • procrastinare@discuss.tchncs.de
    ·
    edit-2
    5 months ago

    I use a variety of FOSS tools for both personal and work productivity.

    For personal I use:

    • Nextcloud (Calendar, sync files, contacts etc, forms, availability sharing)
    • Thunderbird (Mail & Calendar)
    • Vikunja for managing all my projects/tasks. Also is very useful to have shared tasks with relatives. Another useful feature is that it can share specifics projects to people that do not have an account (for vacancy planning for example)
    • Tasks.org to manage Vikunja tasks in Android
    • Logseq for managing all my thoughts, ideas, tracking content like books, movies, videos watched
    • Nomie (specifically this maintained instance which has some new features). I use it to track myself (mood, anxiety, adhd, symptoms, food and drug consumption, people). It has an API so I for example can automatically insert activities from Garmin API. It is very useful to correlate things in life, or to tell the doctor if a specific symptom has flared up or not and many more things
    • Omnivore is my read-later off choice app, replacing Wallabag. It has an EXTREMELY polished interface, can aggregate RSS feeds, supports tags, comments, many filters and more. But the amazing thing is that it has a plugin for Logseq which automatically syncs all my highlights, notes and tags to it
    • Ferdium to quickly access all my important services
    • Syncthing on my phone, laptops and Kobo to sync Logseq between devices and books/articles from my PC to Kobo
    • Liftosaur for exercise routines (it has script language even) and can also track body measurements.
    • waistline as a substitute for myfitnesspal or cronometer

    For work use:

    • Logseq is my main tool, with the capability of connecting to Zotero, reading papers and taking notes which with queries I can leverage it to see new ideas forming. It also acts as the best logbook I've ever used through its powerful templates and queries which simplifies a lot the work of comparing results since it can all be done automatically
    • Zotero to manage all my papers
    • neovim with vimtex, ltex-ls and ultisnips to write documents in LaTeX very fast. Also have some scripts to manage vector graphics very easily using https://github.com/gillescastel/inkscape-figures
    • Inkscape for doing all the images for my papers since I plot my graphs in SVG. This way I can edit graphs after ploting and never lose quality
    • Ranger file manager
    • Espanso

    Update 1: Fixed Nomie link Update 2: added waistline and liftosaur since I had forgotten Update 3: added Inkscape

    • zerakith@lemmy.ml
      hexagon
      ·
      5 months ago

      These are all excellent suggestions and your username is very apt :)

      My read it now is just save as epub and at some point send over to ereader so Omnivore could help me a lot.

      • procrastinare@discuss.tchncs.de
        ·
        5 months ago

        Thank you, glad to help!

        Yeah that's what I was doing before but in a more streamlined way. Wallabag has an integration with KoReader (which I have installed in my Kobo). So I saved articles in my browser or phone and then pulled them from Wallabag directly in the Kobo.

        I hope the dev of Omnivore eventually implements this. He is very responsive and fast implementing features

    • Eugenia@lemmy.ml
      ·
      5 months ago

      10-15 years ago the suggested app listings would be about apps that you create something with them, eg gimp, freecad etc. Most of what you suggest here are just apps to manage yourself, where you control your life down to minute detail. I consider such apps to have the effect of losing freedom and the randomness of life. Basically, we've moved from being creator beings, to barely living, and requiring app assistance for it.

      • WbrJr@lemmy.ml
        ·
        5 months ago

        Interesting take. I think different though, because it does not mean we are not free, I think it helps in moments we are lost. I often find my self overwhelmed by what I need to do so organising myself or keeping myself organised can be very important to me. I don't use apps to this extend yet, but plan on doing so after building my Nas. I think it's also very interesting to keep track of my health and mood in order to learn patterns I should avoid in order to stay mentally stable

    • settoloki@lemmy.one
      ·
      5 months ago

      Your nomie link isn't working, this is the one that interests me the most. But I'm trying logseq too. Thanks for the recommendations

      • procrastinare@discuss.tchncs.de
        ·
        5 months ago

        Strange, try these links maybe:

        • https://www.dailynomie.com/
        • https://www.dailynomie.com/%f0%9f%93%96-docs/%f0%9f%93%96-docs-overview/

        Let me know if any of those are working. You could also search for daily nomie in your preferred search engine. The developer of this maintained version is https://github.com/RdeLange

    • ray@lemmy.ml
      ·
      5 months ago

      Do you know if it's possible to use Vikunja as a frontend for next cloud tasks? It does it have some extra sauce on top of caldav?

  • sgtnasty@lemmy.ml
    ·
    5 months ago

    I have found Kate to be very capable with python and rust. With Sessions I can also have my own set of notes in markdown. The plugins are plentiful and git integration is built in.

  • jbd@lemmy.ml
    ·
    5 months ago

    I use emacs, Denote, and markdown-mode to keep a loose Zettlekasten archive of notes.

  • krash@lemmy.ml
    ·
    5 months ago

    Many have already mentioned Obsidian, I too ventured to it from Joplin and couldn't be happier.

    Other (FOSS) tools I use for productivity... GUI tools:

    • nocodb - a web-based database which can be accessed over API too
    • I'm keeping an eye on vikunja.io, hope to have it mature and implement more features regarding project management
    • paperless-ngx, make order of your paper-mess.

