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.
Zettlr for technical writing into any format.
Obsidian for a second brain based on the molecular notes method. And yes, I’ve tried all of the FOSS alternatives. None are ready to replace Obsidian yet.
Wallabag for saving resources offline for easy and permanent reference.
Lunarvim for actually sitting down to work instead of fiddling with and optimizing my setup.
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
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
Is it possible to “save” those sessions between reboots? That would be awesome.
I do with KWin rules. It’s not elegant but it doesn’t require coding
Thank you, I will look into KWin.
Turns out, it is awesome and does more than I need. I already move a lot of my applications with xdotool to prediscribed positions and sizes, via hotkeys, which start some scripts. Now I found out, it also can move them across virtual desktops. Nice :)
joplin has allowed me to be a lot more flexible with managing and viewing my sheet music.
i converted my notes pretty easily and now i have access to them on all my devices.
I just wished Joplin would store notes as some kind of plain text, like Obsidian does. I’ve also been trying out AppFlowy, which looks kinda promising (and Foss), but it stores notes in a db as well.
I mainly use joplin for tables. it can’t do equations but for set lists and repertoire it’s much easier to use than anything else i’ve tried.