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.
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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
Why Logseq over Obsidian?
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
It’s FOSS.
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.
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
Nextcloud, FreshRSS and KdeConnect come to mind.
How do you use KDEConnect for productivity? I am currently planning a move to KDE Plasma from Gnome (when 6 comes out).
@zerakith @FriendBesto Answering text messages right from the computer is way faster for me. Or file transfers between the smartphone and workstation.
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’m with you on obsidian. Logseq comes close, but the app falls a bit short for me as of yet.
I haven’t tried Obsidian, but I use Logseq all the time. What do you think is holding Logseq back? I’m just curious.
I know for me the mobile app lacks some polish and it lacks plugins, which is annoying.
Honestly, I just found the android app incredibly clunky and annoying to navigate. I’m hoping it’ll improve with time, because I would like to move to a FOSS solution.
Plugin support is a huge thing, obsidian does this so good. Also, tags are pretty cool, not sure if logseq has them. Do I remember correctly that Logseq does not store your stuff in a pure mix of markdown and directories, or was that another App?
Logseq has tags. Logseq does store data in markdown files. There’s one file for each page.
Are you perhaps thinking about Anytype?
I tried obsidian, but the Android app is pretty terrible. So in the end I still use Google keep. I would definitely like a more open Foss option, but haven’t found one that works on Linux and Android that I like.
I’ve been interested in Anytype, it’s supposed to be like Notion, which I haven’t used either. You might want to check it out. I’m also trying to get away from Google Keep.
Anyone here have any experience with Anytype?
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 :)
So you keep a project open in the Virtual Desktop and then boot it up when you are working on it?
Virtual desktop =/= virtual machine
I think gnome calles them workspaces. This article is old and gnome-specific, but it gives you a good idea of what they are.
https://www.maketecheasier.com/how-to-work-with-workspaces-gnome/
Logseq may help?
I keep a few entries in the content page, for each project, and in each page I got an updated todo list.
You can also capture everything in the same place, journal style, then link it back from the content pages. I find it very powerful.
And it’s FOSS. And md/filesystem based, so I just sync it between devices with git.
Try out a tiling wm (i use i3/sway) they are much easier to focus in than a regular de
selfhosted searchengine . i see zero reason not to.
Whoogle (through Tor)? ;)
Or searx??
i was thinking more of a narrow information retrieval system. as opposed to doing random exploration and discovery.
@leanleft Hmm. I think I would agree.
Obsidian flatpak with network disabled
Not FOSS unfortunately.
Therefore disable networking…
Useful, I’m open to non-FOSS if I really have to and no networking helps.
Honestly Obsidian or a similar note-taking app is enough for me. It has a KanBan plugin if you like using that, otherwise just use bulleted lists.
Obsidian is amazing and more people should use it.
It’s not foss unfortunately and the license prohibits its free usage in a company
At the moment they are “don’t be evil”. It’s easy to access all your data in a folder with md files. I like Obsidian and use it on all devices with syncthing. Of course private use. In the long run I will migrate to emacs with my notes. But it’s one of my favorites at this time, too. But of course FOSS will be always free and fair.
emacs org-mode
This is the way.
Nothing comes even close. I just wish there was a distributed / mobile-enabled way to use org-mode. I guess there exists some project, but running full emacs org-mode mobile is hardly usable.
I got acceptable results with org-roam cooperating with logseq. It took some fiddling with org IDs, config and a bit of elisp, but it’s stable enough for me.
How did you handle note interlinking?
I forced logseq to use relative file links and skipped backlinking in org-roam. However, it looks like logseq now supports org-id links with backlinking. I might need another script to convert :).
Would you mind sharing your experience and/or the script? Would be nice for the community!
My biggest productivity booster is tmux. I constantly ssh into my pc to continue my work. I even restart my window manager sometimes if I wanna play games or something, but tmux is always there in the background. And being able to get up, go to my living room, open my laptop and continue the work I was doing on my pc has definitely saved me from a few mental blocks.
Why are you working in personal time?
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.
@JoYo I do use tables in Joplin, but when they get large, dealing with them in markdown becomes unwieldy.
