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.
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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.
Why are you working in personal time?
My ssh config has
RemoteCommand=/usr/bin/tmux -u new-session -A -s laptopforHost *
TaskWarrior
I make use of flowtime, which is an timer app similar to pomodoro but with a smarter system for scheduling breaks. Instead of having a set time to go on break you can go on break anytime, and the app calculates a good break time. It also shows your working statistics, which is quite cool to see.
This sounds interesting I did have some success with Pomodoro but stopped for some reason. I’ll try flowtime out, thanks!
Love Flowtime, I use it almost every time I need to work on something other than my full-time job
Anyone here have any experience with Anytype?
I tried it, but I will stick to Obsidian
Obsidian flatpak with network disabled
Not FOSS unfortunately.
Therefore disable networking…
Useful, I’m open to non-FOSS if I really have to and no networking helps.
I use emacs, Denote, and markdown-mode to keep a loose Zettlekasten archive of notes.
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.
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.
Nextcloud Calendar is where I’m blocking out my time. I use a proprietary task app with a Linux client because tasks.org/former Astrid/nextcloud tasks isn’t quite there yet… for me. If I was creating a system to keep me on track today, I would center the whole thing on Nextcloud. The one thing I despise about nextcloud is how it handled locales and formats. There is no easy way to move to YYYY-MM-DD and HH-DD without messing up other stuff like day of the week captions language. The thing I love about nextcloud is how it doesn’t spam you with garbage recommendations and clutter and such like Outlook.
selfhosted searchengine . i see zero reason not to.
Please elaborate, I’ve been interested in this for awhile - what do you use/recommend for someone who’s new?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Lucene
there are many other options, also.
I’m certain you can think of a reason not to if you really try.
too lazy.
i love google.
Whoogle (through Tor)? ;)
Or searx??
i was thinking more of a narrow information retrieval system. as opposed to doing random exploration and discovery.
@leanleft Right.
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”.
Literally what I use virtual desktops to solve
So you keep a project open in the Virtual Desktop and then boot it up when you are working on it?
Virtual desktop =/= virtual machine
I think gnome calles them workspaces. This article is old and gnome-specific, but it gives you a good idea of what they are.
https://www.maketecheasier.com/how-to-work-with-workspaces-gnome/
They’re not talking about a virtual machine. There is no “booting up”.
You can have multiple desktops in linux, I personally use three, which you can switch between using a keyboard shortcut (or widget/ taskbar item).
It’s kinda like turning one computer into multiple computers that you hop between on demand.
I have one for gaming and entertainment, one for work, and a third for personal projects.
How does resource management work for desktops? Is the computer running all of the processes in the background as though they are just minimized?
Yes. Or out of focus. If you have one monitor, three virtual desktops would be like having three monitors. Looking at a different one, doesn’t stop anything running on another. You can also “send” a window on one desktop to another, equivalent to dragging a window from one monitor to another when using two or more.
KDE Activities is a similar feature, but it can actually suspend everything running in a certain “activity” when you switch to another, if that’s something you want.
Ah KDE activities might be what I’m looking for then. I am planning to transition from Gnome to KDE very soon.
It’s essentially the same as having more monitors, except you can only see the active ones. Nothing changes except what your displays are showing.
Ah thanks for the clarification. I never did manage to use Virtual Desktops effectively but it sounds like the problem was me trying to use them within the workflow rather than for different projects. I always found it difficult to switch compared with just having an extra monitor.
I do worry it might be quite resource intensive just sitting loads in the background though.
I’m going to give it a try!
distrobox too
Is it possible to “save” those sessions between reboots? That would be awesome.
I do with KWin rules. It’s not elegant but it doesn’t require coding
Thank you, I will look into KWin.
Turns out, it is awesome and does more than I need. I already move a lot of my applications with xdotool to prediscribed positions and sizes, via hotkeys, which start some scripts. Now I found out, it also can move them across virtual desktops. Nice :)
That and using multiple instances of the browser instead of one instance with many tabs helped me a lot. If i have to switch tasks i go to a new workspace and only open the software related to that task there. Once I’m done i just close everything in the workspace and move back to the previous one that is the same way it was before i switch.
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Kde activities should suit this well since it’s integrated to the level of the file viewer.
QubesOS is this on crack
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 ;-)
Just because the phrasing of this post implies Obsidian is OSS, just FYI to others, it isn’t 😢
Also +1 for Vikunja! 👍
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.
Try bare git repos over chemo, I’ve been much happier with that over chezmoi
As a programmer most of my utilities are CLI oriented.
zsh
fzf (integrated into zsh, improves reverse search, killing processes and more)
zoxide - for quicker navigation into folders I visit often
Other programs I use from time to time:jq,btop,bat.Flameshot - best screenshotting tool for linux (and also windows)
Redshift/Gammashift - blue light filter
ddccontrol - controlling monitor brightness and contrast without having to fiddle with buttonsLast but not least my Awesome WM (tiling) config - makes working with multiple windows/desktops so easy.
+1 for these that I also use : fzf flameshot and redshift !
Ooh flames hot does look interesting! Thanks, I’ll check it out
Make the print screen button call
flameshot guiand you’re golden
Could you share your config for Awesome? I’m toying with the idea of moving to a tiling WM.
I don’t really have it ready to publicize but it’s based on powerarrow-dark from awesome-copycats github repo (I have mainly removed things I don’t use and added some more mappings like media keys etc).
Have a look at Super Productivity it is a todo list app with projects, time tracking, break time reminder. It is completely offline, no registration required.
emacs org-mode
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!
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.
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.
This is the way.
Nothing comes even close. I just wish there was a distributed / mobile-enabled way to use org-mode. I guess there exists some project, but running full emacs org-mode mobile is hardly usable.
I got acceptable results with org-roam cooperating with logseq. It took some fiddling with org IDs, config and a bit of elisp, but it’s stable enough for me.
How did you handle note interlinking?
I forced logseq to use relative file links and skipped backlinking in org-roam. However, it looks like logseq now supports org-id links with backlinking. I might need another script to convert :).
Would you mind sharing your experience and/or the script? Would be nice for the community!
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True. And I wanted to know how they keep that in tandem with org mode. Because the wiki style links logseq uses don’t seem to work with other applications
I though the interlinking worked for org but not md?
Need to use strokes to make gestures for cycling, todo cycling, etc and see how it works.
Just Emacs in general
I’m a Vim user to my core, but I still use org-mode with this plugin (and Orgzly on Android) because of how useful it is.
Highly recommend pairing this with David Allen’s GTD and Rainer König’s excellent course Getting yourself organized with Org-mode
I’ve recently started replacing most of my shell usage with org mode and babel, along with GitHub copilot and similar LLM backed tools it’s like autocomplete on steroids
OBSIDIAN!
Obsidian is not open source.
not really open source, but all of your data is safe as markdown files. While normally prefer FOSS applications, I make an acception for Obsidian, because nothing really matches it
Not even logseq?
In my experience, nope. I tried so hard to use Logseq, but I had massive issues with speed, stability, and database corruption.
Really I think the root of the issue is their database. The database causes so many problems and makes their synchronization methods dirty hacks at best.
