How do you organize your life?

Calendar, large plain text notes file, VA helping with things, travel agent

[delayed]

Large plain text file, with Things app to take on-the-go notes.

I basically don’t. For work I track in-flight items and a backlog of possible things to do next in a text file. Meetings are in the work outlook calendar. Other than that I just wing it. I’ve found anything else just takes time and doesn’t improve my success or happiness.

GitHub issues. I have a repo called `me` and I create issues in it.

It all revolves around labels, and I store just about everything there, from lists of web design inspiration to random ideas I come up with (each labelled appropriately, in those cases with "list" and "Idea" respectively). It's particularly useful for tracking todos, since I can just close the issue once I finish the todo.

Todoist (todoist.com) for me :). Though wish it also had Notes, or other persistent non-task based storage as one can sometimes close out an item that was meant to be informational/lookup (such as family info, or other persistent notes). That issue aside it's still my instant go-to for adding tasks, reviewing what's next, and generally seeing how far behind I am on all my goals :)).

There are some nice self-hosted open-source alternatives/copycats (https://alternativeto.net/software/todoist/), but I've been too lazy the last few years to try and the price is generally reasonable enough that I haven't been too motivated.

Work wise, I have started just keeping a running google doc (I guess any doc would work) and I log whatever I do. I do share it with my boss but I have found it really personally motivating and helpful as a record.

I am less worried about getting things done on schedule in my personal life. For better or worse. I block out time on my calendar sometimes or create an event on my calendar in the future. I will also sometimes schedule send an email to myself as a reminder.

Email. All my notes, plans, todos, reminders (via snooze/send later) are in the email. I also use calendar to keep the family in sync. My current "life database" (i.e. inbox) is on the iCloud (like everything else, so it is good for Legacy Contact, when I pass away), though it was in google workspaces before and it can be on anything else in the future (including self-hosted server).

Perhaps my answer is a bit unconventional. I try to run my life around the idea of "challenges", and internal/external obstacles I need to "overcome" to get to the next stage. I try to put everything I am doing under a larger "overcome challenge" framework. When there is a concrete story I want to complete, something I wish to accomplish, it is just much easier to get going. Also, I encourage the people around me to identify and take challenges seriously. Humans are natural problem solvers and story addicts.

Calendar for appointments but that's about it.

I try to make my life a little more free-flowing so that it doesn't feel like work.

I live with a bit more spontaneity. Text my friends out for a spontaneous dinner, go out spontaneously with wife, make spontaneous weekend trips. Life seems more fun this way.

Email + Calendar on my own domain, with Google Workspace.

Edit: domain is .com (I don't trust ccTLDs) and paid for 10 years.

text files + Tasks app on android + Notally

I like to keep it simple and purge what's no longer needed. It probably looks heavy to anyone else than me, but I find it pretty compact.

I used to track things in Evernote, but now I have fallen in love with Obsidian and never looked back (migrated all notes there).

The UI is simple, so I focus on the content. As it is Markdown-based, I am not afraid to be locked in, and I back up everything with git.

I use the Calendar plugin, making creating daily (and weekly) notes easy. With each daily note, I write things in the style of Bullet Journal (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hLnY9L1c-M) - all things to do, but started from scratch (so I don't accumulate any TODO debt, which is a nightmare for many of us and people with ADHD in particular). I add all I did that day anyway (whether planned or not) - sometimes an "unproductive" day was full of chores and errands that I had forgotten about but were necessary.

Also, I have folders for drafts (of blog posts and long emails), practical notes (e.g. checklist for traveling), the archive (of re-usable things (e.g. my FB posts I might want to keep).

For me, large files containing everything make me feel lost and confused - all in all, you can easily search Markdown files - be it with Obsidian built-in search, Visual Studio Code, or anything else. YMMV.

