Show HN: Personal productivity workspace for busy people

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • MarvinAPI

    API documentation for the Amazing Marvin productivity tool

  • Not necessarily apple to apple, but I use Amazing Marvin [1], which allows similar type of configuration, and more. (It's kind of application where 10 different configuration would come out from 10 different people...)

    The pricing is high-end, but there's one time option (which I opted couple years ago and paid itself, pretty much!) and optionally usable offline for most features.

    [1]: https://amazingmarvin.com/

  • bar

  • This seems very good.

    1. This looks like Notion, which is good. Notion succeeded by being pretty.

    2. It feels...I don't know the way to say it, but the appropriately level of solid (I don't accidentally drag and drop stuff), fast, and just easy to use. No non-modal mix of commands and typing makes entering information frustrating. It feels like typing into Notepad. It's frustration-free.

    3. I would like if the dashboard showed unscheduled tasks (as a collapsible section at the very bottom, below Completed.)

    4. I have TODOs of the form "Deploy XYZ" and ideally they would be "Deploy XYZ - https://github.com/foo/bar/pull/1337" -- but this adds a lot of clutter to the task list. If there were a way to add details or attach notes to tasks, that would be helpful. (It would also add clutter, so be careful. Just a "Details" link next to "Schedule" and the tags might work. Make it open a note on the right, perhaps?)

    5. The "Schedule" link below each item makes me think I haven't scheduled the item, but I have. It should say "Today" (when I'm looking at today on the dashboard).

    6. The importing of calendars scared me as it populated a giant list, including my coworkers calendars that I've subscribed to (but have set to not display), but turned out fine. Only the ones I have set to display in Google Calendar display in Emery by default. The import UX maaaaybe could be better / less aggressive, but it works.

    7. The dichotomy between "schedule this for today" and "add this to a specific time on my calendar" still exists, and frustrates me, but the ability to sort the tasks helps.

    8. It's good that this is opinionated. Stay focused and reject most feature requests, including mine.

    9. You got me to enter my credit card before I even got to play around with it. That's impressive, but you are definitely cutting your top-of-funnel with that requirement. (Maybe it pays off by increasing conversion at the free trial->paid step, or maybe you only want true believers at the beginning, but the payment form would usually have turned me away.)

    10. Can I export my data? In seven days, am I going to have to manually copy-and-paste all my notes and outstanding TODOs back into my old system if I decide this isn't for me? This risk also makes me hesitant to go all-in during the trial period. (An export wouldn't fully solve this, since I'd then have a messy JSON file or something to deal with, but I'd feel a little better about it.)

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  • NotePlan_Themes

    Official collection of custom themes for NotePlan 3

  • NotePlan (Apple-ecosystem only) is pretty awesome for this: https://noteplan.co, though their new pricing plan is ridiculous (current subscribers unaffected).

    The files are all stored locally in plain text. There's a growing plugin ecosystem as well.

    There are some mildly annoying, long-outstanding bugs like ordered lists not re-ordering as expected, but overall it's a very good app.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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