I've been noticing lately, at least for myself, that useful technology stopped happening like 10-20 years ago. If all you could use was tech from 2000 and before you would have a pretty stable stack that just worked (without a monthly subscription.)
textfiles, makefiles, perl, php, rss, text based email, news groups, irc, icq, vim/emacs, sed, awk; all better than the crap they have spawned that is supposed to be "better".
Out of curiosity, what technology in the past 5 years do you use that you actually find better than something from 20 years ago?
Don't get me wrong as I do feel the core of your thesis is correct. Emacs is my editor and I just finished writing a nicely recursive set of gMake for cloud a pipeline. Most of my core software tools haven't changed appreciably since the mid 2000s--right around the time git came out.
edit: I had no idea Nix was so old. I guess it just feels very "new" in my zeitgeist.
> all you could use was tech from 2000 and before you would have a pretty stable stack that just worked
The improvements made during the late 2000s and 2010s mostly had to do with making the functionality of these technologies accessible to non-technical users. I was younger and probably more mentally agile back then, but I remember the first iTouch I ever bought being very intuitive to use; you could usually intimate what you wanted to do without even looking it up. I got so accustomed to this intuitiveness (Windows Vista being an unhappy interruption in those series of memories) that by the time Windows 8 rolled around I was completely taken aback by how bad it was.
I mentioned in another comment that these productivity apps only really see a positive net expected value at the enterprise level, where they aren’t primarily used for efficiency but as coordination mechanisms and institutional memory. Individual users can only really hope to take advantage of them if they are intuitive to use.
From what I’ve observed, most of these UX failures are not the result of a lack of technical aptitude, nor an issue of cost, but of failures in institutional coordination (principal-agent problems and things like that) or the market simply being cornered; both follow the general trend of consolidation in the tech industry. The companies that are making most of our software are huge and they lack the competition to incentivize them to improve.
I installed some old Debian versions in virtual machines recently, and had a similar thought. Other than security upgrades really 99% of anything useful was already included ~25 years ago. Could probably go back quite a bit further. One annoying thing beyond ~20 years is going back to pre-UTF-8 and having to worry about 8-bit (sometimes 7-bit) character encodings, but that is the only obvious downside. Emacs versions around version 20 also were lacking things that I use today, but nothing that I could not learn to live without.
And you can install everything. As in, you can download (from their archive) the distribution ISOs from old Debian releases. For early version everything fits on a single DVD or single CD-ROM. That is thousands of libraries and applications. You don't have to think about disk space (or RAM) when installing things from there in 2025. Also everything runs very fast.
It's like hardware has finally caught up. The level of bloat from ~2000 is perfect for 2025, especially if you want to be able to set up and run virtual machines without worrying about resource use. For offline use running applications in virtual machines it is perfect.
I don't think it's better than org-mode, but org-mode is also post-2000 so doesn't count here. Obsidian isn't open source, isn't plain text enough, and is slow.
Markdown also falls outside the pre-2000 window as well. But, it's closely based on email and news conventions.
What do you mean by "isn't plain text enough"? I haven't used it, but the only thing I imagine would be indexing with a database, but you can just use plain text tools like grep (or rg) to fill the gaps.
I'd definitely agree with you on that one. Also notice how the company doesn't push monthly subscriptions on people and just lets their program exist out there.
I backup my Obsidian vault weekly by blindly committing the stuff in `.obsidian` and then reviewing the changes to the `.md` files themselves. It's not version control, per se, but at least a backup and record.
No media other than plain text can come even close to the quantity and quality of tooling we have for it. Plain text is amazing to read, edit, share, version, tts, print and all of it with nearly maximum space efficientcy.
I feel like most things I use existed 5 years ago, but now they are just better versions of what they were 5 years ago. TypeScript, Rust, JetBrains IDEs, Firefox, Slack, iTerm2, Sublime Text, Apple iMessages.
