My Weird Workflows
These days I can’t live without tmux and Vim. Once I worked with a team that all used Vim who convinced me to try it, and after some suffering at first I started to like it. By now I wouldn’t say that I use it because I think it is superior to anything else in any way, but it’s more of an addiction. I have a scrappy .vimrc that isn’t very well organized; I just stuff as I need. I think FZF has to be my favorite plugin because I don’t need to waste any space looking at a file tree when I can just type the first few letters of a class name to jump to it. I don’t use Neovim, not for any particular reason, I’ve just been content with my current setup. However, I know that deep down Emacs is calling to me. I’m just not sure if I am ready to suffer again quite yet.
Daily Log and Notes
I keep a me repo where I store:
logs/Daily logs where I write thoughts and notes for the day.labs/Quick scripts, code snippets, experiments.posts/Drafts for new posts.zet/Reference notes. A zet (Zettelkasten) is a note about a specific topic.
I have log, post, and zet scripts which each create a new timestamped directory, add a README.md file inside, and title it with whatever title text was passed. This is a quick way to start a new note or log entry. This setup allows me browse all of my logs and notes from Github on my phone; because each note and log file is stored in a timestamped directory, those directories are automatically sorted chronologically on the terminal and in the Github UI. Because I name each note README.md inside the timestamped directories, Github will also render the markdown.
Managing my notes this way is convenient. I can read them anywhere, and my hands never have to leave the keyboard to add a quick note. If I want to find information about a certain note I can just grep, or use the repository search on Github if I’m on my phone. I also have some scripts to grep my notes and logs for incomplete TODO items, but lately I keep most of my tasks in Taskwarrior.
Task Management
I’ve been using Taskwarrior for a little while to keep track of tasks. In the old days I would have scattered tasks and notes laying around everywhere. I would just have to remember where to look for tasks depending on the project; emails, shared word docs, stickies on my desk, notebooks, Github issues, Slack, or just a big spreadsheet. For a while I thought I could keep track of everything in a Bullet Journal but it turns out that I can type much faster than I can write, and I was missing out on important benefits such as being able to search, copy, and paste. Notebook journals are nice every once in a while when I manage to escape the computer, but anything I really want to keep track of gets put into Taskwarrior.
Taskwarrior is nice because adding a task is as simple as adding one of my logs or notes: task add project:name "Task description". I can get a summary of my tasks for a specific project or subproject with just task project:name. I have to admit though, sometimes I still throw a TODO markdown file in a repo and add some tasks in there for a specific project, but anything I care most about tracking goes into Taskwarrior.
Time Tracking
Since I’m already using Taskwarrior I thought I should give Timewarrior a try. I think it works fine as long as I’m consistently marking tasks as complete before moving on to the next. I don’t always stop to manage my tasks before switching to the next one, so sometimes I have to go back and do some manual tweaking. It adds an extra step where you need to start the task in order to begin tracking time. Sometimes if I am switching between many tasks during the day, this can get a little tedious, but usually it’s not a big deal. I used Toggl for years before switching and I don’t find myself missing anything for the daily workflow. The summary report exports from Toggl were handy because it exported a PDF that you can just hand over to clients, but I don’t have as much of a need for that now.
Daily Mood and Habits
I tried tracking my mood and habits in a Bullet Journal for a while, but I was not consistent about updating it and I didn’t feel like I saw much benefit from it. I have been using Daylio for a few years now, and as of this writing I have a 630 day streak tracking my mood and taking a photo every day. I might have reached 1000 by now but I missed a day and had my streak reset a couple years ago. I discovered Lifelogging and I’ve been interested in the idea that some time in the future I could parse my old data to find useful information. But for now, I’m usually just taking a photo, writing a quick note, and choose the “meh” mood for most days.