I’m in a bit of a productivity rut and whilst I suspect the issue is mainly between the keyboard and chair I’m also interested in what (FOSS) tools there are that people find effective.

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”.

I’m interested in anything that helps manage time or limit distractions or anything that makes it easier to keep track of progress/next steps for project when there may be a bit of a time gap between.

  • @[email protected]
    23•9 months ago

    I use a variety of FOSS tools for both personal and work productivity.

    For personal I use:

    • Nextcloud (Calendar, sync files, contacts etc, forms, availability sharing)
    • Thunderbird (Mail & Calendar)
    • Vikunja for managing all my projects/tasks. Also is very useful to have shared tasks with relatives. Another useful feature is that it can share specifics projects to people that do not have an account (for vacancy planning for example)
    • Tasks.org to manage Vikunja tasks in Android
    • Logseq for managing all my thoughts, ideas, tracking content like books, movies, videos watched
    • Nomie (specifically this maintained instance which has some new features). I use it to track myself (mood, anxiety, adhd, symptoms, food and drug consumption, people). It has an API so I for example can automatically insert activities from Garmin API. It is very useful to correlate things in life, or to tell the doctor if a specific symptom has flared up or not and many more things
    • Omnivore is my read-later off choice app, replacing Wallabag. It has an EXTREMELY polished interface, can aggregate RSS feeds, supports tags, comments, many filters and more. But the amazing thing is that it has a plugin for Logseq which automatically syncs all my highlights, notes and tags to it
    • Ferdium to quickly access all my important services
    • Syncthing on my phone, laptops and Kobo to sync Logseq between devices and books/articles from my PC to Kobo
    • Liftosaur for exercise routines (it has script language even) and can also track body measurements.
    • waistline as a substitute for myfitnesspal or cronometer

    For work use:

    • Logseq is my main tool, with the capability of connecting to Zotero, reading papers and taking notes which with queries I can leverage it to see new ideas forming. It also acts as the best logbook I’ve ever used through its powerful templates and queries which simplifies a lot the work of comparing results since it can all be done automatically
    • Zotero to manage all my papers
    • neovim with vimtex, ltex-ls and ultisnips to write documents in LaTeX very fast. Also have some scripts to manage vector graphics very easily using https://github.com/gillescastel/inkscape-figures
    • Inkscape for doing all the images for my papers since I plot my graphs in SVG. This way I can edit graphs after ploting and never lose quality
    • Ranger file manager
    • Espanso

    Update 1: Fixed Nomie link Update 2: added waistline and liftosaur since I had forgotten Update 3: added Inkscape

    • @[email protected]
      2•9 months ago

      Your nomie link isn’t working, this is the one that interests me the most. But I’m trying logseq too. Thanks for the recommendations

    • @[email protected]OP
      2•9 months ago

      These are all excellent suggestions and your username is very apt :)

      My read it now is just save as epub and at some point send over to ereader so Omnivore could help me a lot.

      • @[email protected]
        2•9 months ago

        Thank you, glad to help!

        Yeah that’s what I was doing before but in a more streamlined way. Wallabag has an integration with KoReader (which I have installed in my Kobo). So I saved articles in my browser or phone and then pulled them from Wallabag directly in the Kobo.

        I hope the dev of Omnivore eventually implements this. He is very responsive and fast implementing features

    • EugeniaEnglish
      1•9 months ago

      10-15 years ago the suggested app listings would be about apps that you create something with them, eg gimp, freecad etc. Most of what you suggest here are just apps to manage yourself, where you control your life down to minute detail. I consider such apps to have the effect of losing freedom and the randomness of life. Basically, we’ve moved from being creator beings, to barely living, and requiring app assistance for it.

      • @[email protected]
        1•9 months ago

        Interesting take. I think different though, because it does not mean we are not free, I think it helps in moments we are lost. I often find my self overwhelmed by what I need to do so organising myself or keeping myself organised can be very important to me. I don’t use apps to this extend yet, but plan on doing so after building my Nas. I think it’s also very interesting to keep track of my health and mood in order to learn patterns I should avoid in order to stay mentally stable

    • @[email protected]English
      1•9 months ago

      Do you know if it’s possible to use Vikunja as a frontend for next cloud tasks? It does it have some extra sauce on top of caldav?

      • @[email protected]
        2•9 months ago

        No, Vikunja has both the front-end and backend for the tasks and is the caldav provider itself.

        You can use planify and Tasks.org as frontends to manage Nextcloud tasks on your computer and phone, respectively

      • @Falcon
        6•9 months ago

        Foss I suspect.

        I avoid obsidian for the same reason, instead I use org mode and MediaWiki (see also dokuwiki)

      • @[email protected]
        4•9 months ago

        As the others said, the main reason is that it is FOSS. Before Logseq, I was using Standard Notes, which is also FOSS and was enough for my needs then.

        Then Logseq appeared at the same time I was learning about graph structured and linked notes as the likes of Tiddlywikis and RoamReasearch