Inspired by Pomodoro Technique time management tools, Marinara online timers are customizable to meet your productivity goals. By digital agency 352 Inc.
Tag: productivity
A brief introduction to TiddlyDesktop, a new cross platform application for working with TiddlyWiki directly on the desktop on Windows, Mac and Linux. Get TiddlyDesktop from https://github.com/Jermolene/TiddlyDesktop, and see http://tiddlywiki.com for more details about TiddlyWiki.
This week, I’ve been delighted to be able to catch up with Adam Procter, academic, games designer, open advocate, and long-time supporter of Thought Shrapnel.
We discussed everything from the IndieWeb to his PhD project, with relevant links below!
Show notes
- Adam’s website / Southampton uni staff page
- Nodenoggin (and alpha app / project code / project feedback forum)
- Adam’s PhD work / blog
I try to unload all information that has any meaning to me from my brain to external storage because I don’t like to rely on my memory nor do I trust it. In this blog post, I’m going to describe my current approach of working with a personal knowledge base.

We often think positive thinking is the best way to achieve our ambitions - but the science shows it holds us all back. Dr Laurie Santos hears how champion swimmer Michael Phelps imagined the worst to help make his Olympic dreams come true.
It takes what it takes.
–Bob Bowman, swimming coach of 23-time Olympic medal winning swimmer Michael Phelps
On planning:
Hope is not a course of action.
–Kristin Beck, Senior chief petty officer, United States Navy SEAL, ret.
Gabriele Oettingen’s work and the Woop concept (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan) sound interesting. Perhaps worth reading some of her work:
Oettingen, G. (2015). Rethinking positive thinking: Inside the new science of motivation. Current.
“You name the goal, and research shows that positive thinking makes it less likely you’ll reach it.”
“It’s a strategy Gabrielle calls “mental contrasting.”
“In addition to simulating the obstacles, Gabrielle also recommends taking time to imagine— very intentionally— what it would feel like to implement our plan whenever the obstacle comes up.”
Some of the ideas behind the WOOP concept remind me of some tangential sounding philosophy and framing that Matt Maldre wrote about in his recent posts about New Year’s resolutions. [1] [2]
WOOP also seems tangential to some areas of memory research as the visualization can tend to create “false” memories that one can look back on as experience when moving toward a particular goal. I often found that in my diving practices in college I did significantly better on new dives when I visualized them or practiced them in my mind several days and even the night before practices.
My secondary backup is on OneNote (I’d used Evernote in the past and I find them roughly similar), where I’ll tend to keep some personal daily to do lists (not too dissimilar from a digital bullet journal) and other private things that are easier to keep there than on my own website.
I like that both OneNote and my website are available on almost all the platforms I regularly use, so they’re always accessible to me.
Here's what you really need to do to start 2020 off right
The secret to low-cost academic blogging is to make blogging a natural byproduct of all the things that academics already do.
- Doing an interesting lecture? Put your lecture notes in a blog post.
- Writing a detailed email reply? "Reply to public" with a blog post.
- Answering the same question a second time? Put it in a blog post.
- Writing interesting code? Comment a snippet into a post.
- Doing something geeky at home? Blog about what you learned.
We’re in danger, I think, of treating everything as if it’s some measure of our productivity. Number of steps taken, emails replied-to, articles read, podcasts listened-to. While accomplishing things — or just plain getting our work done — is important, it’s also important that not everything go in that bucket. The life where everything is measured is not really a full life: we need room for the un-measured, the not-obsessed-about, the casual, the fun-for-fun’s sake.
👓 The tools I use to be productive with ADHD | Paul Jacobson
I just read an article about how many people with ADHD rely on services like Evernote to keep their tendencies to go off chasing squirrels in check long enough to be productive. In honor of #ADHDAwarenessMonth, we asked ADHD coach @takecontroladhd how she takes control of it with Evernote. https://t...
👓 Silence is not necessarily golden for Evernote | Paul Jacobson
I’ve been an Evernote user for well over a decade, and I used it daily until a couple years ago. I have almost 29,000 notes (a fair number of these notes are automatically captured using IFTTT workflows). In recent years, Evernote has been pretty quiet on its blog, and while it’s released update...
