(2022-09-23) Nestor Supercharge Your Productivity Three Recommended Tools For Thought

RJ Nestor: Supercharge Your Productivity: Three Recommended Tools for Thought. Maybe you don’t need a simple, flexible environment to plan projects, convert knowledge to action, get clear when you’re stuck, or develop reliable procedures to streamline future work. But if you do want those benefits, choose a TfT and make it the spine of your productivity system.

Choosing the Right TfT

I’ve pinpointed these three—see which resonates with you!
If you are a fast and furious notetaker and note-linker, or you like to customize your workflows as they emerge, try Tana.
If you prefer a more traditional notes interface with robust task scheduling and management, try Amplenote.
If you want tasks and knowledge to stay separate, but occasionally link between them, try Obsidian paired with your favorite task app.

Tana: Outliner meets Database

The magic of Tana emerges from its combination of outliner and database features

Amplenote: Tradition meets Innovation

if you’re coming from Evernote, you’ll feel at home in Amplenote. But you’ll have so much more power. There are Daily Jots, Amplenote’s take on the TfT daily note concept. There’s note-linking with double brackets, along with backlinks so you can explore your links between notes. And there are tasks—and Amplenote’s tasks are spectacular. (ToDoList)

The tasks system in Amplenote is driven by their Idea Execution Funnel. The concept is this: ideas begin as Jots, mature as you expand upon them in Notes, become actionable as you distill them into Tasks, and get done because you schedule them on the Calendar.

The Idea Execution Funnel is an example of how Amplenote is more “opinionated” than Tana. Tana doesn’t come with any workflows out of the box, only features and behaviors. Amplenote provides more structure.

Obsidian + task app: The computer is the system

When I need to capture ideas on the go, for instance, I use Drafts on my Apple Watch. There’s no need to die on the hill of TfT purity: other apps can be invaluable to us

One productivity model that works well is using a TfT for developing and refining knowledge, then using a task app when that knowledge becomes actionable. As long as you can easily link between the apps, that poses no system problems

Obsidian is a great choice for the knowledge portion of this setup

Obsidian also has an active community developing extensions. For example, there’s an extension that provides two-way sync for tasks living in the Todoist app.