cross-posted from: https://lemmy.selfhostcat.com/post/432780
I’m writing my PhD and sometimes feel like I’m losing my mind trying to balance home and work tasks, thesis tasks, personal and household habits, and potential connecting these to notes. I really struggle if everything isn’t in one place I can’t keep track of it.
I’ve been using Beaverhabits for habits, Baikal for Caldav connected to iPhone reminders and Thunderbird tasks, and memos and trilium for notes. I also, use a notebook for daily stuff and move it over to digital if it isn’t finished by 5.
Any recommendations? I would really appreciate it. I enjoy thinking about how to do and manage work efficiently but also need a firm system.
I use Joplin. It might be a bit more approachable than Org-mode
In my eyes, org-mode (https://orgmode.org/) is the most flexible FOSS option if you’re willing to use a laptop running emacs for most of your organising needs. I’ve been using it for years for all of the demands you describe.
Of course an SDF user recommends this ;)
Is this complicated to get started? I see it mentioned frequently but the site is intimidating
Yes and no. The biggest hurdle is using emacs, org-mode itself is just a rather simple plaintext format. But as a beginner it’s best if you just consider emacs to be a kind of text editor like mousepad or notepad. If you just install it, it will basically look like a weird version of those programs. What might seem intimidating are all the keybindings long-time emacs users regularly throw around. You can just ignore those for the beginning.
But emacs is also extremely well-documented, though. Your biggest aides as a beginner would be “C-h i”, (pressing control + h, then i) to bring up all info manuals installed on your machine, and the various ‘apropos’ commands, which I usually just call through ‘invoke-command’ “M-x” (meta key + x). The emacs manual is pretty good. I know lots of people start with fancy emacs distributions. I would however suggest just starting with plain emacs and keeping the menu bar open for the first few months.
Disclaimer: I do almost all of my work in emacs. And my comparisons to other methods of organising yourself are a few years old.