My Workflow
This isn’t advice. If I have any advice, it’s just to try various things and find out what works for you.
When it comes to productivity tools, I focus always on speed before and above anything else. If some new tool has a wonderful new feature, but takes three seconds to load, it’s off the table. I won’t even consider it.
A standard response might look like this:
- Receive a
dunst
notification that an email has arrived. - Switch to workspace 2 with
aerc
showing email. - If something needs done, I can press one button, and pull up the calendar (
calcurse
). - The task gets entered in with a date, or on the task list.
Nothing I run really ’loads’, because loading times interrupt thinking, and I don’t care about anything as much as my own peace of mind.
Emails go in buckets called ‘professional’, ‘family/ friends’, and ’trash’. That’s it. Everything should get an instant response once I’m at a keyboard, or at least instantly categorized.
No Bings
Any noises distract from work already being done, so anything making a noise must die.
For notifications, I only have a small dunst
window with a short description.
Projects with taskwarrior
I currently have 8 projects on the go.
Some might never get finished, others I work on here and there as time allows.
Keeping track of all these goals requires a properly organized list, and nothing loads quite as fast as taskwarrior
.
Task Warrior for Projects
Weekly Burndown
10 |
|
| . . . .
| . . . .
| . . . .
| . . . . . Done
| . . . . . . + Started
5 | . . . . . . X Pending
| X X . . . .
| X X . . . .
| X X . . . .
| X X + . . .
| X X X + + +
| X X X + + +
| X X X X X X X
0 +--------------------------
01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08
Net Fix Rate: 0.3/d
Estimated completion: 2022-03-10 (7d)
Time Keeping with timewarrior
Time tracking serves mostly to help one focus, but it can also help with billing. Having a CLI program like taskwarrior seems the only way to go, because it responds instantly, and it can take arbitrary commands. I’ve made key-bindings to stop or continue time tracking, and when I start a new task, that automatically starts time tracking. If I wanted to start time tracking when a particular program opened, and stop when that program closed, that’d take less than 5 minutes to set up.
I theoretically clean up task lists every Sunday. I don’t always do it, but having a specified day means it will happen eventually.