My Workflow

calendar Mar 20, 2022 · 3 min read · Prattle

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:

  1. Receive a dunst notification that an email has arrived.
  2. Switch to workspace 2 with aerc showing email.
  3. If something needs done, I can press one button, and pull up the calendar (calcurse).
  4. 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.

Email

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

 1            Weekly Burndown
 210 |
 3   |
 4   |              .  .  .  .
 5   |              .  .  .  .
 6   |              .  .  .  .
 7   |              .  .  .  .    . Done
 8   |        .  .  .  .  .  .    + Started
 9 5 |        .  .  .  .  .  .    X Pending
10   |        X  X  .  .  .  .
11   |        X  X  .  .  .  .
12   |        X  X  .  .  .  .
13   |        X  X  +  .  .  .
14   |        X  X  X  +  +  +
15   |        X  X  X  +  +  +
16   |     X  X  X  X  X  X  X
17 0 +--------------------------
18     01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08
19
20   Net Fix Rate:         0.3/d
21   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.