alt Hacker NewsMy productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)
Comments
With notepad.exe:
At the first line of the a .txt file put .LOG This will then put a timestamp at the end of the file every time you open it.
Also, if you press the F5 key it inserts a timestamp.
Been using this for years and it's pretty much all I ever needed.
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.
- A Plain Text Personal Organizer, https://danlucraft.com/blog/2008/04/plain-text-organizer/
- A template to organise life in plain text, https://github.com/jukil/plain-text-life
- Achieve a text-only work-flow, http://donlelek.github.io/2015-03-09-text-only-workflow/
- Note Taking, Writing and Life Organization Using Plain Text Files, http://www.markwk.com/plain-text-life.html
- Plain Text Journaling System, https://georgecoghill.wordpress.com/plain-text/
- Plain Text Project, https://plaintextproject.online/
- PlainText Productivity, http://plaintext-productivity.net/
- The Plain Text Life: Note Taking, Writing and Life Organization Using Plain Text Files, http://www.markwk.com/plain-text-life.html
- Use plain text email, https://useplaintext.email/
- Writing Plain Text by Derek Sivers, https://sive.rs/plaintext
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.
Gonna be honest, my productivity app once upon a time was unsaved sublime text documents
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.
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.
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
}
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.
This has been a complete game changer for me.
I've never been so organized in my life.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I use never-ending notion pages like this and now they have grown so large that they crash on mobile / tablet so I can only access via desktop.
If anyone knows of a good rich markdown / block based editor that can handle huge pages let me know!
I do this, but it’s an Apple Notes file with a quick open shortcut mapped to the action button (side button) on my iPhone.
I finally figured this setup this year. It had changed my life, in a minor yet significant way.
(I also link to other relevant text files at the top of the doc)
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 do this with plain text but hear me out:
multiple files
multiple directories (folders)
(scripts)
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.
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!
I did something similar since 2001:
-rw-r--r-- 1 nick nick 691 Mar 16 2001 2001-03.txt
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.
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.
What do you guys think?
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.
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.
Sometimes a simple bash script will give it wings: https://github.com/Aperocky/diaryman
What this is:
$ diary # opens vim to $DIARYDIR/year/month/day.md
I've done the same thing for a long time
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.
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.
Something like this would be perfect for a local LLM assistant.
Forever open tabs in Notepad++ (475 and counting for the lost 6 months at least).
I've used so many 'productivity' apps, it makes me sick to think of it. This has been the most consistent tool I've ever used.
I’ve landed in Amplenote and haven’t looked back over the last couple of years.
Exports to mark down if I ever want to leave, works on everything, and sufficiently flexible for note taking and task management.
Every now and then I get the productivity bug and look around but can’t find anything that hits like Amplenote does.
Previously, (I ain't complaining, I like fresh conversations on this one.)
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.
Mine is as well. Well actually one TXT file per project. Still, they are tens of megabytes in total size at this point.
Use a mix of the iCloud notes app, txt files, iCloud sync'd Documents directory; I’m deffo vendor locked.
Actual checkboxes that are reorderable but otherwise a text file is the way to go.
Longer explanation: https://zachsaucier.com/blog/notes-the-best-todo-app/
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
If you append to the bottom of a 50-thousand line file, won't scrolling to the bottom be tedious? Or is he prepending new days to the top of the file?
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.)
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?