Productivity

I’ve been trying to figure out which productivity app actually fits my workflow. Both WHPH (Work Hard Play Hard) and Super Productivity keep coming up, so I thought it was worth comparing them properly. WHPH (Work Hard Play Hard) WHPH is a general-purpose productivity app. It does several things: tracks your tasks, monitors which apps you use and for how long, helps you build habits, and gives you a basic sense of where your time goes. The sync between desktop and mobile happens over your local network – no cloud, no account, just devices talking to each other. ...

I’ve been reading Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain, and it’s one of those books that makes you immediately want to reorganise your entire digital life. The central idea is straightforward enough: your brain is for having ideas, not storing them. Everything else – notes, articles, voice memos, half-finished projects – should live somewhere external that you can trust and search. The framework he proposes is called CODE: Capture, Organise, Distill, Express. It’s simple, and that’s the point. Most people I know (myself included) are terrible at the first two steps. We capture everything – screenshots, highlights, random thoughts – and then we never look at it again because there’s no system for getting it out. ...

It’s the last day of 2013 and I’ve been sitting with the question of what I actually want to do differently in 2014. Not what I should do, not what sounds good on a vision board, but what I genuinely want to change about how I spend my time. I’ve made lists before. Five resolutions, ten resolutions, the whole lot. Write more, exercise more, read more, save more, learn a language, cut out social media, meditate every morning. By February I’d abandoned at least eight of them, and the ones I kept were half-hearted at best. The problem was never discipline. It was that I was trying to change everything at once, which is just a fancy way of saying I wasn’t going to change anything at all. ...