Productivity Traps

27 May, 2024

I've been trying to find a new solution to SimpleNote - in short, I want some place to write posts in markdown format, with the ability to quickly copy & paste into wherever I want to post (either here in Bear, or a week note on my website). SimpleNote was great because it lets you write in markdown and provide a preview, while other apps (such as Notion, which I'm trying at the moment) auto-format your text (with the option to export your notes as .md files).

Honestly, I should just set myself up with basic, plain text files. The only downside to creating plain .txt or .md files is that I can't get an immediate preview. Other than that, I can still write these at any point in time. I have text editing apps on both my phone (Simple Text Editor) and iPad (Runestone). OneDrive also has an in-browser text editor (plus, I can always open Notepad or TextEdit as needed).

I'm giving Notion a shot though, because it is very flexible and has many different capabilities. I've been looking through the Notion subreddit for various tips and tricks and gosh, there are so many productivity traps there. It's just the digital version of the uber-pretty bullet journals - people spend so much time making their productivity platforms look nice and get all fancy with their setups that I wonder if they actually get anything done with them¹.

I almost fell into a productivity trap myself; I found some neat-looking habit trackers created through Notion so I thought I'd give them a shot, even went through a YouTube video with instructions on how to set it up from scratch. Then I remembered...I could just let a dedicated app do this. So I reinstalled Daylio.

And browsing through that subreddit...the entire Notion community seems to be a template marketplace. A lot of templates are free, but so many people are creating these things to sell. The same happens with Obsidian and other similar apps, it's not just Notion.

The only productivity system I've seen recently that seems truly helpful is the Johnny Decimal system. I haven't implemented it exactly as outlined on the website but I did change up some of my work folders to help make things easier to find.

I feel like my best option is to just implement a version of the JD system in my personal One Drive folder and set myself up with .txt and .md files. The only barrier is taking the time to set it up.

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