My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
I use a single text file, have done this for decades. I dump everything into it and don&#x27;t worry too much about structure, it&#x27;s an incredible resource for &quot;remembering&quot; minutia, things like &quot;what was that server that i thought might have had some issues last August?&quot; Just a quick control-S and I&#x27;m there. My current 7+ year old notes file has about 100K lines in it right now. I can tell you what I was doing last year, or the year before, on this day, in seconds.<p>I just type<p><pre><code>    note (maybe some text here)
</code></pre>
and it cracks open Emacs on the notes file, adds a timestamp, appends the optional text, and then I can just type or paste something in. Nearly frictionless, that&#x27;s key. Great for writing those miserable annual reviews, too (easy answers to &quot;what have I worked on in the past year?&quot;)<p>I use plain old notebooks (simple blank sketchpads, or something bound like a Moleskin&#x2F;Lecchturm) for meetings, interviews, walking around datacenters and so forth where a keyboard is awkward and anyway, <i>drawings</i>.<p>I&#x27;ve tried the EverNote&#x2F;OneNote&#x2F;etc. apps and none of them were as convenient or as easy to use, or as portable.