Sqlite is better now than 20 years ago. Java is better now than Java 20 years ago. Linux init systems are better. Virtualization, containeristion etc are better.
WSL2, Neovim, LSPs, Brave Browser, fzf, yt-dlp - just the ones I've used today.
>>makefiles
They are hard to debug and I never could make the compilation as fast as with CMake (which sucks for many other reasons). Hopefully Zig build system will make both obsolete in the near future.
Actually I'll go against the grain here in saying this but I do find LLMs quite useful for a number of tasks. However you won't find an argument that the first two decades of the 21st century were mostly a waste of time in terms of what was built and how little the envelope got pushed outside machine learning. As an old backend developer I find the rise and fall of the nosql mania particularly infuriating.
I think AI is the obvious one. Also, VSCode (or whatever modern IDE you use) is definitely better than the IDEs that existed 20 years ago. LSP is fantastic. Hm... StackOverflow was definitely a step change over existing tools. Godot is really good, much better than anything that came before, IMO. Modern languages are pretty good these days - Rust and TypeScript are better than languages in the 2000s, to name two of the top of my head.
Quite honestly if you put ai aside and just look at VsCode and typescript which is a common drug of choice these days the Java plus Eclipse of 20 years ago was the superior toolkit. At least semantic search and refactoring worked reliably.
Eclipse was great for java specifically, but a lot of its useful/reliable features came from java being easy to standardize around. Strong static typing and javadocs combined allow for a lot of convenient and reliable features like previews, intellisense, refactoring, etc. For me, vscode feeling worse come from the fact that I'm using it for python and javascript which are inherently harder to design IDE features for, and also vscode is designed to be a good all-round programming editor, not a java-specific editor.
Taking its broader scope into account, I feel like vscode is a significantly better IDE than eclipse, though if I went back to exclusively coding in java and nothing else ever, I might switch back to it.
This reminds me of a recent reflection, upon seeing an old journal entry of mine from ~2012, where I seemed to be grappling back then with the same exact issues I do today, namely 'browser tab overload'. Even though we've since had over a decade of tech progress (e.g. tab groups and associated features, AI, etc), I'm still drowning in tab overload. It actually made me laugh for a moment. All this powerful AI, large browser feature development teams shipping consistently quarter after quarter, and I'm still in the same spot. I could copy-paste this dilemma across a variety of 'productivity challenges' and arrive at a similar place.
Been in a similar philosophy for a while now. I like the idea of staying native to the OS, using open formats as much as possible, and using interoperable toolings.
The idea is to approach content as data-first, with tools on top, and be at ease with plans to Walk-Out when needed.
Besides the article in discussion, here are a few inspirations for plain-text as the defaults.
- The writing of our very own Obsidian’s CEO, Steph Ango at https://stephango.com @kepano on HN.
You mean it hasn’t been that way for the last 14 years and it hasn’t survived 5 different computer changes and a dozen or so OS migrations and you don’t still have a tiny document with “fun business ideas” to start that company with your fresh out of college gang right next to that “how to organize a great 10 year reunion” sheet from 3 years ago?
I have seen colleagues using an almost append only txt file with notepad.exe. It worked for them I guess, but there were some features I could not live without on Notepad++
For me it often still is.. at least when I'm working alone on something / no collaboration needed. Every time I try something else I revert back to this, although sometimes I do save the files, eventually.
For me it was a ream of printer paper and a mug full of random writing implements.
IMO the platform is unmatched at rapid on-demand WYSIWYG visualization.
Not so great for a productivity app, though. Too easy to lose important information when it's on the same sheet of paper as a drawing of a graph algorithm that turned out to be wrong, and trying to remember whether x cross y positive implies x right or left of y.
I bet you could rig up a webcam, hook it up to a multimodal LLM, that can then instantly scan, sort, and archive all of the separate ideas on each sheet.
That would make it easier to not lose information, but I don't think it makes it any easier of a productivity app.
