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

I did something similar since 2001:

    -rw-r--r--  1 nick nick    691 Mar 16  2001 2001-03.txt

I separated mine by YYYY-MM which is long enough to keep related things together but short enough where it's easy to find things within a single file. It's all super easy to grep things out on demand.

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.

> There's no procrastination about organizing or perfect tags. Just brain dump the thought or notes and move on with life.

I keep my notes on paper and write them in real time, so I agree with this very strongly. I manage to keep up with the real world despite this.

My paper indexing system is two simple things.

1) Write in the next available space. When done writing I draw a dividing horizontal line straight across the whole page. Just above this line I assign it a serial number in a little box.

2) Starting from the back of the last page, I keep metadata for each entry. Usually topic tags, but sometimes it's more involved. I usually do this when I am under less time pressure. It doesn't even have to be the same day. I'm not strict about completeness because if I don't care... well I don't care.