How do you Organize Your Life (Productivity Tips)?

Mixolyde wrote:
Chairman_Mao wrote:

We put a big dry erase sheet on our dining area wall. Easiest way for kids to see what's up.

How do you organize that sheet?

It's pretty big, about 3ft wide and 6ft high, so there's a fair bit of space to section it out. We have sections for things that change regularly like this week's weather and dinner, weekend to-do's, and things that are fixed like stuff that needs to be done before playing video games, chores, birthday tracker. We also have seasonal sections like holiday planning. Dry erase makes it pretty easy to change sections as needed.

The bottom is near the ground and typically gets used by the little one to draw.

misplacedbravado wrote:

ARISE ONCE MORE!

I'm re-evaluating how I organize some things and thought I'd try to revive this thread a little.

This time a year ago I was still trying to use Outlook to manage my to-do lists. Then I gave Microsoft To-Do a try and came to like it even less. Eventually I settled on Todoist and have been happily using it for work stuff for the last several months now. I'd love to have come back to Things, but I use Windows at work and want my to-do application to run on my computer and not just my phone.

For some reason, I haven't gotten Todoist to stick for home/personal stuff. Tody has been great for keeping track of household chores. Maybe I'm just resistant to structuring my personal time.

I've been using Evernote for years for personal/hobby stuff and I'm getting to the point where a file structure on my computer isn't cutting it any more for meeting notes, code snippets, and other work stuff. So I'm trying to decide whether to create a free Evernote account for my work stuff, or try something else. Here's where I'd love to hear from people who switched from Evernote to other tools -- what are you using now and what was the transition like?

I did briefly attempt migrating to Joplin because, hey, open-source, but something in the export/import process lost attachments and formatting and generally wrecked all my web clippings.

For whatever reason OneNote and I just don't get along. I've been hearing a lot about Notion and Obsidian lately but haven't tried either yet.

I'd be basically starting from scratch for the work stuff, but a smooth and complete import from Evernote would be a prerequisite for me to move my personal stuff into a new tool.

I'm stuck on Evernote. Over the last several years their prices have gone up, and their app was nearly-unusable for awhile on MacOS. But, I subscribed again when they had a half-off option because I'm in the same boat that you are. I feel like I want something other than Evernote, but I haven't found that environment that does things as cleanly as Evernote.

I've tried Notion, but I just felt like I was spending all my time working around its formatting options rather than just seamlessly entering text. It has a lot of options for doing things like Kanban boards, but it just felt clunky to use. I tried Joplin briefly, but deleted it pretty quickly. I also bounced off of OneNote...hard. And I'm not about to try Google Keep after all the things they've killed over the years.

So, if you find something you like, please do share!

I tried switching over from Evernote to OneNote a few years back, but that didn't work. Mostly because OneNote works in a completely different way though. OneNote has been my default work note app (customer meeting reports, internal info, ...) and I'm very happy with that. But those notes were organized from the ground up in the app, and that makes all the difference.

I've been increasingly dissatisfied with Evernotes' sales popups, constant updates and how it organizes notes - then suggests a subscription upgrade when I try to personalize the dashboard. But I will keep using it for private notes, migrating to OneNote takes too much effort.

I still use Microsoft To Do for task lists, for work tasks as well as private (Christmas presents to buy, grocery list, ...). Its simplicity is a feature not a bug, especially as both my wife and I use it together.

I use to use evernote and then onenote. Now I use Scrivener which people mainly use to right books for stuff I was using evernote and onenote for.

I use google Keep for To Do lists and lists in general. I use to use Colornote which was pretty good,. I think I switched over to Keep because I could access it on my phone and PC.

I think the key to any To Do list is remembering to look at it.

I think the key to any To Do list is remembering to look at it.

Very much so. Which is probably why I prefer the flawed but simpler solutions to the customizable niche ones. It's very convenient to sync To Do across devices simply by logging into my Microsoft account, flawed as the solution may be. Any barriers to just look at it would be too high to overcome, defeating its entire purpose.

Evernote that's more about vendor lock-in

For anyone who is in the macOS/iOS/iPadOS ecosystem, I highly recommend checking out the default Reminders and Notes apps. They’ve come a long way and I’ve fully cut over to using them for my personal needs. They are still fairly basic from a features standpoint, but are quite nice overall.

For work though, I’m also using Microsoft To Do and OneNote, mainly because of how well the Office apps all work on Windows together.

I use a variety of things and tweak sometimes, but I can get lost down that road (e.g., theming Obsidian) so I try to minimize it.

For notes and such at work, I really wanted to like OneNote but I hate mousing around the UI. I had been using vimwiki and still like it. For a few months now I’ve been trying Obsidian. I like it because it’s themable and has an option to support vim keybinds built-in. The plugin system is nice and includes a vimrc plugin that allows for whatever configuration is available in CodeMirror’s vim emulation. I like that notes are in Markdown and it’s mostly compatible with vimwiki, though I haven’t made the two cross paths.

For tasks, I’ve been a Remember The Milk subscriber for years now, and I kind of use it, but when a thing needs to get done and isn’t a project in its own right, it goes in Reminders in iOS. RTM is sort of aspirational but I hold on to that hope.

PaladinTom wrote:

For anyone who is in the macOS/iOS/iPadOS ecosystem, I highly recommend checking out the default Reminders and Notes apps. They’ve come a long way and I’ve fully cut over to using them for my personal needs. They are still fairly basic from a features standpoint, but are quite nice overall.

For work though, I’m also using Microsoft To Do and OneNote, mainly because of how well the Office apps all work on Windows together.

I use Notes and Reminders and both are great. They also work great with Siri so it makes adding to lists and creating notes very easy. It's really the only time i use a voice assistants.

I tried Notion and it was just too much for what I need. If somethings more complicated than I need it to be i'll never end up using it.