I do something similar but with Emacs and org mode. I start a new file each time I join a new company and just keep on updating it with things as I'm progressing through my day. The one I carry right now goes back as far as Dec 2017. It's a super useful resource for dailies, or looking back at what you did. Heck I even add TODOs and shell snippets that I often find useful. If you feed it to some LLM then you can even do nice summaries and meaningful searches that aren't necessarily based on single keywords.
I used to have a zillion todo txt files in the early 2000's, migrated to OneNote around 2005 and have been using the same OneNote notebook for 20 years now. My life is in there - 20 years worth of todos, lists, thoughts, ideas, etc.. always evolving, perfectly synchronized across computers and mobile. I'm referencing and updating my OneNote all day as I get things done, have ideas, and think of new things to do, or things to remembers. It's an extension of my brain at this point.
I've tried alternatives, but OneNote has been simple and reliable, it just works everywhere. Probably one of the most important apps in my life.
Same but with Keep and GDocs. I still use a local neverending txt like TFA though, as a short-term todo list + clipboard. Short thoughts and little factoids like license plate numbers, appointments, and restaurant recommendations go on Keep (although some of those "short thoughts" have ended up busting the character limit). Refined structured notes end up in a GDoc by topic. Some of my GDocs are now the size of small textbooks. I also love Google Takeout so that I can backup it all up periodically.
I would say, just as you would about OneNote, Keep is one of the most important apps in my life.
Once I realised I rarely read my notes, I now put them in a single note and prepend it when I add something new. It’s weird but I think the value I get from notes is in the writing of them, it’s a way of thinking rather than for recall.
Agreed, I always add to the top of my note files. You can also use timestamps so you know when something was created. Nowadays I use this just like a notebook, adding new pages to the top. You can use it to write not only simple notes, but anything you want, like for example the 1st draft of a book or report you're creating. Even some coding can be done this way.
It really is in the writing and not the referencing 95% of the time. That's why I tend to hand-write my notes. If it 's something I think I should have for reference, I'll transcribe, bookmark a reference, or something.
I live in iOS notes. I can access them from phone, home and work computers. I have a work and non-work todo list and notes for about a million other things. Whenever I book a flight or hotel or something, I just paste a screenshot of it in my todo note. No more digging up details from an email or searching through some other system. I even wrote a book using iOS notes as my primary research recording tool.
I am convinced that this is how you could run a successful sales team in the ~dozens at a software company before needing a dedicated crm. We prematurely opted for a crm once we had five sales folks and so many calories were burned just managing the systems to ensure the data was just so. "Clean data" was our obsession. Huge waste of time.
If I had to do it all over again, I'd do it how we started: sales meeting every Monday. Open last week's meeting text file. Review the current status of deals. Remove ones that are dead, add ones that are new, update ones that changed. Save file. See you next week.
A lot of my notes and tasks wind up having bits of code and sometimes large data files associated with them, so I've landed on a similar path of using plain text/org mode files, but aided by a little shell function `today` that creates-if-not-exists a new subdirectory named for the date whenever I use it:
function today() {
TODAY_DIR="$HOME/today/"
DATE_DIR=$(date +'%Y-%m-%d')
if [ ! -d $TODAY_DIR$DATE_DIR ];
then
mkdir -p $TODAY_DIR$DATE_DIR
fi;
echo $TODAY_DIR$DATE_DIR
}
So I just do something like `emacs $(today)/tasks.org`. Easy to grep across time, copy things forward (I guess I could do with having `yesterday` and `tomorrow` as well). It's really nice to just use basic CLI tools and little scripts to manage notes and todo lists. Project specific stuff gets a subfolder name every day so it's easy enough to glob ~/today/*/{project}/....
It's a sort of landing zone for all of the miscellaneous artifacts I might deal with on a given day as well:, e.g. `wget -P $(today) https://site.net/cooldata.gzip`.
