What's your productivity system/philosophy?

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

With the new year coming up, perhaps some of you would like to share what you do to be productive?

I'm currently rereading David Allen's famous GTD book and trying to apply using what it suggests to the tools I have. I like most of what I'm reading from it but am a little apprehensive about some of it.

I use OmniFocus and iCal. I don't have a selected notes taking application yet. I might just use Notes.app that comes with my Mac but Evernote might be better.

When I'm not on vacation, I use an app called "Self Control" on my Mac to block myself from wasting too much time on addictive websites like Facebook, or this place. If you turn the app off, or even delete it, the websites are still blocked. I'm not sure how it does that.

I also go into the terminal and and type "sudo nano /etc/hosts" where I have a list of websites that I have blocked 24/7.

I set my router to block the internet to my iPod during certain hours of the day so I won't be tempted to distract myself from work.

I've tried Things, The Hit List, Midnight Inbox, Apple's Reminders, Wunderlist, 2Do, and a bunch of others. Some of them I liked but overall. I liked how Things had a special "Areas of Responsibility" organization feature. The Hit List has a built in timer and a special focus mode. Midnight Inbox is very nice since it has the GTD workflow built in. Overall, The Hit List and OmniFocus I liked best since they let you create sub tasks but I chose OmniFocus because The Hit List doesn't have an equivalent to a "Next Actions" list and it doesn't make a distinction between a project and a generic list. Things does have a "Next Actions" list but it doesn't support subtasks which makes complex projects hard to follow. Midnight Inbox is actually better than OmniFocus feature wise but the interface is so messy and it hasn't been updated in so long so it's gotten buggy as the OS has changed.

I grew up using a paper Franklin Planner. Although using it now would be too impractical for me I do miss how it integrated a calendar, task manager, and a journal together. Nothing I've found today for your computer does that so you end up having to use 3 or 4 applications at once. I also liked the inspiring quotes it had everyday but I can just replace that with a desktop widget. Some of the Franklin philosophy I liked and I might try to find a method of combining it with the GTD philosophy.

What do you use if anything to be productive? What tips or suggestions might you have? (I put this into Off Topic rather than technology because the discussion isn't only about productivity software).

[Something completely different]

Basicaly

I just wait for death.

[Jackalope]

Slack.

That, and goofing off a lot. You'd be surprised what you can accomplish when you goof off as much as I do.

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

I should've known this wouldn't be the best place to ask...

[Minimalist]

I'm retired.

Let someone else be productive.

[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.

[Violet]

"Fuck it"

* Violet turns on a video game.

I have nonstop fun and anti-stress production

[CapnAwesome]

Prowhative?

[John V]

I currently use this:
http://www.fractalplanner.com/

It's not pretty or full of bells and whistles, but it works pretty well. Costs $10/month.

I used to use Simpleology, but they don't keep up with the software.

Fractal planner combines elements of Simpleology and (from what little I've read about it) GTD.

I also use a large whiteboard on the wall and a small whiteboard just to my right. The small whiteboard is for things that pop up today and need done today (so they don't need to get into FP). Large whiteboard has sections for long term, this week, and today.

These overlap to some extent, but in my field it's better to have too much than not enough. Clients place great value on timeliness.