A productivity update

General
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I’ve been doing something weird lately and I want to tell you about it…

A few months back, I wrote about abandoning my second brain. It’s how a lot of folks found my blog in the first place.

For a while (post PKM) I just kind of floated around, trying different things, feeling like life and work were happening to me rather than the other way around. I still had todo apps, with a million scheduled things popping up and reminding me and so on.

Then I re-read something Derek Sivers wrote about keeping his entire life in text files:

Tasks, ideas, writing, contacts, everything. Just plain .txt files in a folder. My first reaction was “that’s insane” followed pretty much immediately by “wait, is it though?”

Text files: they can’t go out of business.

They can’t change their pricing model or force an update that breaks everything.

They open instantly.

They work on every device that’s ever been made and every device that will be made.

They’re permanent in a way that no app will ever be.

So I tried it. Made a folder. Put some text files in it. tasks.txt, ideas.txt, writing.txt. When I think of something, I open the file and type it. That’s it. No metadata. No tags. No system to satisfy before I can start.

Instead of a complicated bookmark tool, I just save a url into a plain text file - and because there’s no rich preview etc to offer context, I’m almost forced to write out some notes about what I’m saving and why.

My brain keeps reaching for complexity. Shouldn’t I color-code these? Don’t I need separate files for different areas? What about priorities and due dates? Each time, I have to stop myself. The file already works. Adding systems would just create more things to maintain.

That constant background hum of system maintenance just disappeared. The nagging feeling that I needed to process my inbox, update my dashboard, review my weekly whatever - gone. I started feeling like I was doing life again instead of managing it…

Your productivity system should be nearly invisible. If it takes significant time to maintain, if you can describe it in elaborate detail, you’re probably optimizing the wrong thing. You might be building scaffolding around a house that never gets built.

The apps we use aren’t neutral. Notion wants you to think in databases. Roam wants you to think in bidirectional links. They’re cognitive frameworks that want your attention.

Plain text doesn’t want anything from you. It just sits there and waits.

I’m not saying this is the answer for everyone. Maybe you love your system and it actually serves you. But if you’ve got that feeling I had - that your tools are managing you instead of the other way around - maybe try subtracting instead of adding. Strip away a layer. See what happens.

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I don’t know if this approach would work for me, but I get it. I rarely revisit the links I save to Raindrop, and finding them again is a challenge despite the tags. There are just too many to dig through because it’s so easy to keep adding new ones.

More importantly, because the process requires minimal thought, there is nothing to make them stick in my mind for future recall and reflection.

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That’s what drew me to Obsidian, TBH. Plain text, never locked into proprietary format again. I don’t use 90% of its features, I’m sure. It’s a dumping ground, of sorts. Minimal organization, and almost no inter-linking, but I can search to my heart’s content with a variety of tools and techniques.

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I’ve done this for years! I switched from plaintext to markdown for checkboxes, but it’s still just plaintext technically. Mostly plain lists.

I recently added them to GitHub so it has source control and I can access it across devices with any git client. I literally open GitHub app for my grocery list lol

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Yeah, when I discovered that Sivers post, I switched immediately to markdown text files and found it just so liberating. I still use Obsidian for certain things. Very rarely though. I use Houdahspot on Mac for search functioning on steroids. I haven’t looked back. And I can keep all those text files on a tiny USB key chain.

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I use Markdown format, but only because I can’t resist formatting at least a little when I’m writing. And yes, I loooooove plain text. Plain text is easy to diff and therefore easy to track in version control, when that becomes helpful.

That said, plain text doesn’t easily provide reminders and isn’t so easy to browse in a calendar, so I’m not giving up Todoist quite yet. That said, I always always lean towards human-readable text formats. Anything that easily exports data as human-readable text (or some reasonable approximation of that) gets my vote.

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The best productivity tool is already in people’s hand but I see no one talks about or uses it correctly.

Press CTRL + D

I have more than 40K bookmarks - %99 categorized. I can find anything in seconds months - years before.

There is just a few simple rules to maintain. All your bookmarks are with you within all your devices. And your browsing history.

If someone replies me, I’ll give the secret sauce to rule them all in three lines.

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This is a good take. I like this.
Although I keep my bookmarks saved as .txt files on my hard drive - I like the actual file being within reach

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The Power of Native Bookmarks Feature of Everyday Browsers

I always thought bookmark management is fundamental for anyone builds something.

