I've tried every productivity app. Notion, Obsidian, Todoist, Trello, Things 3, pen and paper, sticky notes on my monitor, sending myself emails — the full spectrum. Most of them lasted about as long as my New Year's resolutions.
But a few stuck. Here's what actually survived the purge.
A plain text file called "today.txt"
Seriously. I keep a file on my desktop called today.txt. Every morning I open it, delete yesterday's stuff, and write down three things I need to do. That's it. No tags, no priorities, no color coding. Just three things. If I finish them, great. If I don't, they roll over.
The magic is in the constraint. Three things means I actually think about what matters instead of writing a 47-item list that makes me feel productive without actually being productive.
Calendar blocking
Not the corporate "block your deep work time" advice. I mean literally blocking time for everything, including "do nothing" blocks. If it's not on the calendar, my brain treats it as optional. So I put "eat lunch" and "go for a walk" and "scroll the internet guilt-free" on there too. Turns out I'm way more productive when I give myself explicit permission to not be productive.
Screenshots folder
This is unconventional but hear me out. Instead of bookmarking articles, saving links, or adding things to read-later apps (which I never actually read later), I just screenshot interesting things and dump them in a folder. Once a week I go through the folder and either act on them or delete them. Most get deleted. That's fine — it means they weren't that important.
A "done" list
In addition to my to-do list, I keep a "done" list. At the end of each day I write down what I actually accomplished. On bad days when I feel like I did nothing, I look at the done list and realize I actually did a lot — it just didn't feel like it because none of it was on my original to-do list.
The anti-tool
The biggest productivity improvement I've made? Turning off notifications for everything except calls and direct messages. No app badges, no banner alerts, no "you haven't posted in 3 days!" guilt trips. I check things when I choose to, not when my phone demands it.
It's boring advice. But boring advice that you actually follow beats exciting advice that you abandon after a week.