Lots of competitors in this space it seems. I had a similar idea, a todo list + calendar app listed below, but it's interesting to see ideas converging on the idea of timeboxing your tasks.
Ever since Cal Newport wrote Deep Work, it seems like everyone wants to get on the deep work productivity train. I wonder who will win eventually though.
In my experience, productivity apps have more in common with lifestyle brands than, say, email. In that way, there's no winning any more than one brand can effectively own a space.
If I were CEO of one of these products, I'd quickly diversify into other areas in order to differentiate, add value to subscriptions, and better cater to a particular audience. How I'd do that would depend on the lifestyle brand I'm trying to establish. I've heard this called the law of division in marketing.[1]
https://agenda.com fit the bill for me. Offline use (though can only sync today through iCloud and Dropbox, I think, which sucks - but you can sync folders manually), pulls calendar from your system integration, simple payment. You can link your daily agenda items/notes to calendar invites.
Though it does not connect to email, at least today, which was OK for my use cases.
I recently switched from Sunsama to Amazing Marvin, which is less opinionated, has more features, and is cheaper, but doesn't support teams as far as I can tell.
Indeed, I included it to show that even though everyone might seem like they're clamoring for deep work products, the reality is that sometimes people just don't care enough. Level's founder Derrick Reimer had a hypothesis that people hated Slack (and particularly its interrupting notifications) that he wanted to make a product that was async. Turns out people don't actually care enough to change their entire communications workflow.
I think the bigger problem there is missing who the real customer is. Slacks pay-for features are targeted not at the users but at management, and management gets to dictate tools more often than not. Individual developers would absolutely jump on an async platform, but they're not the decision maker.
I run a problem validation platform, The problem which has the most number of solutions is 'Getting things done at individual level'[1].
Just when I think, every possible way to address this has been done there comes another with totally different approach to task management. This is very interesting as each one of them built it because they felt something was missing in their existing task manager.
As long there's a need-gap exists, there's a need for the solution.
Thanks for the survey of similar applications. What I want is (inspired by Deep Work) an application that allows me to do time-blocking for a given day around my typical schedule.
For example, in a given day, since I'm a student, I may have two 75-minute blocks of class and a 45 minute meeting scheduled. I want an app that encourages me to think about what I'll be doing with the rest of my time and fill in the gaps in my calendar with whatever (reading, doing assignments, note-taking, etc.). Does one of the apps you've linked to provide this?
In my opinion, why not use a calendar app for that, like Google Calendar, and fill it out each day yourself? For that usecase I don't see the value in paying for these tools.
I know the founder of Oltra, cool guy. My product is actually mobile first because I found that I liked having it on my phone when I'm out and about. It's still in the building stages though, I've been documenting it on Twitter [0] this month, trying to finish the MVP before the end of the month.
A decade or so, I did _everything_ in emacs. I was never more productive and I attribute it partially to the sort of flow that Legend seems to be trying to make.
Smartphones are what killed it for me. As I switched to using my smartphone + tablet more, it broke my emacs setup. I'm still trying to get it back.
Our IT dept at work is super strict with everything, to the point that I don’t even bother accessing anything work related on any device other than my work machine. Nor am I allowed to actually (so these tools like Legend are by default unusable). By the same token, I refuse to put any personal info on the work machine. The upside of this is that I’ve been able to go back to using emacs for everything :)
Is there a good screencast series about people doing stuff in Emacs? Not like a tutorial like "press C-x" etc. I just want to know what is possible, or what people mean by "I did _everything_ in emacs".
That's the thing. I attempted to get into the org productivity zone a while ago but it fell apart the moment I needed mobile support and syncing. Unfortunately, the mobile org clients of the time didn't support syncing well enough to be viable for my use case - not to mention that all the customization I had painstakingly set up within emacs didn't transfer to the mobile clients either.
I suspect it's impractical to adapt the Emacs workflow to the task of syncing data across devices that is now the expected norm, and other services will have to rise up in its place. If all you have is a filesystem, up-to-date syncing across multiple devices is just a really hard problem (coming from someone who could never get Syncthing to work reliably).
However, I have heard of the remoteStorage protocol, which is supposed to be an open-source syncing protocol that replaces Dropbox and the like, but it's still in its infancy. Maybe adding support for it as a plugin to sync directly from Emacs, instead of using a "dumb" polling filesystem monitor, could become an option.
I strongly recommend Simpletask (disclosure, I've sent a couple PRs). Not visually polished, but functionality is the best, bar none: Lua scripts allow extensive customization of your workflow. Free & open source. Only on F-Droid due to asinine Play Store policies.
I read this a few times trying to understand this. I guess OP means:
> I was very productive, then, using emacs.
"I was never more productive" isn't wrong, and in context it should be clear. But, I read this like "Never, using emacs, did I experience increased productivity".
It reminds me of that trope, "Couldn't care less".
Smart devices suck for deep focus productivity and organisation. Ultimately what works is either the desktop Outlook application or some offline gadget that can sync to your PC.
iOS has a couple decent ssh clients, if you are into command line stuff. Blink and Panic both seem fine, although I'm sure I'll get some better suggestions now as that is the inevitable result of publicly airing an opinion on an ssh client. :)
99% of my incoming work happens in a combination of Slack, an SCM, Zoom and Jira. Maybe 1% of the time I get a task in from email (do this training, etc).
