Simplify your workflows
My advice is to keep your workflows simple.
Give up the war on trying to optimize your productivity stack. Go back to the basics. Use simple apps.
Most people in the productivity movement overthink how to get the most out of their tools instead of doing the work. I too found myself in this abysmal trap of death.
I would think to myself, “this isn’t the right tool, and if only I found the right tool, I could be way more productive!” Nope. Tried it for years—didn’t work one bit.
My output started to increase when I realized the following three things about myself:
My workflow doesn’t need to be perfect
I have information ADHD; I am not going to spend hours organizing my notes
Basic tools are more effective than heavy ones
Maybe these aren’t true for you but once I let go of the fact that my workflow didn't have to be perfect, I felt free. I realized that it’s okay to not use every note, so I stopped organizing them.
I've used everything from Evernote to Bear Notes to Trello to Notion to Roam but nothing has stuck quite like these three:
Google Docs for to-do lists
Apple Notes for taking notes
Obsidian for building on ideas
Google Docs for to-do lists
My to-do list is a simple Google Doc which has replaced Notion for me. For some reason it's sticking more than anything else that I’ve tried. I leave my to-do list open as tab #1 in my browser, and learned a beautiful trick from the beautiful Visakan on Twitter: Type doc.new into the browser and it opens up a completely new Google Doc.
I copy yesterday’s to-do list
Type doc.new and paste the old to-do list onto the page
I then title today’s to-do list with the date, for example 7-18-22 (or 18-7-22 for my European friends) and it auto-populates the title at the top
Throughout my day, I cross items off my life with the keyboard shortcut “command + shift + X” (to
strikethrough items like this)
Apple Notes for rapid note taking
I take a lot of notes—on average some 20-30 a day. Before Apple Notes I was using Evernote for years (was a diehard fan) but the product became bloated and started taking forever to load.
Apple Notes is nimble and has been both the easiest and quickest way of capturing random thoughts and ideas. For easy accessibility it’s placed at the the bottom right of my iPhone’s dock.
I’ll be walking down the street and think of something random or I hear a song and Shazam it or upload some screenshot or create a grocery list or type the outline for an article idea in middle of the night.
It’s clean.
Obsidian for compiling notes and journaling
More recently I started using Obsidian for which is more powerful than Apple Notes and is most closely related to Roam. The design is simple and it has a nice folder structure. Obsidian is lightweight yet has powerful functionality for superusers—I mostly just use it for the keyboard shortcuts.
It’s proven to be quite lovely for my journaling each morning.
I've configured the "daily note" (an Obsidian feature) that pipes to a folder titled “Journal”
Then I’ve configured a shortcut “command + shift + O” that takes you to today’s note which automatically gets titled with the date
The notes are automatically indexed in the journal folder for easy viewing
The combination of folder structure and keyboard shortcuts make it easier to stick to a regular journaling routine.
Summary
I’m optimizing for for effectiveness not efficiency. Effectiveness trumps efficiency every time, and now that I’ve simplified my apps and workflows, I’m getting more done because I’m actually focusing on the work.
Try going back to the basics and see what you cook up.