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On Enabling Incredible Productivity Through Software Organization And Simplicity

Brett Fraley · January 22, 2024

Introduction

This article is about being productive, making progress that counts, completing tasks, projects, and finishing that next course or reading that next book.

It isn’t advice on setting or reaching goals. It is about identifying what works for you or your organization to enable and optimize the ability to reach heightened levels of productivity. It is about clearing the path from obstacles and then upgrading your mode of transport along said path.

The first half is the sections Clutter Out - Incredible Productivity In, The Need For Drive & Passion Amongst Mere Lists, and The Turbulent Sea of Lost Notes In Bottles.

The second half is for anyone who uses software daily in their career, creative projects, and school or hobby work, which is practically everyone! Becoming incredibly productive and organized through software doesn’t mean a separate tool or service for every job. I write about digital simplicity, good tools, tips for software engineers, and customizing your daily use of software in ways that may bring joy and peace of mind to your work. Note: I will be posting a more thorough standalone article on this topic, open source, Linux, and the arsenal of some lesser known software development tools I recommend and will link to it here and on my website once complete - @TODO! :)

As of this writing, we are 3 weeks into the month of January 2024. Goals, tasks, notes, schedules, emails, browser tabs, diagrams, charts, and ideas abound!

Clutter Out, Incredible Productivity In

An influx of information and work are overflowing and scattered across multiple software tools, notebooks, Github repositories, whiteboard scribbles, and are entangled across the desks, kitchen tables, and white brain matter of individuals and entire organizations.

More than ever, our minds and daily hustle are like a busy harbor where hundred other ships are waiting to enter the port to load and unload their cargo. -Brett Fraley 2024 (yes, I just made that up and am proud of it)

Before I dive into hyper-productivity, software, simplicity, and automation, below is a quote from the following source on ‘white brain matter’: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/318966

One study Trusted Source, for instance, found a relationship between white matter structure and IQ, the authors of which concluded that “cognitive function correlates with greater fiber organization.” Similarly, other scientists have found links between the quality of white matter in an adult’s brain and their reading ability.

Researchers have also demonstrated that using our brains in a specific way can change the structure of white matter. For instance, one experiment found that regularly practicing a musical instrument increases the level of organization within white matter in the areas important for musical performance. The researchers showed that the amount of change was proportional to the number of hours the individual practiced. The more you work, the more white matter is modified.

Let’s Get into it! Just in the first 20 minutes of sitting down to write, I searched my bookmarks to be able to link to the above article, saved one of the images from the website and made it my desktop background, refilled my coffee mug, jotted down some notes to attempt at organizing my thoughts, and jumped over to YouTube to put on some ‘Tokyo Retro Lo-fi tunes’. Which, obviously is relevant to topic(s) at hand because concentration matters and is a hot commodity these days. How will I finish this article?

To guide myself along, I’ll first break down my thoughts into a concise list! What is the estimated time to complete the list? What are key points behind each topic?

Lesson 1: Screw the list because I risk getting stuck in the middle of one of the sections and not moving onto the next until tomorrow, and tomorrow I can and should be working on something else!

The Need For Drive & Passion Amongst Mere Lists

It’s difficult to be inspired by mundane tasks. Either eliminate those tasks, automate them, or push through them in light of the greater end goal or the purpose of the task. Drive and passion for reaching a desired outcome can’t be found in a spreadsheet (depending on the numbers and data). You won’t find drive or passion in your to do list. Perhaps you’ll find insight, inspiration, an outline of subtasks, and a sense of being organized, but consider completing the first item on that list and tossing the rest.

Your list is bound to change and may not matter tomorrow. If what you need to accomplish is important enough, it is most likely so prominent in the forefront and focus of your mind that you probably didn’t need a list.

The Turbulent Sea of Lost Notes In Bottles

Brainstorming can be an essential tool. Choosing goals, measuring progress, and prioritization of work is a priceless necessity, but these sort of processes should consume a small percentage of effort compared to taking action and actually moving forward.

Particularly in software development, too much emphasis on what I’ll call ‘setup’ time and planning tend to lead to large amounts of metadata, logs, design artifacts, diagrams, email chains, and documentation scattered across various tools, departments, user machines and even handwritten notes. If much of this effort ends up deprecated or irrelevant, trash it! Although, these are essential to project planning, communications, tracking a project’s lifespan and progress, it surely isn’t always valuable data to keep around.

When entire teams spend more time writing and tracking down this data and documentation than actually completing the next prioritized work, then simplification and consolidation of ‘planning’ may be much more valuable than the act of extensive planning itself, while increasing productivity.

Status update and todo list for this article, because if you’re reading and made it this far, let’s get organized and focus:

List Length: 1, Time Allotted: 30 seconds, Total Time Writing So Far: 45 mins, Editing Time: 1 minute of spellcheck and pure procrastination, Reader Engagement and Confidence: Doesn’t Matter, Word Count: 987 words 6,231 characters, Time spent on wordcounter.net: 1 minute, Time Spent on this metadata of progress as some fun satire: 5 mins and priceless, Status: Done :)

Summarizing up this section is a metaphor to household chores, and then I’ll move onto software, where I’ll describe some tools and tips I’ve picked up (the hard way) on my quest to being incredibly productive in 2024!