    CLI tools:

    • Fish - a very nice and modern shell
    • chezmoi - a really nice dotfile manager
    • lsd instead of ls, dust instead of du, zoxide instead of cd
    • kopia - awesome backup tool. How backup is related to productivity? Disaster recovery ;-)
    • gazby@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      ·
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      Just because the phrasing of this post implies Obsidian is OSS, just FYI to others, it isn't 😢

      Also +1 for Vikunja! 👍

    • zerakith@lemmy.ml
      hexagon
      ·
      5 months ago

      Useful suggestions, thank you!

      I'm going to try some of the more FOSS options (I'm on Joplin at the moment) first but if they don't work out I'm going to give Obsidian a try.

  • thepiguy@lemmy.ml
    ·
    5 months ago

    My biggest productivity booster is tmux. I constantly ssh into my pc to continue my work. I even restart my window manager sometimes if I wanna play games or something, but tmux is always there in the background. And being able to get up, go to my living room, open my laptop and continue the work I was doing on my pc has definitely saved me from a few mental blocks.

  • JoYo@lemmy.ml
    ·
    5 months ago

    joplin has allowed me to be a lot more flexible with managing and viewing my sheet music.

    i converted my notes pretty easily and now i have access to them on all my devices.

    • Azzk1kr@feddit.nl
      ·
      5 months ago

      I just wished Joplin would store notes as some kind of plain text, like Obsidian does. I've also been trying out AppFlowy, which looks kinda promising (and Foss), but it stores notes in a db as well.

      • Fisch@lemmy.ml
        ·
        5 months ago

        Joplin does store the notes as plain text files, they're just named after IDs, so you can't tell which note is which

  • Dragonish@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    ·
    5 months ago

    For keeping track of tasks on my projects i use todo txt. For each of my projects will drop a file named todo.txt in the root. each line is a task, and i order them based on priority. I can walk away from it and when i start working on the project again, i have an simple way to see the list of tasks i have laid out for this project.

    http://todotxt.org/

    I personally find it less useful to see the "big picture" of all tasks, and this lets me focus on the details of my projects without forcing a bunch of structure.

  • yieldsfalsehood@lemmy.ml
    ·
    5 months ago

    I capture all my predictable work items in icalendar-encoded files that I mostly author by hand in emacs. I use evolution for a conventional calendar view on my computer. I adb push to my phone and use icsx5 to import so I can view events there as well.

    I've also been working on a project to produce a printable view that's reasonably mature at this point. It accepts VEVENT, VJOURNAL, and VTODO entries and groups them by day, month, or year. Todo items are rendered as lists so I have a little circle to fill in when I've completed the work. I display both the title and description for all types, with the description processed as Markdown. So for instance a VJOURNAL with a weekly recurrence, a title like "This Week", and a description like * \n* \n will appear every week in the printout as a blank list for jotting down two items not captured in my calendars.

    I've been using the daily grouping so far to produce a weekly "checklist". Every few weeks or so I hack on my RRULEs based on what's working for me. For instance I bake a loaf of sourdough every week so I have events for feeding the starter, mixing the dough, then baking. I set each of those to recur on subsequent days of the week so they all magically fall into place then I shifted the start days around until I found my ideal baking day. I also have an entry for changing the bed sheets every week, and another for washing the washing machine scheduled for the same day of week at a slower frequency. Capturing everything that needs to be done (with some editorializing on granularity) and evolving their recurrences is the fundamental way I synchronize independent work, leaning on icalendar for expressiveness like this recurrence for planting the garden on the Saturday before Memorial Day weekend:

    RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=5;BYDAY=SA;BYMONTHDAY=16,17,18,19,20,21,22
    

    The workflow doesn't require the bespoke tooling since I can see all my maintenance items alongside my meetings using any application that can render icalendar. That was key to getting moving, but having the print out lets me feel more productive. I knock out all the routine stuff throughout the day and find that "if I have time" becomes "what do I want to do with this time".

    There are tools in the project for generating events for solstices and equinoxes as well as sunrises and sunsets. I include all of those in my printed daily view but exclude the sunrises and sunsets from evolution by capturing them in separate files. I also separate routine/noisy tasks like "change the bed sheets" from holidays and operational work like "plant the garden" or "change the water filters" so those become more visible.

  • nephs@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    5 months ago

    Logseq may help?

    I keep a few entries in the content page, for each project, and in each page I got an updated todo list.

    You can also capture everything in the same place, journal style, then link it back from the content pages. I find it very powerful.

    And it's FOSS. And md/filesystem based, so I just sync it between devices with git.

  • wolf@lemmy.zip
    ·
    5 months ago

    I ended up using spreadsheets for keeping track of todos and habits. LibreOffice Calc is the obvious solution for FOSS, though I am using Googles Spreadsheet for cloud syncing and the Android/iPhone apps. If I get trouble with Google I will just copy and paste to LibreOffice and I am good.

    For notes, IMHO nothing beats a good directory structure/layout and markdown. (Sorry, org-mode guys. :-P )

    • zerakith@lemmy.ml
      hexagon
      ·
      5 months ago

      How do you use KDEConnect for productivity? I am currently planning a move to KDE Plasma from Gnome (when 6 comes out).