One of my issues at the moment is cross managing different workstreams particularly with personal projects which are more in the “if I have time category”.

Literally what I use virtual desktops to solve

I use a variety of FOSS tools for both personal and work productivity.

For personal I use:

• Nextcloud (Calendar, sync files, contacts etc, forms, availability sharing)
• Thunderbird (Mail & Calendar)
• Vikunja for managing all my projects/tasks. Also is very useful to have shared tasks with relatives. Another useful feature is that it can share specifics projects to people that do not have an account (for vacancy planning for example)
• Tasks.org to manage Vikunja tasks in Android
• Logseq for managing all my thoughts, ideas, tracking content like books, movies, videos watched
• Nomie (specifically this maintained instance which has some new features). I use it to track myself (mood, anxiety, adhd, symptoms, food and drug consumption, people). It has an API so I for example can automatically insert activities from Garmin API. It is very useful to correlate things in life, or to tell the doctor if a specific symptom has flared up or not and many more things
• Omnivore is my read-later off choice app, replacing Wallabag. It has an EXTREMELY polished interface, can aggregate RSS feeds, supports tags, comments, many filters and more. But the amazing thing is that it has a plugin for Logseq which automatically syncs all my highlights, notes and tags to it
• Ferdium to quickly access all my important services
• Syncthing on my phone, laptops and Kobo to sync Logseq between devices and books/articles from my PC to Kobo
• Liftosaur for exercise routines (it has script language even) and can also track body measurements.
• waistline as a substitute for myfitnesspal or cronometer

For work use:

• Logseq is my main tool, with the capability of connecting to Zotero, reading papers and taking notes which with queries I can leverage it to see new ideas forming. It also acts as the best logbook I’ve ever used through its powerful templates and queries which simplifies a lot the work of comparing results since it can all be done automatically
• Zotero to manage all my papers
• neovim with vimtex, ltex-ls and ultisnips to write documents in LaTeX very fast. Also have some scripts to manage vector graphics very easily using https://github.com/gillescastel/inkscape-figures
• Inkscape for doing all the images for my papers since I plot my graphs in SVG. This way I can edit graphs after ploting and never lose quality
• Ranger file manager
• Espanso

Update 1: Fixed Nomie link Update 2: added waistline and liftosaur since I had forgotten Update 3: added Inkscape

As a programmer most of my utilities are CLI oriented.

zsh
fzf (integrated into zsh, improves reverse search, killing processes and more)
zoxide - for quicker navigation into folders I visit often
Other programs I use from time to time: jq, btop, bat.

Flameshot - best screenshotting tool for linux (and also windows)
Redshift/Gammashift - blue light filter
ddccontrol - controlling monitor brightness and contrast without having to fiddle with buttons

Last but not least my Awesome WM (tiling) config - makes working with multiple windows/desktops so easy.

I’m running a few on my NAS:

• Taiga to manage projects. It’s as easy and pleasant to use as Trello, but with velocity/burndown charts and the whole “agile” thing, but you can also turn parts of it on and off (per project even).

• Trilium completely cured me of messy note-taking habits, simply by winning on the convenience side. I was firmly in the “folder tree of markdown documents” and “my Sublime Text tabs of random notes have no number” camp before.

• I’m considering Habitica which lets you set up rewards and achievements for your real life (i.e. apply addictive reward/progress loop from video games to motivate your real self to do things). Also Wger for exercise tracking, but I’m not sure they’re the right thing for my ticket/tracking-averse self (I wish there was something that covered the whole MyFitnessPal/FitDay and the whole Polar Personal Trainer/Garmin Connect side, but FOSS and self-hosted).

For leisure, I also run Stash (it bills itself as an organizer for your porn library, but it’s really good for any kind of clips), Jellyfin for my music and movies and currently both Mango and Kavita for books and comics.

Try out a tiling wm (i use i3/sway) they are much easier to focus in than a regular de

selfhosted searchengine . i see zero reason not to.

I have found Kate to be very capable with python and rust. With Sessions I can also have my own set of notes in markdown. The plugins are plentiful and git integration is built in.

Many have already mentioned Obsidian, I too ventured to it from Joplin and couldn’t be happier.

Other (FOSS) tools I use for productivity… GUI tools:

• nocodb - a web-based database which can be accessed over API too
• I’m keeping an eye on vikunja.io, hope to have it mature and implement more features regarding project management
• paperless-ngx, make order of your paper-mess.