I've being developing my own micro-cloud for the last ten years - There I've wrote my own email client, password manager, finance book, OTP, movies, music, notes, calendar, backup... and a lot of other micro apps. It works fantastic for me, and I'd recommend you to try setting up an instance of NextCloud, which can achieve similar results. My problem with org-mode, Obsidian, etc is that they are attention black holes, you focus all of your time installing plugins and configuring your workspace that by the time you're done with that you don't really feel like doing the real work. If that's your case, you might consider removing apps that hinder you ability to control your life and just use a simple, plain, gigantic markdown file and grow organically from there, with the focus being simplicity and 0 config.

Dont't "organize" your life. Live it!

you dont't organize eating, sleeping, shtting, loving,... Did you ever forgot to eat or hug your beloved one and organize a birthday party for your wife / children / whoever?

so why do you want to "organize" the other aspects of your life?

The only things i need to push me forward in the important aspects of my life are values*.

The values are working like a compass and pushing me fully "from self" in the right directions.

If one value is punctuality then you will find a natural way to reach this value.

If the Value is your own and it is real, then you will find various ways to reach it.

So go and look out for the real important values in your life. If you need "lists" or "organisation tricks" to reach goals, then, maybe, these goals are not your own goals.

Find them and the rest will follow :)

> now I am using Obsidian

Me too. Ever since starting on plain text methods that I read about a professor using on here, I have experimented with capturing a log of my todos using emacs along with other methods such as iOS Notes, Excel and email.

At the end of the day, I settled on Obsidian because I can sync the vault across my iOS devices and even create separate vaults for work to isolate notes or reminders. It has become a repo for a lot of my notes, ideas and is also designed well.

For day to day, I am able to keep reminders and tasks in the Things app (which shows my calendar, creates tasks from email and make tasks linkable)

The insight that worked for me is that it isn’t about the tools. Rather, it’s about having a solid plan, or methodology, that works for you, which can be implemented using whichever tools are convenient. Many folks, including me at one point, hop from one tool to another, looking for one that “feels right” and which will magically fix and organize your life.. or make you want to do that. Ain’t no such thing. But once you figure out the methodology, the rest slides into place.

Here[1] is the methodology that works for me. It enables long and short term planning and organization in accordance with my changing priorities and values.

[1]: https://sagar.se/blog/a-task-management-model/

I have three layers in my life, alongside a document silo.

On the bottom level, I use Trello with my wife. Longer term tasks are stored there, in a modified kanban-style board (multiple backlog queues, in progress, done, canceled). This is visited semi-regularly and updated. Also we plan bigger events like long travels and things involving both of us there.

On the day to day level, I use Pagico. Pagico is a personal "project management" application which can track multiple projects and store data about them. Work life and personal life has different spaces, and I can mix them together in Pagico to handle tasks in both places.

On the shortest term (minutes to hours), I use pen and paper. I always have an affinity to writing, so taking notes, writing sub tasks, etc. allows me to work with a lower mental load. This notebooks are scanned and shredded when they are full.

All important documents are stored in Evernote, shared with my wife.

This is the third or fourth iteration of my personal system, last revamped during the pandemic, in 2020. Before that I had a bullet-like journal I started before bullet-journalling craze, and overgrown it.

Please feel free to ask any further questions.

Apple Notes, syncs between phone, tablet, computer. I have a folder hierarchy there and I use checkboxes. It's not as structured as I would like but I have shortcuts to find the most commonly used documents.

Microsoft To Do for short stuff, Google Keep for long-form stuff, and Google Calendar for events. That's all I need really, and they're free.

I highly recommend org-roam. I also tried and did not stick with plain Org, because it becomes unwieldy trying to maintain structure as it grows large. Org-roam minimizes the friction for inserting information, which made it much easier for me to actually use it.

GTD with simple .MD files on Obsidian. Keep it simple. Make your reviews every week.

