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Typical freelancer needs to use too many tools #freelancer #productivity

Fri, 11 Feb 2022 00:07:00 +0000

A lot of people who freelance already use too many tools in the stack. e.g. a lot of freelancers use Freshbooks, Asana, Toggl, Jira, Calend.ly to manage their business. They have either to integrate it or manually rewrite information between apps. Not to mention some features missing like simply tracking invoices sent/invoices paid.

Also, many people right now are quitting their jobs and moving to freelance, and they are worried about how to choose the right tools, which won't be very expensive (for example they were working in enterprise segment, and they had all the tools paid by their company - now they have to buy it on their own).

There are number of solutions which lacks some of the features of "all-in-one" stack, or are too expensive to buy.

3 points posted by tomw

Browser tabs become unmanageable fast #tabs #productivity

Tue, 12 Oct 2021 03:20:00 +0000

When working remotely at a tech company, I use a lot of different SaaS apps, so essentially, all my work is done in the browser. So very quickly, I find that the number of tabs in my internet browser grows to unmanageable counts.

This forces me to stop what I'm doing, and spend time curating my window of tabs to reduce the count so I can continue doing my work. Existing solutions often facilitate curating your tabs in different ways.

Chrome profiles work up to a limit, but when you are multitasking everyday, it doesn't make sense to create multiple profiles for even short-lived distractions.

3 points posted by TabWorkx

Palm OS like timesheet app for modern mobile OS #timesheet #productivity

Thu, 23 Sep 2021 13:15:00 +0000

It looks like some are still using the Timesheet app from their long discontinued Palm OS devices because some features from it are not found in the modern timesheet apps of android and iOS.

To quote what's missing,

Palm had a set of "rules" for programmers as to how the UI should work - and one was that nothing should take more than 3 clicks, IIRC. The needs I have for a time sheet app is to simply keep track whenever I change what I work on during the day. I may be working on project 1234, then someone wants me in a meeting on project 6566 work package 312, and my time app must keep track of that. The TimeSheet app does that in the simplest way possible - I do exactly one click, and it tracks the other project.
During the day I may have to work on a number of projects, for shorter or longer periods. I have a list of those projects and work packages in TimeSheet. When the time comes to input all of that into the corporate time system TimeSheet presents me with the total sum of all work packages for each day (and other ways, if I need them).

It's extremely simple. I just can't find anything with the same easy functionality on Android or elsewhere. They seem to have a different focus, and way too many clicks to go through.

3 points posted by Abishek Muthian

I don't read my articles from the read later app #reading #productivity

Wed, 08 Sep 2021 02:24:00 +0000

Some pain points:

Lack of dark patterns/workflow that motivates you to go through lists
Lack of visualisation of your progress and to be covered lists. Also once Peter Drucker noted you can't manage what you can't measure, so there's that.
Lack of features such as queues and intelligent sorting based on params like the time needed (smartly learned by your reading speeds), etc. Queues and lists as in music and podcast players
Lack of smart organisational ability and proper search implementation thus resulting in friction of finding the content in future. Bookmarking services don't help because even then you have to think and dig deep in the mess of tags and folders.
Inconsistencies in parsing articles and content

3 points posted by shermix

Buddy Training for anything and everything #productivity #training

Fri, 10 Apr 2020 10:12:00 +0000

When I'm training for something say for a weight loss milestone or a new language; I usually give up midway due to lack of motivation.

I know there are several apps for training which put us against several other users and challenges us to rise up in the rankings. But being an introvert, those kind of apps just rises my anxiety and doesn't help me with my training.

I was thinking, if there was a virtual buddy system i.e. someone real who trains along with us for mutual milestones, what ever it may be; say learning cooking, learning programming, physical training etc. that can be highly productive.

You may say, why not ask your friend to train with you? Well, friendships come with packages and biases. I don't think we can have absolute focus in training for something with an existing friend all of a sudden, if at all there's such a friend for everyone.

Besides, an app which pairs us with some random individual for mutual training is a great way to make friends who share common interests.

Let me know if you would like to use a virtual buddy training and if there are any apps like that already.

5 points posted by Cristen George

Getting things done at individual level #productivity #taskmanagement

Sat, 07 Sep 2019 14:24:00 +0000

I spend much of my time browsing Reddit, YC-HackerNews and looks like needgap is going to be on that list. I'm not sure whether this is social network addiction, as none of the sites I mentioned is a social network. But, I spend inordinate amount of time on them and on other stuff without getting the tasks which I had in my mind done.

At the end of the day my tasks lists are full, get postponed, more tasks get added the next day, this cycle repeats. This undone task lists depresses me every night, but I don't do much about it the next day and hence the cycle.

I want something which helps me focus and gets things done. I'm sure, I'm not the only one with this issue.

5 points posted by Shinzo Reyen

Notification pollution #mobile #productivity

Sun, 15 Dec 2019 13:46:00 +0000

An average US smartphone user supposedly receives 46 app push notifications per day. It's highly likely that most of them are distributed during working hours, so if distributed equally an average user is interrupted ~ 3 times/hour during 16 hours when they are awake. This figure is likely higher in some Asian countries, where some apps play integral part in the lifestyle.

Science is clear on the effect of notifications on productivity - it's bad. Both android and iOS has features to disable notifications for the entire app or by categories, but when it comes to categories the onus is on the app developer to maintain the etiquette.

I think there is a need gap to impose etiquette on the users as well, considering majority of the notifications are from messaging apps and social networks. Making the user select the category of notification e.g. 'delayed' for a meme & 'immediate' for urgent, emergency communication can help this.

4 points posted by Abishek Muthian

Consumer level local distributed computing #computation #productivity

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 05:15:00 +0000

Current Smartphones, Tablets for most is more powerful(compute) than their old computers. At this point we should be able to distribute the computing load across all our capable devices. Distributed Computing is now limited to scientific research, data science, machine learning and I feel it's high time we use it for solving some consumer problems.

I use low power computers by choice for my climate goals, So I have several low power task specific computing devices. Consider able to compress 2TB folder consisting of disjoint files using the CPU of computer, smartphone, tablet etc. If Handbrake could use distributed computing then the encoding could be much faster. Network is an Achilles heel for distributed computing, but average network bandwidth in home networks have been growing steadily.

The manufacturers themselves are unlikely to create an interoperable environment, but perhaps applications which function in the user space could fulfill this need gap.

3 points posted by Abishek Muthian

Browser tab group sync between PC and the mobile #productivity #sync

Mon, 06 Sep 2021 13:19:00 +0000

Tab groups are a major productivity feature in modern browsers, If not available by default there are add-ons which enable them. This allows us to group various tabs in the browser to avoid clutter and easy access.

Although individual websites are synced between PC and the mobile using a common account the tab groups aren't synced. So same level of productivity is not available on mobile browsers.

1 points posted by Anthony