If I have a list of 20 household chores to do, I could easily spend 20 minutes (1 minute per task) setting goals for each. I’d set start and stop times for each task, color code the items, switch around their order, list supplies needed for each chore, chores that must come before other chores, and chores in order to increase enablement of doing chores. That is if only in handwritten format.

Imagine the list is on a phone’s todo app, a personal scrum board, on a cloud provider’s site where there’s a needed software update, on local project planning software which of course the reset my password link isn’t working! In that time, you can bet that I’ll already have the dishes done, the lawn mowed, and reading the next chapter of a book!

Software Tools, Productivity, Organization

This section is written in a ‘stream of consciousness outlined list style’ because otherwise it would never be posted. Note: Whether Windows, Mac, or Linux user, there’s information applicable to everyone here, and will not be writing this as if it were a tutorial or technical documentation.

Before diving into categorizing these notes, here are some practices I’ve found valuable to my own organization and productivity on my computer(s).

For Everyone

Simple, Basic Folder Organization

  • Any document that is not part of a code repository, an ebook or pdf, or belong to another logical directory, gets stored in Documents. It’s the same for the Downloads folder. If it’s a download then it goes in downloads until moved accordingly as needed.
  • I keep my Desktop almost empty other than the top 3-5 applications I use where I tend to actual click desktop icons to launch it.
  • Folder shortcuts on my Desktop include ARCHIVE-ME, ORGANIZE-ME, Screenshots-[the current month and year], where every month the screenshots folder gets moved to ALL-SCREENSHOTS and a new one for the month is created on the desktop. Pro-tip: this can be automated.
  • If you’re wondering what’s up with the ALL-CAPS folder naming, this is how I name what I’d consider ‘main parent directories’ as if an aisle in a grocery store. I only need and want a few main places things can be. That way, by following a pattern and never think about where a file should reside or is at on my machine.
  • I also keep a folder on the desktop named BOOKS-2024, and accordingly for each year. I download and put all books in there, simple.

* Web Browsers*

Notes, Lists, Ideas, Brainstorms

BrainDump.ms

  • I keep a single file .txt or .md document in ~/Documents named BrainDump-[Month-Year], but then I ended up having 12 BrainDump files per year. Over 6-7 years of doping this, there is no going back that far, rehashing lists, todos, notes, etc. None of that worth keeping should be left in the archives of the old BrainDumps, ya know? So, now I keep a single file and update it almost daily, usually deleting a lot of it’s contents because I don’t need it or I have moved whatever it is to somewhere relavent.

TasksLog.md

  • TasksLog is a one file journal that is literally like a captains log of only actions I took related to installing, using, or setting up some software on my machine. I go back to this as a reference for when I’m setting up[ a new virtual machine, docker image, etc. It has entries that are simply like:
  • installed xyz at version 123 to try it. It’s super cool, and NOTE: in order to set the config add: some elusive undocumented command I never will ever have to dig across the internets for again that seemingly only exists on Jim's blog from 2006!

Okay, let’s see. There’s BrainDump.md, TasksLog.md, and for more categorized organization for personal project management, on Ubuntu I use an open source application called Standard Notes! I’ve tried a ton and highly recommend it.

  • This needs to go at the top of the software developer section. Even if you’re on a Mac, and if on Windows even though they’ve come along way as far as developer friendly operating system, please jsut install via dual boot (recommended) or in Virtual Box, or on a USB stick some Linux distribution. Linux Mint or Ubuntu will run incredibly fast on your modern laptop[ that Windows has bogged down and VSCode seems to somehow still lag on 16gm ram or more.] More so, Learn Linux, learn Bash, learn Git (not just Github Desktop) or SCM tools in your IDE of choice.

I’ll be writing a huge list of lesser known applications I use on Ubuntu that are incredibly well done, useful, and interesting tools and software projects themselves.

I’m leaving the rest of anything open source / Linux based rant to include in posts on my website.

Software Development

  • For software work on my personal machine I simply have a ~/dev directory for my own projects. Then a directory named ~/dev-learn for trying out the latest greatest, following guides, and throwaway git repos. This is because I don’t want to clutter my ~/dev directory with 100 clones and forks over time because that becomes a mess, and it only takes one rogue noe_modules, .env, .gemfile. dockerfile..etc to make it into the wrong place and that can make for a bad day when you’re trying to spin up something you haven’t started locally for 3 months and xyz library globally installed package abc…etc. Speaking of, if this resonates with you or not, see the next item!
  • It’s 2024! Calling all software engineers! You no longer need to use or manage virtualenv or venv directly! Same for NodeJS and NPM. To manage your JS and Python project environments going forward, use Pipenv and NVM. I’;m not even providing links. If this is news to you, leave this article now, google both, get them installed and your life as a developer just got an order of magnitude easier and more organized :)