My life is pretty disorganized with stuff at school, work, and extracurriculars. For a few months now I’ve been encouraged to get a planner instead of keeping it all in my head. Now don’t get me wrong, I love taking physical notes and doing homework on paper with my nice pens and such. However, I do need a planner that syncs from my phone, laptop, and desktop.
I’ve been scouring for an open source solution to all this and a few months ago, I found Super Productivity. It had pretty much all of what I needed, places to put down tasks, a pomodoro timer, clients for desktop and mobile, and a place to see my progress. I didn’t use its syncing features though, because, it only allows dropbox, webdav, and local file sync. I thought it was pretty incomplete.
Over the course of this week I realized that I had a NAS that I could access outside of home so I could sync everything with my synology drive folder, allowing uploading and downloading of the .json file across all my devices. This works extremely well and very seamlessly. Now, I have a completely open source solution that doesn’t really ping any servers apart from saving a .json file locally and then syncing to my server. It’s a dream come true and works works amazingly.
After seeing how much this piece of software has transformed my life, I am hoping to share this and hope you guys will start using it as well and support this dev. Planners usually cost me around $10 or so, I’ll probably give the dev at least that much once my paycheck rolls in.
In regards to productivity, you could also take a look at Get Things Done or Bullet Journal as time/task organization frameworks, or Zettelkasten if you need data/knowledge organization.
Are these cross platform and can they sync?
Those are philosophies more than software. There are open and proprietary apps for e.g. Bullet Journaling, but you can do it with pen and paper too.
Yeah, I tried to get into physical planners but I also need a pomodoro timer type of thing to keep me on track for short term goals as well. I’ll see if I can incorporate more physical planners though.
Getting things done is a method from David Allen, he wrote a book on it. It has been around forever and lots of people really like it. I listen to his audiobook every few years. Not really to fully adopt his method, but it will always inspire me to reset my chaos and find stricture again.
The audiobook is pretty easy to find if you want to buy it or torrent it.
Not really relevant but it’s funny that pomodoro was originally physical anyway
Thanks for posting this. Interesting.
Keep in mind that you will have to decide what works for you. My experience for me is that there is a sweet spot. These is under planing and over planning. You will have to find the sweet spot yourself.
Also for me what I use is Thunderbird for contacts, calendar, and tasks. Then Joplin and Zim for notes. Recurrent tasks I use tasks… but bigger projects I just ouline in my notes app. For really big projects I’ll put it in a project planning tool and use Pert or Monte Carlo planning which is a totally different thing mostly for work and team management. For home I sync all this through Nextcloud but synology is a great choice too. For work I just kept I all on my laptop. Good not to have any work stuff on personal devices.
I dont like the UX. For me its bad :/
Too bad it’s MIT licensed, but oh well, nothing’s perfect 🤷.
What is wrong with that?
In practice, nothing much.
And in theory?
Weaker copyleft. Doesn’t guarantee freedom the way GPL does.
If someone were to make a proprietary derivative using the MIT licensed code, that would be allowed. Their source code changes aren’t required to be shared and licensed under a FLOSS license.
GPL on the other hand, guarantees (legally, not always in practice) that any derivatives are to be licensed the same way, so they must remain FLOSS.
Irrelevant. You can sublicense MIT to GPL by forking if you’re so inclined.
Hm, that’s good to know actually, cuz I don’t think the same applies to BSD.
I love that software. It’s so simple - no need for much clicking you can do a lot with just the keyboard.
I love particularly how there is no bloatness. Creating a new task is as simple as pressing ctrl+a (or shift+a), typing the name and pressing enter. Creating a subtask is just pressing ‘a’ on the task and type the name.
There is jira integration so I can import my jira tickets and make my own local subdivision in smaller tasks that do not need to be thoroughly described or shared. The status of the jira tickets can be updated from the app directly
There is a pomodoro plugin that works well minor some bugs (don’t ever choose “close” when prompted to skip the break or go back to work)
Wonder what did I do last week for writing a summary? Just look at the history in the app
I really love it and can only recommend it for personal planning
I haven’t learned any of the keyboard shortcuts but based on what you said, it will make my life a bit more efficient.
I was looking for a Todo app recently, thanks for sharing!
Do you happen to know where those json files are located? I have been looking for those
You can store them wherever you wish. I put them in my documents folder. You can specify the folder path in the sync settings.
In this space, I think Acreom will be the one to beat once their road map is a bit further along. For example: making it open source and including local only option for Android. On that last piece, I don’t know if iOS does it, but with Android you have to sync with their cloud whereas desktop versions don’t even require a sign in, tested on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. So not there for me yet, but is very promising.
