Tech Productivity Issue #234 (Organizing Your Digital Life)

Issue #234 (Organizing Your Digital Life) 08/07/23

Sponsor

Bytes: Your Favourite JavaScript Newsletter
I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, but this is definitely one I look forward to. Entertaining with lots of cool and useful coding tidbits and tools.

Subscribe to Bytes

A user on Hacker News asks: What are your favorite methodologies for organizing digital life? Definitely worth checking out the thread for a very diverse array of suggestions on organizing, archiving, or generally keeping track of digital things that have piled up over the years.

The user asking the question says the amount of "digital clutter" in their case is 20 years worth. Which I can definitely relate to! I don't think I have as much as others do, but there's certainly a lot of old things on my hard drive and on some external drives that could use some revisiting.

One kind of digital clutter that needs good organization is photos. One user suggests an open-source photo management program called digiKam. I'm going to check that one out for myself because apparently it has facial recognition built in, which is a great feature for trying to find specific people in old pictures.

Now on to this week's hand-picked productivity links!

Tools & Apps

Way of Life — A beautiful, intuitive habit tracker for iOS and Android that uses a color-coded system to help you track your habits in just a few seconds per day.

GigaBrain — An online tool and optional Chrome extension that provides AI-based answers in the form of summaries, sourced mainly from Reddit, to give you an idea of what people on Reddit are saying about a subject.

Velja — A browser picker app for Mac that lets you specify when to use which browsers and apps for opening different kinds of links.

Bytes: Your Favourite JavaScript Newsletter — I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, but this is definitely one I look forward to. Entertaining with lots of cool and useful coding tidbits and tools. sponsor

Passbolt — A cross-platform, open-source password manager with powerful security and privacy features that's built for collaboration in large organizations.

Equals — A spreadsheet app, as an alternative to Sheets and Excel, with a small learning curve and built-in connections to any database, versioning, and collaboration features.

LEAD — A Slack or MS Teams plugin to help build meaningful connections across your organization, with tools to manage virtual and in-person engagements (peer learning, remote work, etc).

Articles & Resources

The Time Traveling Mistake We Make When We Procrastinate — From Mozart to Tim Urban, some lessons on how procrastination can impact our 'future self'.

How to Have Buckets of Time — A bit of a play on words because the solution the author proposes is 'putting stuff into buckets' that you empty later all in one shot, rather than a little at a time (e.g. he's against the concept of 'inbox zero').

Bytes: Your Favourite JavaScript Newsletter — I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, but this is definitely one I look forward to. Entertaining with lots of cool and useful coding tidbits and tools. sponsor

Biases — A one-stop comprehensive reference for dozens of 'biases' (i.e. how our brain takes unwanted shortcuts) and how we can improve and avoid these kinds of mental habits.

31 Secrets to Unlocking Your Creativity — Not all of these suggestions are for everyone, but there might be something you like in here that can unlock your ability to get stuff done.

Effective Spaced Repetition — This is probably the most detailed and example-filled reference you'll find on spaced repetition, one of the most effective 'cognitive hacks' for better retention of information.

A Four-Day Workweek Experiment Finds Work Does Get Done in Less Time — More research supporting the concept of shortening the workweek based on a series of trials conducted in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Ireland over an 18-month period.

Suggestions?

Have a suggestion for a productivity-related tool, article, or other resource? Send me a direct message via X (@LouisLazaris) and I’ll consider including it in a future issue.

Stay productive!

Louis
techproductivity.co
@LouisLazaris

Not subscribed? Visit techproductivity.co to join today.