  1. Maintain the categorization of your bookmarks clearly >>> 2-3 times a year.
  2. Keep an eye on where you are bookmarking them and find the right folder as fast as possible by good folder structure >>> chrome://bookmarks/ put this at the beginning of your bookmark bar and delete its name and use it as only with its star icon
  3. Clean the URL first, remove the ref sections starting with ? >>> This way you will be sure if you visited that page before or not. For forum pages like this go to top and zeroing the URL and then bookmark it.
  4. Always give a good name to the bookmark if the page has no good page title structure >>> This will pay off when you are searching something.
  5. Always use seperate Google Chrome profiles for each Google account. I have at least 40 profiles mostly client accounts and my platform’s other role accounts and my family members. While working on other account, when you learned from a page from that other profile’s open tab, copy the URL and paste it into your .txt or Google Sheets logs.
  6. If that other party’s bookmark will be beneficial for them, bookmark it there also and do a quick clean up on their bookmark bar and teach them how to use it.
  7. Use only your primary Gmail account for deep research and this will help organizing bookmarks and they will stay with you and in your browsing history.

I am prefering Google Sheets over plain txt or Docs for keeping changelogs, note taking and checklisting. This helps to customize the structure when needed and adding many capabilities on your knowledge and it is also as simple as using txt files.

This is one of my checklist templates. You are free to copy it.

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Bookmarks have been available for export as a plain HTML file for decades, so for those who prefer not to manage them by hand, they could set a reminder to export them regularly, such as weekly. I imagine that one could run a browser headless and automate exporting bookmarks according to a regular schedule, although I’ve not yet tried to do that yet.

Of course, I see value in curating bookmarks as well as in having some tedious tasks that provide a kind of meditative experience. :slight_smile:

I think I fell out of love with bookmarks in part because there was a period where web design stopped making articles available at stable addresses. And then it became possible to find anything any time using a few keywords. Since that’s not as reliable as it used to be, perhaps the time has come to fall back in love with bookmarks…

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this is something I’ve struggled with for as long as I can remember also. I’ve used every service from the now-defunct Pocket (a good example of why it’s never ideal to depend on these services) to currently using Raindrop which has its own problems. I’m constantly moving between different browsers on windows, mac, and ios, so the need for a way to quickly save and open links from any of them makes text files, native bookmarks, or most self-hosted solutions a challenge.

I’ve considered developing a basic tool to extract the text from all my saved pages for the reason you mention, since so much is subject to change or disappear forever due to link rot. Raindrop and a few of the other services allow for this (full-text search at least, not local backup), but it’s not available for free, and I’m trying to minimize subscriptions out of principle. I think you can do the same thing now with Wallabag and some similar foss options. But having to host and manage another service and find ways to make it work across platforms can be a pain as well.

I am not completely opposed to subscription services if they provide some actual value beyond basic functions that can be replicated for free. I know Joan is a fan of Sublime, and I’ve been enjoying trying it out lately.

I appreciate that it is focused not just on discovering and hoarding new content, but also on helping you continue to engage with what you have saved in meaningful ways and form connections. That feels significantly different from digging through a huge library of unsorted links in any of the read later style apps. Even if you go to the trouble of carefully tagging and highlighting in Raindrop, the UI isn’t designed for reflecting on or putting together what you have saved. I suppose you could do more of that in Obsidian, but that’s another rabbit hole I’m trying to avoid falling back into.

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One thing I’ll always say - when you save content for later, later will never come. I think if you want to use a service like Instapaper, or a bookmark management service, you have to find regular time your schedule, in your life, dedicated time to go through that content. Review it. Sit with it. Etc.

For me - if I’ve saved an article and I haven’t read it a week later, I delete it from my Instapaper. If I cared enough about it, I would have read it by now etc.

I do keep things in Sublime (and need to get back to curating a little) as a public record of things I’ve found and things I like.

Would that I could self-host my own version of Sublime.

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Although something I keep thinking could be fun is using this forum as a read-later and bookmarking tool for myself. Do it in public.

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I’ve let go of the idea that I’m ever going to get to everything I’ve saved. I like Burkeman’s approach to treat it like a stream you can go back to and drink from rather than a bucket you feel obligated to get to the bottom of.