I use a google spreadsheet. Shortcut on my phone home screen so I can add items any time easily.
I log all my lab work and how many hours I've worked in a day and it calculates my hours in a separate tab automatically. Items I need to follow up on are in bold, and get unbolded when I've followed up on them. When I have to write a report, everything is there in chronological order and it is super easy to take the relevant lines and write out the path of my work. When I get into the lab, I open my sheet and bam! I'm right where I left off before I can have the first sip of coffee.
> I use a google spreadsheet. Shortcut on my phone home screen so I can add items any time easily.
And if you aren't already doing this, you can set up a Google Form for mobile that asks for input and then puts the data into the spreadsheet. I do this for exercise tracking and it works great.
txt file is great. Makes me wonder, does the author always have their laptop on them since that's the only place I know of where a txt file can live? Do they go to sleep and wake up next to their laptop?
I've always been an iPhone user and have never seen a .txt file on one and probably you wouldn't be able to edit one on an iPhone if you did have it in Files app - I'm not counting Notes app as a text file here.
I do quarterly notes inside of Notes app but it mostly non-work related stuff and doesn't integrate well with desktop since its kind of a pain to login to iCloud from browser. Quarterly notes bc once the note gets too long, it gets very laggy on phone and is difficult to navigate; i.e. getting to the bottom to write a new line can be tough on mobile.
I use Termux on my Android phone and sync my text-files using git or fossil, just like how I sync between laptops/desktops. I run Emacs in Termux (but vim and many other text editors are also available, for those that prefer those). No need for special apps or cloud stuff, just syncing the plain files and using the same software I use on bigger computers.
There are multiple text editors that work just fine on iPhone, certainly on Android as well. Textastic and Runestone are two for iOS (there are more). They read and write text files just fine. You can even keep them version controlled in Github or other Git systems using Working Copy, which allows flexibility in modifying the text file in multiple locations.
https://gitjournal.io/ is something I've started using recently. I edit Markdown notes on my mobile device, and they are then automatically synced to a Git repository.
Yeah I don't either, I have to use onenote at work and i use obsidian personally. I'd be a lot more productive if I'd be able to use obsidian there though. Onenote is a turd.
90% of the time I try to come up with systems more elaborate than a spreadsheet, I realize I’ll spend longer designing and maintaining it than I will actually using it. You really only see those efficiencies across larger organizations and even then it isn’t a given these sorts of systems will be well-maintained, and the benefits they provide are usually not so much efficiency as standardizing the way that users record data. This standardization is in turn mostly useful because it allows larger groups of people to coordinate across time and space (e.g. calendar events, and records of those calendar events for employees who joined years after they occurred).
At an individual level you’re basically always better off using text files as the equivalent of a machine-readable blank piece of paper to scrawl notes on with minimal (if any) thought being given to other features.
Have used this approach for 8 years. Only improvement I can recommend is creating a new txt every quarter (or so) and manually adding everything back to the list to declutter. Works better than any todo app I’ve used (dozens).
I've been using this method for 25 years, but ruthlessly delete completed tasks and things I decided I don't want to do after all. Kind of like inbox 0, but for my _todo.txt
I would probably keep my notes if I had to report to anybody or needed to keep a track of what I was doing, but luckily I haven't needed to do that for a long time.
Same, I have one living document that is constantly being updated with TODOs, questions, notes, but once they are done or irrelevant, I delete them. I am actually surprised how many people here use append-only approaches.
Usually my experience is stuff just slowly drifts into irrelevance. Sometimes people ask me for performance numbers or error messages that are 3 months old and I can find them with a backsearch. On the other hand there's implementation ideas that are years old which are perfectly decent and would probably be improvements, but nobody has ever gotten around to them. Letting them gradually slide upwards out of mind seems appropriate. The only thing I do is archive the old file once a year at new-years to prevent any editor slowdown.
