The 3 tools I use to simplify life, achieve goals, and boost productivity

Are you looking for tools to simplify your life, help you achieve your goals, and boost your productivity? In this post, I'll show you the tools that I have found after years of researching and experimenting with different methods and systems. We will look into task management, note-taking, and time management.

As a preface, and at the risk of contradicting this whole post, I want to emphasize a few key points:

• Principles over tools - find the principles that work for you and choose the tools that facilitate them.
• Start simple - when starting with something complex, you run into the risk of adding too much overhead and giving up. Start simple and build on what works.
• Experiment - this relates to the points above. You probably won't know the best method for you, so it's best to try out different options before committing to one.

The tools

I'll be covering the following tools:

• Todoist for task management
• Obsidian for note-taking
• Calendar for time management

These tools can be used to varying degrees of complexity and lend themselves well to many methods and productivity principles. This makes them great choices for starting to build your own productivity system that works for you.

Todoist - task management

Todoist is generally the entry point for my productivity system. This is where I put everything that I want to remember and do. This could be a meeting, an article that I want to read later, my shopping list, or work tasks that I have to do.

When I'm out and about, I use Todoist to quickly jot down things I want to remember. Once I get home, I go over my inbox to move things to their appropriate place. I then regularly review my filters to check what needs taking care of, and ensuring that nothing is falling behind (by mistake).

Todoist is very flexible and fits many types of "mind-models". I'll be sharing how I organize my tasks and base my whole productivity system around Todoist in a future post.

Obsidian - note-taking

Obsidian is my go to for storing knowledge, from quick notes to long form content. This includes things from meetings notes, blog posts (this was once a note in my Obsidian vault), recipes, resources, the list is endless.

Obsidian allows you to link between your notes, which builds a graph of your knowledge, where related notes are connected with each other. In principle, this makes it so that accessing your knowledge feels intuitive and flows across the several layers of complexity that you have. You can also have tags for your notes, which allows you to categorize your notes and grouping them.

Obsidian stores everything as simple text files (formatted using markdown) in your computer, and I have them synced across my devices using Syncthing. You can also add plugins which can drastically change (for better or for worse) your experience and workflow with Obsidian.

At the end of the day, you can build a complex system where notes and concepts are linked together, and you use several plugins to write and access your notes. You can also just use Obsidian as a simple file editor, keeping your notes in their folders and nothing more (this is how I started). I encourage you not to fall into the trap of building a complex system that you can't use, and resist the urge of going for the pretty plugins, that seem super useful, but end up not adding anything of value to your system. It's better to start simple and scale up.

Calendar - time management

I use different calendar apps (mainly Google Calendar and Outlook), but my use for them is simple. I just track my meetings and events. Every time I make some sort of appointment, whether it's a meeting, hanging out with friends or going to the doctor, I put it in my calendar. This makes it very easy for me to know when I can make plans, and when I can dedicate some time to achieve my goals.

I also like to use my calendar to do time blocking. I simply schedule an event to restrict my calendar, and try as best I can to keep that time slot dedicated to the thing I planned to work on. I do this both at work and outside of work. Oftentimes things don't work out, and I have to move a time block, but it's alright, the point is that it's flexible and adaptable.

As Todoist rolls out their calendar feature, I look forward to seeing how much of this I can concentrate there.

How to use these build your own system

Once again, this is about realizing what works for you. Here are some tips:

• Choose a tool for your needs, and start trying it.
• Start simple. Don't dive head first into the complexity hole.
• When looking at what others are doing, realize it may have taken them years to perfect their system. Copying it just because it looks cool will put you at a disadvantage.

This was originally posted on Knowledge Tamer, a website about building productivity and knowledge systems that work for you.