GTD, using a ring binder and a paper agenda.

i use a combo of trello and onenote

Live a simpler life. Optimize for spare time. Then you don't need all these tools to organize your chaos. Periodically, I get an urge to "organize" my life but when I start writing down digital TODO lists and fill in calendars they end up gaping almost empty, so I stop. Today, if I need to do something I write it down on a post-it and put it on my desk (right now there are two post-its with four bullet points). Those few time-sensitive events gets an event in the calender with associated alarm (this week it was two events).

Yes I do things, but those are hobbies and occasional hangouts, not hard to remember! :)

Ever-growing Google Docs text files tell you everything about my life, going back to about 2007. Bank balances, payment schedules, work tasks, personal tasks, items ordered, deliveries expected, and even a couple sentences about how I felt and what happened. As you might expect, there's a simple format that is followed for each day, so that someday I could parse these files into a database of some sort. During meetings, I type non-stop taking notes into this file. If I promise someone something, it goes into the file. Because of this, I can tell you that I did 'x' on Tuesday, March 12th, around 2pm, and for that it is invaluable because if I were to rely on my grey matter for all of this, I would fall flat on my face. If I promised someone something or began a task, it keeps getting rolled over into the next day's notes until it's complete. It is extremely uncommon for things to 'slip through the cracks' as a result.

It doesn't really matter which tool you use, as long as it's predictably formatted and easily searchable. There is simply no way I could deal with the insane demands of life without relying on an external memory. Google Docs is nice because it's highly available and replicates between desktop, macbook, and iphone almost instantly, such that I can leave one device and pick up the next without losing my 'memory'. This is one feature that I find extremely valuable.

I use text files. One text file per day, named `yyyy-MM-dd.yml`.

YAML! Shudder! But it's the best way I found to enter Markdown with some metadata at the top.

Each day file has multiple Yaml documents, with ids like `yyyy-MM-dd/number`. I use [ ] for todos and turn them into [x] when they are done. This way, searching/grepping for `[ ]` gives me a list of stuff not done yet. I sometimes have a list of things to do in my day. I move the `[ ]`s to the next day at the end of the current day (or start of the next).

I use Visual Studio Code snippets to enter the metadata.

Example:

    ---
    id: 2023-10-13/1
    links:
    tags:
    project:
    text: |
        This text field is **Markdown**, not **YAML**.

        - first note
            - [ ] todo 1
        - second note
      

The `links` item points to other notes by id (it's an array).

The idea of having ids with daily counters is from https://www.soenkeahrens.de/en/takesmartnotes.

[edits: formatting the yaml, mention 'how to take smart notes' book, mention that the `text` is Markdown]

It's kind of basic and error-prone but my girl and I share a private discord server where we share pictures, put notes about upcoming events, share links when planning, store our grocery lists, etc. I also use Notion for note taking. I haven't yet found a solution that I like for setting and achieving longer term goals.

Notes: A notes git repo that contains mostly Markdown files, which I write via Obsidian.md.

Action items: Github issues on that notes repo. I wrote some custom code that lets me snooze actions via Github labels and sets up certain tasks to appear automatically on a recurring schedule (e.g., replace the air filter in my house every 90 days).

This works really well for me, but sadly it is bad for collaborating on projects with less technical folks such as my wife.

I use a single never-ending text file for this, because I'm tired of dealing with remembering formats or apps. I've written about it here: https://jeffhuang.com/productivity_text_file/

Instead of planning, do retrospectives. Start journaling. It’s not the answer you are looking for, but it’s the answer you need. Don’t focus hard on what you *will* achieve. Instead, focus on what you have achieved.

Mostly markdown files in a private git repository using VSCode (Win) or Spck (Android). I tried Obsidian a while ago, but I can't remember what I disliked about it.

It’s a bit boring but I really like GTD. I’ve never read the book or gone too hard into the “rules” of GTD, but just using Omnifocus for a decade has basically got me into the habit of:

- do things that take less than 5 minutes when you hear about them

- throw things that might take longer than 5 minutes or require deciding something into an inbox

- sort thru it when you have a moment

- have an auto generated list of old tasks that haven’t been reviewed to ruthlessly delete

- have an auto generated list of tasks possible to do today

And that’s about it.