One thing I would like about this system is that I wouldn't get incessant notifications about things I haven't yet done lol. I do think that building a habit to check on a txt file periodically (like the author says) to stay on top of things is better for emotional health than a wall of notifications on the phone lock screen that I've been conditioned to just tap on and select "Remind me tomorrow " without even thinking.
Knowing myself, though, I don't think I'd keep up with this since it would take mental strength on my part to overthink the data structure for the task entry. I've been thinking about how I might also track emotional impact of my todo items on me. I wonder if the open nature of a txt file would be good for instant journaling about things that give me stress?
I really like having some guardrails when it comes to organizing thoughts so this system might not be for me. Also building up the daily habit to organize the todos at the end of each day is something I'd probably struggle with for a while. I do agree that is a great habit to have, still.
You can use your note files for journaling as well. I always add new content on the top with a timestamp, it works just like having a physical notebook where you add new pages, only these new pages go to the top.
I use tasks.org android app (I use my smartphone for everything (except programming or server administration) as I love cellphones and portability)
Tasks.org has cool filter system, which alongside it's widget makes me list of everything that's important to me just on home screen of my smartphone.
For example, I can make a filter "tasks starting today, priority yellow or higher, lists "personal" or "projects", sorr by due date). And make corresponding widget.
Samsung OneUI has widget carousel feature, so I make multiple widgets with different filters and switch by swiping. Very convinent.
Also tasks.org support syncing to nextcloud, but I keep it disabled due to tons of bugs in nextcloud itself.
I make separate list for everything not important at current period of my life, so I can review it later (usually once a week or once a month, my life is very unstable and unpredictable to tell more exactly)
I use this for about a year, so it's not so well tested workflow, but for now it works better than other variants I tried.
I do something similar - I create a "2025December.md" file each month (with proper year/month obviously) and have a bullet list of everything I'm working on/trying to keep track of. I also use it as a scratchpad for whatever, and writing down notes for projects. Each day I insert a "#### 11 Dec 2025" heading at the bottom of the file, then just copy over everything relevant from the previous entry.
It's stored in my Dropbox so it is always backed up, though it is not VCS'd.
It's worked for me for years, far better than any app. Too, I have full control over it, and years of the data, free for processing by any tools/LLMs that I might want (I haven't wanted such a thing so far, but maybe I will).
Everyone talks about txt files and editors etc, but my main driver is actually paper.
Every morning I pickup a sheet of used paper, and on the backside of it I hand-copy unfinished todos from the previous day. I write down every important details from that day on that paper. At the end of the day, it goes into a file folder for future references.
Actually I got this habit while working in the military, where I received a 1-page-long daily status report every morning. I used that to keep track of both organization status and my daily tasks. I did use this log to analyze, design and optimize procedures, one of which involved over 100 tasks.
Searching over this record can be problematic, but most of the time I have auxiliary records like email, message, call history, etc, which can help me with tracking down “when” things happened. It’s not much different from digging into system log.
However, I think, with the rise of LLMs, perhaps it’s about time to migrate to txt finally.
I envy people that stick for a system like this for so long. Because when you master it, it is when you can build a system around it. For this piece, i suggest the author to build his own frontend app, that mimics this system but with a better, clean UI interface. Hell, he can just vibe code it in under a hour these days and at the end leverage the ergonomics of a clean interface, and of course implement integrations that the app will enables, to build systems around it, to become even more productive.
- Compatible with all backup systems and most version control systems
Have you considered that stuff like this is already "more productive" for fluent users than almost any alternative could be?
Somewhere along the line, product people started to mistake following design trends and adding complexity for productivity, forgetting that delivering the right combination of fluency, stability, simiplicity are often the real road to maximizing it.
The portability thing can't be stressed more. It took me ages to liberate my notes from onenote cloud when I moved over to obsidian. Which is of course exactly the point of Microsoft's.