CLI tools:

• Fish - a very nice and modern shell
• chezmoi - a really nice dotfile manager
• lsd instead of ls, dust instead of du, zoxide instead of cd
• kopia - awesome backup tool. How backup is related to productivity? Disaster recovery ;-)

My biggest productivity booster is tmux. I constantly ssh into my pc to continue my work. I even restart my window manager sometimes if I wanna play games or something, but tmux is always there in the background. And being able to get up, go to my living room, open my laptop and continue the work I was doing on my pc has definitely saved me from a few mental blocks.

Zettlr for technical writing into any format.

Obsidian for a second brain based on the molecular notes method. And yes, I’ve tried all of the FOSS alternatives. None are ready to replace Obsidian yet.

Wallabag for saving resources offline for easy and permanent reference.

Lunarvim for actually sitting down to work instead of fiddling with and optimizing my setup.

I use emacs, Denote, and markdown-mode to keep a loose Zettlekasten archive of notes.

python i automated a ton of repeatative and boring tasks. made my work life super easy. made some tools for my manager to harvest all drawings for a user specified product. sky is the limit. well until you type import cosmos /s

For keeping track of tasks on my projects i use todo txt. For each of my projects will drop a file named todo.txt in the root. each line is a task, and i order them based on priority. I can walk away from it and when i start working on the project again, i have an simple way to see the list of tasks i have laid out for this project.

http://todotxt.org/

I personally find it less useful to see the “big picture” of all tasks, and this lets me focus on the details of my projects without forcing a bunch of structure.

I use Gnome as my main DE, so I use the Pop shell for automatic window tiling. It’s not being actively maintained anymore while Pop works on their new DE, but it still works pretty great. I have my eye on Veshell which is an upcoming DE from the guy who made the Material Shell overhaul for Gnome. It’s a significant change to the UX compared to any other DEs I’ve tried.

My main productivity work is making vector files for a laser cutter, so I use a combination of Inkscape and Lightburn (not FOSS) for that. I also use Openscad and Prusa Slicer for making various repair parts, but that’s not usually paying work.

On the terminal side I prefer fish and kakoune. Kakoune’s changes to the vim/neovim keybinds are a lot more intuitive and easier to learn imo, but come with the obvious downside of learning something less universally useful than the vim keybinds.

I capture all my predictable work items in icalendar-encoded files that I mostly author by hand in emacs. I use evolution for a conventional calendar view on my computer. I adb push to my phone and use icsx5 to import so I can view events there as well.

I’ve also been working on a project to produce a printable view that’s reasonably mature at this point. It accepts VEVENT, VJOURNAL, and VTODO entries and groups them by day, month, or year. Todo items are rendered as lists so I have a little circle to fill in when I’ve completed the work. I display both the title and description for all types, with the description processed as Markdown. So for instance a VJOURNAL with a weekly recurrence, a title like “This Week”, and a description like * \n* \n will appear every week in the printout as a blank list for jotting down two items not captured in my calendars.

I’ve been using the daily grouping so far to produce a weekly “checklist”. Every few weeks or so I hack on my RRULEs based on what’s working for me. For instance I bake a loaf of sourdough every week so I have events for feeding the starter, mixing the dough, then baking. I set each of those to recur on subsequent days of the week so they all magically fall into place then I shifted the start days around until I found my ideal baking day. I also have an entry for changing the bed sheets every week, and another for washing the washing machine scheduled for the same day of week at a slower frequency. Capturing everything that needs to be done (with some editorializing on granularity) and evolving their recurrences is the fundamental way I synchronize independent work, leaning on icalendar for expressiveness like this recurrence for planting the garden on the Saturday before Memorial Day weekend:

RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=5;BYDAY=SA;BYMONTHDAY=16,17,18,19,20,21,22

The workflow doesn’t require the bespoke tooling since I can see all my maintenance items alongside my meetings using any application that can render icalendar. That was key to getting moving, but having the print out lets me feel more productive. I knock out all the routine stuff throughout the day and find that “if I have time” becomes “what do I want to do with this time”.

There are tools in the project for generating events for solstices and equinoxes as well as sunrises and sunsets. I include all of those in my printed daily view but exclude the sunrises and sunsets from evolution by capturing them in separate files. I also separate routine/noisy tasks like “change the bed sheets” from holidays and operational work like “plant the garden” or “change the water filters” so those become more visible.