I don’t think it needs to be anything strict or super comprehensive; people are right in saying that you shouldn’t fully plan out your life. I don’t track anything bigger than “vacation” or “user story” as a project, just the tasks/checklists I know I need written down and want to get floated by me when actually relevant.

I really like Cal Newport's thinking in this area. Basically, yes, you need a system that you trust to keep yourself focused on what matters most in each of your roles. The specific tools don't matter and are often an excuse to distract yourself from doing the work.

Here's a good podcast covering this idea: https://overcast.fm/+b1V3bnLPc

Mostly some version of GTD.

A todo list managed by http://todotxt.org/. Items are dated and I make sure I review (remove or modify) items that have become stale. A similar list for non-actionable ideas (called inbox in GTD). I think I end up removing most of these. A text file with dated items for a "waiting for" list( e.g. waiting for an answer to a message), reviewed regularly. A list of "projects" (somewhat vague, but list priorities, reminds me of bigger goals). I don't really do "proper" project management for personal things, I guess I could, but the overhead would be too big for me to keep this consistent over time.

A proper and reliable calendar. I use calcurse (https://www.calcurse.org/) as I like curse-based interfaces, it makes it trivial to use my setup via ssh. I'm always shocked when I find out some people don't really have any calendar and just hope they'll remember appointments and events. It becomes obvious when they inevitably forget to show up somewhere and have to deal with the consequences.

"Notable Plus" (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.icechen1.notable.pro/) for very quick notes on mobile (that I write down properly in one of the previous lists within 24h).

Lately I'm also experimenting with some priority queue based on dates to make sure I do some things regularly. Let's say you do 5 different sports, and you want to do all of them (at the cost of doing any of them less frequently). You could keep track of the last time you did them, and to choose what to do next, you do the one you haven't done in the most time. There are few things I do once in a while, and when I do them, I often think "why didn't do that earlier", and I think this applies nicely to this when time is just limited. E.g. reaching out to people, going to some places...

I edit most of these text files using vim, or Markor on Android (https://github.com/gsantner/markor). Shared via Syncthing on my personal devices. Automated version control via Git (meaning daily automated commits), although in practice I so rarely use this that I could get rid of it. I guess it's cheap so why not.

A mobile app (https://github.com/iSoron/uhabits) to keep track of habits. At this point I have enough of them that doing them all in one day means I had a good day. That removes some thinking when I have little time and I'm not sure what I should do: just try to tick one more habit.

Org-mode looks interesting but I've never managed to migrate to it, I suspect it's because I'm already too efficient with my current setup such that it's too much friction to switch to org-mode and spend months just reaching the same level with it.

Overall whatever works for you, but I'd advise against proprietary apps and services: I've had about the same setup for about 10 years, I can't imagine how many productivity apps were created / deprecated during that time. It's very likely that my setup or a similar one will still work in 10+ years with very few changes required.

I organize my life primarily by keeping it simple enough that it's not very hard to keep track of.

I keep a paper to-do list. My calendar I know. My social calendar my wife keeps, because it's mainly her social calendar, and I just show up when and where she says.

My weekly to-dos don't go on my to-do list. I kind of have a rhythm for those; I do them when I always do them.

The virtue of this system is very low overhead. The downside is that, if you're not like me, if you want a more complicated life, it probably doesn't scale to that.

I've done a lot of different things over the years. What I've finally been settling on (though I might change this up a bit because another app I've really liked in the past just updated and might have finally filled a gap I needed):

- Google Drive for file backup/sync. I used to use Dropbox, but how they handle photos is awful. Drive's desktop client is way worse than Dropbox in almost every possible metric, but...

- Google Photos for photos. I pay for more storage in Drive which gives me the room I need in photos for everything. Very convenient not only for cloud access to photos anywhere, but also really good search, and being able to share albums with people.

