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

I’m running a few on my NAS:

• Taiga to manage projects. It’s as easy and pleasant to use as Trello, but with velocity/burndown charts and the whole “agile” thing, but you can also turn parts of it on and off (per project even).

• Trilium completely cured me of messy note-taking habits, simply by winning on the convenience side. I was firmly in the “folder tree of markdown documents” and “my Sublime Text tabs of random notes have no number” camp before.

• I’m considering Habitica which lets you set up rewards and achievements for your real life (i.e. apply addictive reward/progress loop from video games to motivate your real self to do things). Also Wger for exercise tracking, but I’m not sure they’re the right thing for my ticket/tracking-averse self (I wish there was something that covered the whole MyFitnessPal/FitDay and the whole Polar Personal Trainer/Garmin Connect side, but FOSS and self-hosted).

For leisure, I also run Stash (it bills itself as an organizer for your porn library, but it’s really good for any kind of clips), Jellyfin for my music and movies and currently both Mango and Kavita for books and comics.

I have found Kate to be very capable with python and rust. With Sessions I can also have my own set of notes in markdown. The plugins are plentiful and git integration is built in.

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.

selfhosted searchengine . i see zero reason not to.

I capture all my predictable work items in icalendar-encoded files that I mostly author by hand in emacs. I use evolution for a conventional calendar view on my computer. I adb push to my phone and use icsx5 to import so I can view events there as well.

I’ve also been working on a project to produce a printable view that’s reasonably mature at this point. It accepts VEVENT, VJOURNAL, and VTODO entries and groups them by day, month, or year. Todo items are rendered as lists so I have a little circle to fill in when I’ve completed the work. I display both the title and description for all types, with the description processed as Markdown. So for instance a VJOURNAL with a weekly recurrence, a title like “This Week”, and a description like * \n* \n will appear every week in the printout as a blank list for jotting down two items not captured in my calendars.

I’ve been using the daily grouping so far to produce a weekly “checklist”. Every few weeks or so I hack on my RRULEs based on what’s working for me. For instance I bake a loaf of sourdough every week so I have events for feeding the starter, mixing the dough, then baking. I set each of those to recur on subsequent days of the week so they all magically fall into place then I shifted the start days around until I found my ideal baking day. I also have an entry for changing the bed sheets every week, and another for washing the washing machine scheduled for the same day of week at a slower frequency. Capturing everything that needs to be done (with some editorializing on granularity) and evolving their recurrences is the fundamental way I synchronize independent work, leaning on icalendar for expressiveness like this recurrence for planting the garden on the Saturday before Memorial Day weekend:

RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=5;BYDAY=SA;BYMONTHDAY=16,17,18,19,20,21,22

The workflow doesn’t require the bespoke tooling since I can see all my maintenance items alongside my meetings using any application that can render icalendar. That was key to getting moving, but having the print out lets me feel more productive. I knock out all the routine stuff throughout the day and find that “if I have time” becomes “what do I want to do with this time”.

There are tools in the project for generating events for solstices and equinoxes as well as sunrises and sunsets. I include all of those in my printed daily view but exclude the sunrises and sunsets from evolution by capturing them in separate files. I also separate routine/noisy tasks like “change the bed sheets” from holidays and operational work like “plant the garden” or “change the water filters” so those become more visible.

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 ;-)

Obsidian flatpak with network disabled

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.

Sway really sped things up for me. Also using ble.sh helps with bash. Then custom scripts and aliases in bashrc.

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.

TaskWarrior

I use emacs, Denote, and markdown-mode to keep a loose Zettlekasten archive of notes.

A combination of different.

For brainstorming Logseq is great, for tasks I use CalDAV in combination with Thunderbird and JTX Board (Android) a lot.

FZF in Bash. For those wondering why Ctrl+R does not work in Terminal, https://web.archive.org/web/20231202002540/https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/665689/fzf-ctlr-r-not-triggering-history-search-on-command-line

And to avoid all the web browser player BS, use yt-dlp for any video link or worthwhile playlist. I just search and fetch video links from Invidious, or read comments on videos, so it ends up with practically zero bandwidth load on instance owners.