Articles tagged as "productivity"

I have had a mixed relationship with task management software over the years. Sometimes it seems to jive and I am excited to add tasks into it, and other times I leave it to slowly decay until I notice the subscription bill and cancel. One piece of software that I keep coming back to is Vikunja, which is completely open-source and can be either self-hosted, or you can use the hosted option and have it all taken care of for you on Vikunja cloud. Here, I will go over a super easy way to setup vikunja on a debian vps, and then use the vja command line tool to manage tasks from the command line. On mobile, you can either use the Vikunja web app, or tasks.org which will sync through Caldav.

I have been on a journey recently to discover more terminal tools. Having them close by while working in things like neovim reduces the number of times that I need to bounce around in the browser or the number of applications that I need to install on my machine. Currently I just use alacritty, firefox, and thunderbird and that’s pretty much it. Today I added taskwarrior to the growing list of applications I can use from within the terminal.

I am always skeptical of techniques (specifically apps) that claim to be “life changing”. Todo software has always been the one thing that never stuck for me. After trying everything from Vikunja to todoist I was ready to throw in the towel on the idea for good. Then Habitica came along, and has changed a lot of things for the better.

I have a bad habit of jumping on the latest and greatest quite quickly. Whether that’s notetaking applications like Obsidian or Logseq, a read-it-later application like raindrop.io or Omnivore, or a text-editor like VSCodium or Lunarvim I have gone through quite a lot of change in 2023. In the year ahead, I would like to slow down and take better stock of what is working, and trim down what isn’t. In addition to just having less to generally worry about, this will also allow me to use annual pricing to save money.

You wake up in a tizzy, barely cognizant of the day, and pick up your phone to silence that incessant alarm. Next, a quick glance at the notifications for the day. Congratulations, you’re already behind. Six emails (two of high importance), ten messages, and a gazillion news articles. Oh? What’s this? Ding! Congratulations, you just got 10% off your next Uber Eats order! Lucky you.

Recently, I have made it a priority to learn vim, first starting out with the key bindings and then eventually transitioning to developing in Lunarvim. To be blunt, it sucks — I can feel my stress levels rise as I try to remember how to do something simple like delete a letter. Using it feels unnecessarily complicated, and it is frustrating to have to do things so much slower than I am used to.

Being productive can feel like joining a cult. Everybody seems to have the best system in place, touting their methods through videos, blog posts, and tutorials. To begin, simply install five applications on your mobile phone, integrate them with your desktop software, simultaneously track your mood through a journal app, and don’t forget to intersperse 5-minute breaks to maximize your focus. By the time you jump between clicking boxes and fixing bugs, you might be lucky to have time left over to actually work. It’s overly complex because it needs to be; otherwise it wouldn’t be novel and would make for a terrible video.