A Sketch for an IndieWeb Bullet Journal
I like the lab book metaphor! That’s probably why a notebook-note analogy appeals to me for my productivity tools. Paul Jacobson on .
I’m honestly a bit surprised that no one has created a bullet journal plugin for WordPress yet. Or maybe someone comes up with a bullet journal stand alone product a bit like Autommatic’s Simple Note? Last week after a talk I attended, someone came up to me who had self-published 400+ copies of a custom made bullet journal that they wanted to sell/market. I’ve also been looking at some bullet journal apps, but my very first thoughts were “Who owns this data? What will they do with it? What happens if the company goes out of business? Is there a useful data export functionality?” For one of the ones I looked at my immediate impression was “This is a really painful and unintuitive UI.”
Naturally my next thought was “how would the IndieWeb build such a thing?”
Perhaps there’s a lot of code to write, though I can imagine that simply creating Archive views of pre-existing data may be a good first start. In fact some good archive views would be particularly helpful if one is using a plugin like David Shanske’s Post Kinds which dramatically extends the idea behind Post Formats. This would make tracking things like eating, drinking, reading, etc. a lot easier to present visually as well as to track/journal. One could easily extend the functionality of Post Kinds to create “to do” items and then have archive views that could be sorted by date, date due, tags/categories for easier daily use. Since it’s all web-based, it’s backed up and available almost everywhere including desktop and mobile.
I know a few people like Jonathan LaCour and Eddie Hinkle have been tinkering around with monthly, weekly, or annual recaps on their websites (see also: https://indieweb.org/monthly_recap). Isn’t this what a lot of bullet journals are doing, but in reverse order? You put in data quickly so you can have an overview to better plan and live in the future? If you’re already using Micropub tools like teacup (for food/drink), OwnYourSwarm (for location), or a variety of others for bookmarking things (which could be added to one’s to-do list), then creating a handful of bullet journal-type views on that data should be fairly easy. I also remember that Beau Lebens had his Keyring project for WordPress that was pulling in a lot of data from various places that could be leveraged in much the same way.
In some sense I’m already using my own WP-based website as a commonplace book (or as Jamie Todd Rubin mentions on Paul’s post a (lab) notebook), so how much nicer/easier would it be if I could (privately) track to do lists as well?
Of course the hard part now is building it all…
Additional notes and ideas
I started thinking about some of this ages ago when I prototyped making “itches” for my own website. And isn’t this just a public-facing to-do list? I don’t immediately see a to-do list entry on the IndieWeb wiki though I know that people have talked about it in the past. There’s also definitely no bullet journal or productivity entries, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t build them.
There are a lot of preexisting silos on the web that do to-do lists or which have productivity related personal data (Google notes, Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, etc.), so there are definitely many UI examples of good and bad display. For distributed group task management I could easily see things being marked done or undone and webmentions handling notifications for these. I suspect for this to take off on a wide, distributed scale for company-wide project management however, more work would need to exist on the ideas of audience and private or semi-private posts. The smaller personal side is certainly much more easily handled.
As another useful sub-case for study, I’ll note that several within the IndieWeb are able to post issues on their own websites, syndicate to GitHub’s issue queue, and get replies back, and isn’t this just a simple example workflow of a to-do list as well?
Greg McVerry has also mentioned he’s tinkered around in this area before primarily using pre-existing functionality in WithKnown. In his case, he’s been utilizing the related idea of the Pomodoro Technique which is widely known in productivity circles.
I’d be thrilled to hear ideas, thoughts, additional brainstorming, or even prior art examples of this sort of stuff. Feel free to add your thoughts below.
Featured photo by Matt Ragland on Unsplash
📺 Capsicum Bullet Journal App Review | YouTube
Leo Laporte and Megan Morrone discuss Capsicum, a new subscription app by Illuminated Bits. It's a bullet journal with digital washy tape and cool fonts, plus a way to visually track good habits, keep your Google or Apple calendar, make to-do lists, keep a gratitude journal, a diary, or more. A great tool for living your best (or your worst) life.
Bookmarked to watch on February 8, 2019 at 12:25PM
👓 Scoop: Leaked private schedules show Trump spent 60% of last 3 months in “Executive Time” | Axios
It's unprecedented visibility into how the president spends his days.