A New Take on Productivity

People often ask me how I got into the CTO game, and my answer has been the same for many years – I simply love technology. 

The downside is that I apply technology to pretty much everything, and most recently I’ve put my focus on productivity.

I’ve tried so many task managers and note taking apps over the years, and nothing ever stuck. 

So I finally asked myself: is there a piece of software that has clicked with me over the years that could fill the gap? 

Well, the only tool that I’ve been using day-in and day-out since my earliest days as a technologist is my beloved text editor – vim.

What is Vim?

Vim is the successor to vi, which was originally released in 1976, before I was even born. 

In 1991, Bram Moolenaar released the first version of Vim, which stands for “Vi improved,” right around the time when I was starting my journey as a programmer. 

I’ve been using a flavor of vim ever since, eventually moving to NeoVim in 2016, and finally to LunarVim in 2023.

How does this all fit together?

Well, I’ve started to take my daily notes in my text editor, using the Markdown format. I wrote a plugin for LunarVim in Lua that automatically creates a daily note for me, populated with a list of my meetings from my calendar, and a set of templated sections. 

Every morning, I fire up LunarVim, type in a shortcut, and am dropped into my daily notes. 

During the day, I take notes during each meeting, capturing key information and action items. 

That last part is pretty key. My plugin lets me type in a keyboard shortcut and quickly create tasks.

Once I had the plugin in place, I was off to the races. 

I use a lot of devices, which should come as no surprise, so the next challenge was making my notes available everywhere. 

Notes in Perfect Harmony

Enter Syncthing, which is a self-hosted automatic file synchronization service. Using Syncthing, my notes are replicated nearly instantly to every device I own.

When I’m on my phone, it isn’t always convenient to open up a text editor to add, edit, or complete tasks, so I sat down with my good friend Amazon Q Developer and whipped up a quick web app in Python, JavaScript, and Tailwind CSS. 

When actions are taken within the web app, they are pushed to disk on one of my servers, and then replicated to my devices using Syncthing. 

I call the app tascii. (If you got the pun, congrats, you’re a nerd).

I’ve been using this system for a couple of months now, and it's really changed the game for me. 

Now I am able to use the tool that has been central to my life as a developer since the early 1990’s to take notes and manage my tasks.