What's your productivity system/philosophy?

[Angrboda]

I use Evernote, and have been less than fully satisfied with it, but am too lazy to look for something better. (MS One Note appears to offer a different mix of capabilities, but not really any functional advantages. My only real complaint about Evernote is that you can't specify a custom sort order, so everytime it starts up, it defaults to reverse order of creation for notes. All told, it works okay, as I primarily use it to collect song lyrics, notes on books, quotes, philosophical musings, and the like. I've looked at a few programs that allow you to create webs of relationships among notes, but given my needs, I found the learning curves too steep to pursue them.

I'm retired as well, but my life is organized around book clubs and discussion groups in my community. So far, I've just been using wordpad for taking notes. I suppose if I had half a brain, I'd have been using Evernote instead, and so when my netbook was lost, I wouldn't have lost 6 months of notes. Oh well, I think the primary reason I take notes on lectures and discussions, as well as annotating books I read, is so that I will have a better chance of remembering the specific point involved. I rarely return to my notes for my own purposes. Usually it's when I want to use a quote or reference in a discussion online or off that I return to my notes.

I've got a year's worth of quotes and such in a note taking program called iWisdom. It's written in Java, and kinda stinks, but I see no easy way to transfer the data from there to Evernote or whatever. (I have the same problem with Keepass; I have a password management program, personal info keeper, that I've used for quite a few years, and upon trying to import the data into keepass, couldn't get the wizard to behave properly. Eventually, I probably should do the work necessary to clear that hurdle, but there's always more interesting things to be done. Since losing my fingers, I've become a shameless hedonist; hedonism, as a system for managing priorities, has some definite drawbacks.