- Evernote for all my notes. Also for going paperless. (I've been doing a TON of cleaning of my office and being able to get rid of old documents by scanning them to Evernote is great) Nothing else fully replicates all the features Evernote has: OCR of images/PDFs/etc., email to new note, literally the best web clipper, connect to calendar and create/link notes to events, go to note/tag/notebook, etc. It's not the fastest app out there, but generally pretty consistent no matter how much I throw at it. I tried importing my notes to Apple Notes or Bear and they tend to start choking a bit. The best part and one of the reasons I can't leave for anything else: The search is too darn convenient. I can just throw things in and it's easy to find later even if I don't go crazy with notebook/tag organization.

- Apple Reminders for TODOs. Very fast to add things via Siri or text, has just enough smarts to do some natural language setting of dates, just generally convenient to use via my phone or laptop. I don't do anything complicated here, mostly just to keep track of what I need to do in a day or anything I need to do on a schedule like laundry. I might migrate to TeuxDeux at some point now that they've added better repeating TODOs (they were very primitive previously and didn't do what I needed). Or I might migrate to Evernote tasks which I used in the past but had enough bugs at the time I decided to stop and wait for reliability updates.

- Fantastical for calendar, synced to Google. This might change since apparently Hey is working on a calendar? We'll see how that ends up working out.

It might sound like a lot, but it actually is pretty simple and I keep my usage of things simple. Things like basic notebooks in Evernote or just throwing things in an inbox. I don't stuff my calendar full of things, I just use it to keep track of stuff that is happening at certain times (vet appointments, job interviews, etc.) or something I might want to link to a note in Evernote. I've ended up here because of the simplicity of how it ends up working. I don't want to spend tons of time managing anything, so I just want things I can quickly throw stuff into and stop worrying about it.

When you're hungry, eat; when you're tired, sleep.

I just build my own solution. I've dabbled with many tools, services and methods over the years, but they all suck in some way, because they are not custom-made for my demand and personal situation, and I will always find some critical unfixable flaw which will nag me. Also, humans are lazy, and organization is a low-level job where little flaws can make a big difference.

So at the moment, my solution is to generate daily a markdown-file with routines, unfinished routines from the previous day, and links to visit that day. It also has a section for notes, and a dataview-query for filtering urgent and due tasks from my vault (dataview is an extension for obsidian). For the regular tasks, I have either Google Keep, which I use to collect notes, links, photos for later, or markdown-files, for which I have a routine to review them regularly, or just use on the spot if work leads to them.

It's not perfect, has some flaws and lacks features, but it's my system, and I can work on fixing the flaws because everything is open and accessible. Before this, I used todoist, which is also quite good, but it had some critical flaws for my workflows, so I moved away after some years.

An excel spreadsheet for budgeting and my phones calendar. I was also using a LOG.txt which is now a LOG.odt.

Life just happens.

If you are looking for something to organize knowledge for your projects and activities, that is an entirely different question.

Hetzner’s Nextcloud instance.

Since Nextcloud supports all *DAV protocols I care, it’s easy to sync it with my iPhone without being tied to Apple’s ecosystem. Todos, calendars, contacts, notes. I hate Nextcloud’s web interface, but it’s bearable.

If I have to do something at a specific time, I put it in my calendar. If it doesn't have to be at a specific time, I put it in a todo list. Periodically I look at the calendar and todo list. At work I have a piece of paper on my desk and I write down what I need to do that day.

Write things down! All the weird things and ideas, put them into categories and write them down. This categories can also have a to do list.

Use some kind of calendar.

Try to not read the news on the internet too much. Use a RSS reader.

Notes:

Simplenote https://simplenote.com/

I use it with nvpy on Linux https://pypi.org/project/nvpy/

Calendar: https://www.rainlendar.net/

Tiny Tiny RSS Reader for selfhosting: https://tt-rss.org/

This is not bad either, 30 USD per year but I decided to go with tiny tiny

https://bazqux.com/

PS, strangely, this app makes me also more productive. Enpass: https://www.enpass.io/

I did not pay, it was available for free in the past. But I may have to buy it in the future. Organizes everything. Passwords. Information. Credit Cards. Certificates. Passportcopies, whatever. But this may be a personal thing.