Why would he want to waste a single iota of effort trying to improve something that was working just fine for fourteen years when he wrote this post three years ago? What’s gonna be easier to use than the text editor he knows how to drive without a single thought? What does he gain by taking a simple text file he can sync to any device and replacing it with a database bound to a custom app that he now has to keep running? I mean besides the risk that an OS update will break this app and now he can’t get anything else done until he fixes it, because he’s the only person maintaining it? Most of the interaction is still going to be typing in free-form text, how is taking his hand off the keyboard to poke at a “new task” widget going to make it better and cleaner than just typing return, dash, space? What GUI kit is not going to fall over and whimper when you hand it 51k items to render? What does he gain by spending days trying different ways to get around that interface design problem in hopes of finding one as seamless as his simple text editor?
Why build an app? It seems the whole benefit here is it doesnt need any app. Its completely agnostic and simple. The value is in the data and the way he enters it in.
It sounds like a good system but i still believe it takes the discipline of a strong willed person to do the system no matter what system you use.
If i did this i would give up after 2 days. He says he redoes his list every night ready for the next day —- THAT is the secret here, not the specific system he uses.
I’ve tried all sorts over the years different tools, different systems , different philosophies, inbox zero, gtd etc They don’t work for me. I get by with a notepad and pen and i write lists as and when. Theres people out there and some even have YouTube channeks dedicatd to disseminating their productivity hack and workflows for evey tool
Imaginable, and they are really enthusiastic about it.
I updated it substantially via AI this summer (includes micros, compounds, and various other stats and a webpage with charts now) and then I started making diet changes based on these new features. Is really neat to compare data from before and after those changes. And like you suggested, I keep making improvements to the system and to myself and it becomes really satisfying / motivational.
My daily driver! Considering how much time I spend with these tools, it's surprising that I had relatively few iterations over the years.
I have two major use cases:
1) a TODO list
2) longer texts (project plans, travel plans, shopping lists for things to buy sometimes in the next 6 months (e.g. books to read), etc.).
The TODO list is my daily driver. As the family became larger, it became difficult to track what needs to be done the next day (including simple things, like "give a daily dose of vitamin", "clean & lube the bike chain every 2w"). For a very long time, I used pen & paper. It was OK, used it for years, but it didn't scale so well with kids. An Android TODO/reminder app with notifications and repeats was a life saver. I used BZ Reminder (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bzzzapp) which ticked all the boxes. But the author decided to downgrade the lifetime licences to periodic... It's still not expensive but I don't approve the behavior. After trying out a dozen of similar apps, I ended up with "Reminders: Todo List & Notes" (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pocketbril...). I can't live without a tool like this anymore. TBH, pen & paper TODO lists are still around.
For the longer texts I used an offline wiki (ZIM) for quite some time. Then gradually moved to Google Keep (simple, can accept text & lists, and can be shared). The Keep collection kept growing. With both lists and texts. It's pretty bad input method, but its simplicity kept me using it for years. Now I'm happy with simple txt files (syced between phone & PCs, and properly backed up).
This was my system for a long time and I eventually moved to Notesnook with success, but I bounced off so many notes apps before it. I don't know why, but the feature set had to be just right because one little thing would keep me from sticking with anything else. Plain text files are great and served me well but don't lose hope that some new option could come along and be an improvement.
While we're here, let me go ahead and once again give much praise to https://zim-wiki.org , my daily driver for most things in my life.
It was really interesting to see the sort of "second stage" discovery of things like this when obsidian got hot, and I toyed with many of those for a while.
And the end result was me getting even further back into doing what zim does, and even finding new cool little time savers (e.g. interwiki links).
I have circled back to using the apps that are already on my phone, especially the Apple Reminders app which I am currently trying out as my main notes and ideas system.
I have placed it as one of the two bottom widgets on the lock screen which gives me immediate access to everything I need to capture a thought: a main note, the list where I want to store it (e.g., work or personal), the notes field if more context is needed, and I can flag it or schedule a reminder. The app then also has an optional auto-categorize feature which works quite well. Add to that reliable sync across devices and except for a good way to bulk export lists, this has everything I want from a quick draft and capture system.