It’s probably easiest to address the problem at the source by never saving unfinished articles and videos for later in the first place. I still keep lists for books and movies, but anything that requires less than a five minute commitment which I’m not willing to sit down and finish right now probably isn’t important enough to spend time with later either.

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Yes, and at the meta level, I find value in training myself to let my inbox grow without guilt nor shame, because an inbox helps me most when it’s a collection of options instead of obligations.

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absolutely, the video from a while ago about renouncing Inbox Zero helped me to feel better about my own three-digit unread count

most of it is junk that I simply didn’t have the time to swipe out of the way, and anything urgent enough can still be picked out, but I’m sure there are some things in there with potential value that are lost forever.

Burkeman recommends realizing that you are never going to live long enough to get to it all: not just your inbox or your reading list, but 90% of the the things you want to do or learn before you die. The goal then isn’t to optimize endlessly to fit in more things, but to focus on getting the most out of what limited time you have to engage with a few, and being honest about which ones you value in the first place.

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This is something I help software folks come to terms with: you have Too Much to Do and you probably need to make peace with that, rather than interpreting that as a character flaw. I ask them to make a list of all their intended projects (including personal and professional), then guess how long it would take to complete them, then ask them to add it all up. A pretty common answer is something like “3 decades”. Great! So you have 3 decades of things to do even if you never have another idea for the rest of your life. You aren’t gonna do it, right?

I love the look on their face when they first see this as freeing.

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A couple of random thoughts.

First, I used to be one of those people who really wanted to build a personal productivity “system”. Every time, though, it ended up giving me more anxiety, not less. Maintaining the system, following its rules, and trying to fit my life into it — instead of the other way around — was always the real problem.

At some point, I started to experiment with a very simple rule: “How can I make this simpler?” And honestly, it’s done wonders for both my mental well-being and my productivity.

At work, we use a very simple Basecamp setup. I like Basecamp because it actively protects you from overcomplicating things, while still offering solid collaboration features. For us, it’s mostly about talking about work in different contexts, as opposed to most productivity tools, which (in my view) are overly obsessed with databases full of checkboxes.

For personal stuff, I use a paper notebook — a very loose take on a bullet journal — where I just write things down without overthinking the structure. I complement it with Post-it notes and a yearly calendar.

If I worked alone and didn’t need to communicate with a team, this would probably be my work setup as well. In fact, I was doing this (with a small help of Thunderbird email and calendar) before I had to onboard my coworkers.

I also stopped collecting and archiving information just for the sake of it. I do make notes for my future self, but I no longer save things like articles unless I have a concrete use case for them right now. No “save to read later”, no endless inboxes of references.

I really like something Jason Fried once said (in the context of not maintaining backlogs, but I think it applies here as well): important stuff has a way of coming back to you. I’ve fully embraced that idea.

The plain-text approach you describe resonates with me for similar reasons that you mentioned (compatibility, simplicity, etc.), but even here I sometimes notice a bit of dogmatism. In some cases, using something other than text files can actually be simpler or more appropriate, and limiting yourself strictly to plain text can end up making things more complicated, not less.

But hey — these are just some unpolished thoughts, written while taking a hot bath after Christmas dinner, so take them for what they are :slight_smile:

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#Reading tip:

I read widely. What I do is have a huge number of RSS feeds that I skim and parse.

How I read web articles:
And now PDF’s.

Browser plugin to throw to Instapaper, this removes all ads, and reformats text for easy reading. Then I use Calibre to fetch, collate, combine, and, (most important), index all the unread Instapaper articles. This combines them into one ebook. Then from Calibre, wirelessly load them into my KoBo e-ink reader, to read off line.

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I think this is valuable to think this way (not obligations, just available options), however, as someone who has used Read-It-Later services, GTD apps, bookmarking services etc. for years and years, I am no longer certain that even this mindset can completely save you from the residue of these services. I have been thinking of it in terms of “weight”. I still think being the type of person who is drawn toward productivity systems, saving things to read later, etc., saving all this stuff, even without making it an obligation, produces a “heaviness”. I still think there is a part of my mind that keeps tabs on it. Some part of me is still running the loop of “I haven’t read my saved articles in a while” and starts to play with the idea of planning a day, or a routine, or some sort of schedule no matter how much I tell it there is no obligation here. I still feel like it all leaves a bit of itself behind in my mind that weighs it down.

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