My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)

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.

Satire?

Why build an app? It seems the whole benefit here is it doesnt need any app. Its completely agnostic and simple. The value is in the data and the way he enters it in.

It sounds like a good system but i still believe it takes the discipline of a strong willed person to do the system no matter what system you use.

If i did this i would give up after 2 days. He says he redoes his list every night ready for the next day —- THAT is the secret here, not the specific system he uses.

I’ve tried all sorts over the years different tools, different systems , different philosophies, inbox zero, gtd etc They don’t work for me. I get by with a notepad and pen and i write lists as and when. Theres people out there and some even have YouTube channeks dedicatd to disseminating their productivity hack and workflows for evey tool Imaginable, and they are really enthusiastic about it.

It doesn’t do it for me im too free spirited.

I started tracking everything I ate three years ago and even posted about it via this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32552288

I updated it substantially via AI this summer (includes micros, compounds, and various other stats and a webpage with charts now) and then I started making diet changes based on these new features. Is really neat to compare data from before and after those changes. And like you suggested, I keep making improvements to the system and to myself and it becomes really satisfying / motivational.

Is still driven by simple text files.

- Essentially zero input or transactional latency

- Proven effective after 14 years of heavy use

- Celebrated by user

- Zero dependencies

- Maximally portable

- Outage-proof

- Compatible with all backup systems and most version control systems

Have you considered that stuff like this is already "more productive" for fluent users than almost any alternative could be?

Somewhere along the line, product people started to mistake following design trends and adding complexity for productivity, forgetting that delivering the right combination of fluency, stability, simiplicity are often the real road to maximizing it.

I wish I could tell honest comments from satire apart. It's especially hard after reading the future HN created by Gemini that was posted yesterday.

> Celebrated by user

Oh I’m totally putting this in a performance review this year.

Why?

Why would he want to waste a single iota of effort trying to improve something that was working just fine for fourteen years when he wrote this post three years ago? What’s gonna be easier to use than the text editor he knows how to drive without a single thought? What does he gain by taking a simple text file he can sync to any device and replacing it with a database bound to a custom app that he now has to keep running? I mean besides the risk that an OS update will break this app and now he can’t get anything else done until he fixes it, because he’s the only person maintaining it? Most of the interaction is still going to be typing in free-form text, how is taking his hand off the keyboard to poke at a “new task” widget going to make it better and cleaner than just typing return, dash, space? What GUI kit is not going to fall over and whimper when you hand it 51k items to render? What does he gain by spending days trying different ways to get around that interface design problem in hopes of finding one as seamless as his simple text editor?

Why would he?

The portability thing can't be stressed more. It took me ages to liberate my notes from onenote cloud when I moved over to obsidian. Which is of course exactly the point of Microsoft's.

> besides the risk that an OS update will break this app

Tangential, but what a sad state of affairs is that an OS update can break your app. I'm not a windows user (not voluntarily, at least), but I always appreciated the stability and retrocompatibilità that allowed old apps to run unmodified on modern systems. I heard they dropped the ball on this as well, though.