-rw-r--r-- 1 nick nick 691 Mar 16 2001 2001-03.txt
I separated mine by YYYY-MM which is long enough to keep related things together but short enough where it's easy to find things within a single file. It's all super easy to grep things out on demand.
There's no procrastination about organizing or perfect tags. Just brain dump the thought or notes and move on with life.
https://github.com/nickjj/notes was created so I can type things like `notes hello world` and it inserts it for the correct YYYY-MM or `notes` to open the current YYYY-MM in your $EDITOR. It supports piping into it too (good for pasting from your clipboard). It's ~40 lines of shell scripting with comments.
> There's no procrastination about organizing or perfect tags. Just brain dump the thought or notes and move on with life.
I keep my notes on paper and write them in real time, so I agree with this very strongly. I manage to keep up with the real world despite this.
My paper indexing system is two simple things.
1) Write in the next available space. When done writing I draw a dividing horizontal line straight across the whole page. Just above this line I assign it a serial number in a little box.
2) Starting from the back of the last page, I keep metadata for each entry. Usually topic tags, but sometimes it's more involved. I usually do this when I am under less time pressure. It doesn't even have to be the same day. I'm not strict about completeness because if I don't care... well I don't care.
Earlier, I had a simpler todo system using pen and paper. There was a weekly list which exchanged tasks with daily list. The daily tasks were prioritized in three categories immediately, today, and this week.
Now since I am managing multiple teams, this is not longer scalable. Also majority of work revolves around Slack. People post stuff that I need to follow up at a later stage. I copy these posts and put them into the todo list file.
1. As text files get longer you lose view of things unlike paper. I still feel limited and strong difficulty in fully adopting an online todo system.
2. Many other stuff like Slack threads are difficult to get into todo files. They also lose context. This I would say is a modern problem.
I use sheets of junk paper (e.g. stuff I got in the mail that is only printed on one side). I keep an "active" one that I cross stuff out from, etc. When I start a new one (about once a week) I go through the old one and port over any remaining items; most of the time I discard the whole thing since it's no longer relevant. If there are important items that are just too big to handle I'll transcribe it to my Calendar, Linear, Reminders app, etc.
To me this is a good balance of:
- Writing things down is the major benefit for me, writing down on physical paper is even more helpful.
- Forces me to garbage collect irrelevant stuff.
- I don't need an app or even to buy paper really.
Same here, what ever tools I tried, I keep going back to my txt files. Now I use cursor to edit these txt files and get some amazing auto suggestions given the rich context!
A super simple solution that works for me is Signal's "Note to self" chat, I just write to myself and it works as a diary/ephemeral todo list. Easily accessible across multiple devices and can be backed up, including recently introduced cloud backups.
If I want some dedication information "pinned" so I don't lose track of it, I just create a dedicated group chat for that topic.
I used Notational Velocity for years. I loved its free form approach to note taking and searching, but I needed a cross platform solution with files that could be shared using Dropbox.
I now just use three text files open in Sublime Text: todo-today.txt, todo-this-week.txt, and todo-later.txt. I review them daily and promote todos to the next file when appropriate.
Personally, I just use obsidian notes. Its simple enough, uses markdown, syncs to my phone. I like to break projects/problems out into checklists. Helps keep me motivated.
I don't use the 'linking' feature between notes. The whole 'second brain' thing seems like something you do to make a neat screenshot of your note graph. I just use regular old folders like a file directory. My notes have gotten a little messy though.
The only extra thing is I set up autohotkey macros
For example typing $today or $yesterday will insert the date with a dividing line underneath to separate days into clear blocks
I've tried a lot of different note apps and what I eventually realized is that when it comes to work, I generally don't actually care about old notes 98% of the time.