Overall it's a cool idea, but I wasn't able to quickly determine if any/all of those things had support for task import.
Of course, I can just type in the tasks and schedule them that way too.
(I'm an SRE, not a founder or PM, so my workflow is likely a little different than most)
I started an account, but felt it wasn't very compelling to actually get started using it. I've synchronized my email and calendar, but it isn't jumping out at me how this will be superior to my current workflow (I use Things and Calendar on MacOS/iOS, and they integrate very dumbly but well enough).
At the risk of sounding dumb, what is this supposed to offer that my workflow doesn't have? I see it can support contacts and files as well, but I'm not sure if/why I'd need that. I have all of that on MacOS/iOS already, so when I add contacts or references to files it'll come from iCloud or whatever. That's fine for me. Is this for people with more disparate and less integrated systems? Am I missing out on something?
The main appeal to me is having task lists working more like documents; Things doesn't support this and it's fairly inflexible in that regard. I do wish I could plan projects and take notes a little more freely in there. But I'd also worry that having this freedom might be a distraction, too.
Thank you, this is great! I missed this announcement because I've been on vacation. I agree, it isn't documents (nor should it be) but it's certainly better than plain text.
I wanted to try out the Linux app on Ubuntu (downloaded the .deb file), see how it compared to Obsidian (which is sadly a little awkward in terms of sync and config).
Unfortunately the desktop version is unusable - it automatically maximises itself and then gets stuck in a loop, constantly trying to resize. Trying to make the window smaller makes it go similarly crazy and it will just revert to filling the screen again.
From the quick demos on the website this seems like something I would absolutely love.
However, after signing up, I'm presented with a big, blank, white document and have no clue where to begin or how things are supposed to link together. I closed it in less than 1 minute.
Legend developer here. We actually weren't quite ready to do a public launch yet because we're planning to make some videos and overall improve the intro experience. If you're interested, check back in a few weeks. Or the Help page at https://legendapp.com/help/ could help for now.
+1 for templates. The big hurdle I hit with every productivity app is getting it set up.
I'd love to have some templates to play with, to find bits that work for me that I can copy from and stick together to end up with what I want.
I'm certain that almost everything I want an app like this to do can be done; the problem is I have no idea how to do it because I'm not familiar with how the app structures things. It's frustrating to start setting things up one way, only to discover there was a better way to do it and have to re-do everything.
Interesting approach! Building an "all-in-one" workflow tool is difficult because as the feature list grows the app becomes bloated with user-facing features in form of buttons, dropdowns etc.
It's cool to see a new design approach where user gets just about what they need at the time.
I'm building yet another workflow tool but with NLP doing the heavy lifting for the user. https://acreom.com
I gave this app a spin today and I really like what they're going for. Unfortunately, I use Fastmail for email and calendars so I can't take advantage of one of the key features. I hope they add support in the future. It's a fresh take and I'd be willing to give it a serious try if I could sync my email and calendar!
All I want is a way to add tasks as items in my gmail inbox just like Google Inbox had, before they killed it. Does anyone make a Gmail plugin that adds that? I don't want to use a whole different email client or add tasks to a separate task-only list off to the side.
Yeah I do that. It's a pain for small UI reasons, like you can't snooze it before you send it, you can't edit it after you send it, it requires a bunch of clicks and waiting, etc. It's close to what I want but it could be a lot better. That's exactly what Inbox fixed.
Still prefer Dendron, I get to own my data if it dies (please keep funding them ycombinator). Plus it looks like its going this direction already with api's that are local first for people to build it in if they don't.
Why is it so common to bunch email, todos, and calendars together? Is this based on some memory of a desk from the 1980s, where one might sit down to write a letter to one's friend, check the calendar to see what date you should suggest meeting, and then mark on a sticky note that you need to get milk when you're at the grocery store?
I wouldn't worry too much. The market is huge and it's also usually never the first mover of some new way of doing things that wins the big price (look at Amazon, Apple, MSFT, Google, Facebook etc.etc.)
Have you read the eponymous book by Cal Newport? That's where these tools being labeled for "deep work" are coming from. It's a great book, I'd highly recommend it. Overall though I don't think you necessarily need a tool for deep work, but it can help.
I have not read the book, but I am aware of it. That's why I think it is so similar to GTD: started as a book, became very popular with the tech community leading to a few tools being made for it, became a common sight on HN front page, (we have not gotten here yet with deep work) became clear it was not a silver bullet and lost its lustre, vanished from front page, some people still use it.
Deep Work is all about large blocks of time allocated to highly creative/in-depth work. GTD is more of a way of handling tasks that are obvious and known in a methodical way. Deep Work is probably more applicable to software developers or other creative fields than it is to say, someone like a secretary that has to manage a huge influx of tasks that fly in from all directions, most of which are trivial to handle, but can be "paralyzing" when not handled.
But also, I applaud this effort at simplifying workflows, recognizing how difficult it is to program around productivity where everyone seems to have a different way of doing things :)
Ever since Cal Newport wrote Deep Work, it seems like everyone wants to get on the deep work productivity train. I wonder who will win eventually though.
- www.getartemis.app (disclosure, my app)
- www.akiflow.com
- www.oltra.io
- www.levelteams.com