Most important: Your apps must be snappy. Especially nvpy is nice.

Things like https://obsidian.md/ are on my watch list. But maybe the overhead is too complex. Is somebody here that uses Obsidian?

If you like to optimize your day by planning your schedule in advance, a calendar app can be a valuable solution. In this article: https://www.cleveroad.com/blog/create-a-calendar-app/ we explain what calendar applications are, highlight the importance of these online tools, and discuss nine apps that can assist you in making your day more productive.

If you like to optimize your day by planning your schedule in advance, a calendar app can be a valuable solution. In this article:https://www.cleveroad.com/blog/create-a-calendar-app/ we explain what calendar applications are, highlight the importance of these online tools, and discuss nine apps that can assist you in making your day more productive.

I think "Getting Things Done" is genuinely a pretty good method. David Allen wrote a book on it, and there are whole communities where people take it to a weird level. I tend to think all of that is overkill, and I'm happy to offer my takeaway from the GTD method, with the caveat that I took the pieces that worked for me and didn't incorporate things that did not:

First, try to break down big projects into smaller tasks. In order to make progress on the thing you want to do, what is the next action you need to take? For example, I want to take a trip to visit my family that lives far away. My next action is not "plan a trip." My next action might be "buy plane tickets for X date." Oh, I don't know what dates should be my departing and return flights? Then my next action is actually "determine dates of my trip." The idea of "Next Action" is important in GTD. You don't have to do the "Next Action" right away, but you need to be able to note it down.

Next, create a small list of your big projects/goals you're working towards. This just helps clarify what is important for you to be working toward. The list is personal to you and you an always update it as needed.

The real trick now is capturing all these Next Actions. Create a centralized place where you can collect your "Next Actions." For example, you might have a basket on your desk to collect sticky notes or index cards with your Next Actions written on them. But this is HN, so probably a better method is some kind of to-do list app. The important thing is that it is easy for you to add Next Actions into this bucket whenever you need to, and also that you "trust" it to contain everything you need to do next. The goal is to have everything in one place. If one "place" is not possible, try to have as few as possible, like maybe one place for your work tasks and other place for your personal tasks, or an app for most stuff and a basket for physical stuff (like mail or receipts).

Now, whenever you have time, you check your system and work through your Next Actions. Ideally you will have set aside some time to work on this stuff, but life is busy. I used to tag some tasks as "phone" tasks, meaning that X task could be done just on my phone. This was handy if I was, I dunno, stuck in a long line somewhere with nothing better to do, I could look at my "phone tasks" and check something off the list.

Additionally, sometimes you need to be reminded of things at specific times. GTD recommends having a calendar for this stuff, which is fine. A Google calendar that you can sync across your work computer and smartphone works pretty well, but I find that most to-do apps work pretty well for scheduling reminders. The important thing is to, again, have a system you "trust." In this case, you trust your system to remind you of whatever thing you need to do at the appropriate time. Tip: sometimes this means I need to be reminded a little before the actual event (like if I need travel somewhere), so build that in as needed.

Finally, GTD says you should have some kind regular review period. Once a week (or whenever works for you), you look over your whole system and clean things up. Like maybe something has changed, and what seemed important at the time is now something you can forget about, so remove those Next Actions (or a whole project) from your system. This review period should usually only take a few minutes, don't stress over it.

Ultimately, the goal here is to create a system that you trust enough to hold your to-do list for you, so you're not carrying this mental-load of fuzzy tasks in the back of your mind all the time. You put a task into the system, and then you will get to the task when it is appropriate to do so.

There's a whole book, of course. But my entry to it was through the Todoist app, and they have a pretty good summary of GTD on their blog: https://todoist.com/productivity-methods/getting-things-done