I only really care about the last week or two and when everything is in one file its optimized for viewing that, like a working memory.
The text file ends up gigantic but its still small data for a computer even after many years of adding to a single file and searching is still fast.
I am incredibly jealous of people for who this works for. Mine just become too unwieldy to manage or work with because they grow out in a crazy fashion.
My "productivity solution" is currently TriliumNotes with three work spaces as 1) Planner with sub notes for year, month, day 2) Brain Dump with subnotes for year and month 3) Projects with sub notes for each project. I manage tasks with Vikunja and then my time with Google Calendar.
It's an absolute mess, but it's the closest I've gotten to a solution that works the way my brain does.
Thank you for sharing. I feel similar to you; jealous this system works for others, sounds like a dream, but too overwhelming for me once it hits some point of no return. Your structure sounds interesting.
I'm genuinely curious how others do not get overwhelmed or sucked into yak-shaving some reorganization of a system like this.
Google Keep for me is the way to go. Easy to use on desktop or mobile, can "share" anything with it. I like to make notes with various titles & colors that I use to organize my life/thoughts.
Agreed. I'm working on a small GUI that just appends to a local .ndjson file. A user just posts with a text box into a feed. Like a one person chat or tweeting into the void. And a local LLM picks apart metadata, storing just enough to index where answers to future questions will be. Then you can use slash commands to get at the analysis like "/tasks last month" or "/summarize work today" etc.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, but I agree at least in principle. There should be some means to index/search this kind of semi-structured text. Summaries are also nice, but not as useful to me at least.
Like the author I also do tagging, but in the real world some notes will eventually slip through the cracks. Even when it's just one, that's probably the one you're looking for. :)
I have a file like this, several years long, but parsed with YAML so that each day is clearly separated from the next, and for list parsing, and for dictionary parsing so each project I work on is associated with a YAML dictionary key. I can go back in time and easily find notes related to specific projects or specific dates.
I've had a similar system for a while, but the primary pain point is the lack of access on iPhone / iPad. Giant text files are laggy, dropbox integration is poor, etc. A custom app that interacts with the text file might be the best bet :D
What I realized at least for me is that work notes and personal notes are two different use cases
The .txt file approach works for work stuff because I never need to reference it on mobile, if I'm doing software development I need to be on a computer anyway.
Whereas personal stuff I need an actual notetaking app like Notion for the mobile usability
I've been doing pretty much the same thing since 2019. The only big change I made was in early 2023, when I started saving a new version of the long txt file each day. It works very well for me but I recognize it isn't the right system for everyone!
I use Google Calendar as my todo list. Syncs across devices. Notifications. Share with Family & Work. Repeating tasks. Supports notes and attachments. Multiple Lists (calendars). Free.
I read this a few years ago and start to doing that. And I never looked back. I can search what i did on a specific day, search for a task and see all the traces, having it accessible over dropbox.
No upgrade CTA, no nonsense. now even I can feed it to llm and get feedback about my planning, routines and everything
I ended up doing a similar thing when I was a contractor. Just a really long note file that I'd track everything I was doing.
Relatedly, I find all of the todo/task management apps to be utterly overwhelming for my person tasks. I'm so tired of all of the task apps adding way too much complexity.
All I want is:
* Something that's available on all of my devices.
* Can be ordered by sections
* Triage
* Now
* Today
* Tomorrow
* Soon
* Eventually
* Whenever (when-never)
* Let's me add a task without thinking (default to triage)
There is also this article today: https://jon.recoil.org/blog/2025/12/an-svg-is-all-you-need.h... about how great good ol' svg is. And then every recurring article about using RSS instead of all the other siloed products.
textfiles, makefiles, perl, php, rss, text based email, news groups, irc, icq, vim/emacs, sed, awk; all better than the crap they have spawned that is supposed to be "better".
Out of curiosity, what technology in the past 5 years do you use that you actually find better than something from 20 years ago?
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