My Productivity Set-up

This is my set-up for school-work and other serious life goals that I want to seriously achieve.

The Thinkpad

The main driver of the show is this laptop that I found at Goodwill for $65 + $10 shipping. I already had a laptop, but I mainly wanted to find one for school because, from experience, my MSI laptop with an RTX inside of it was not cutting it by any margins on the portability front. That is why, on a fateful summer day, I decided I needed to find a slim < 13-inch laptop that could handle my needs as a CS student. It was only after I received it that I realized what a godsend it was because the sound didn’t work (probably just Manjaro ngl…) and the already pre-planned low specs of the device that could keep me off, even unwillingly, the internet.

The Specs:

Looking back, I realize this was seriously underpriced, and I’m glad I bought it. It also has sent me down the road as a user of vim and Linux, which I will report back in a while on how it is going.

Terminal and Tiling Manager

The first actual modification I made to my environment was spending a couple of hours editing my terminal configs to give it a good feel every time I loaded it up. It has no point in productivity other than the creative aspect of making sure it’s a unique and separate mental mode. I also made sure to download a folder of fun/aesthetic images to randomize each boot with; very important that they match the theme you configured as well. Another very important thing to do is to go in and customize your .bashrc to print something fun, like a quote or ASCII image, out every time it opens.

Another key element in my environment besides the terminal is the tiling manager. It allows me to consciously context switch between tasks, which helps me focus on the tasks/purposes I gave a specific window. This practice does seem restrictive at first, but the productivity gain from it, in contrast to alt-tabbing on Windows, is greatly appreciated.

The 5 named windows I have are:

  1. Google
  2. PDF
  3. Joplin
  4. Terminal
  5. Habitica/To-Do

Joplin

A pretty solid open-source note-taking app. I know Obsidian exists, but I already have a system going on for me, and the trade-off isn’t there for me to switch over. I have largely 3 groups of tags that I utilize and browse through, which are based on their purpose. Each tag essentially lets you view the notes or sub-notebooks attached, which are usually just textbook readings, etc. I’ll list them below for you to judge if they are effective. Overall though, Joplin is a solid .md note taker, minimal and effective.

Habitica

This app is one of the more interesting ones off the list. The app aims to gamify daily tasks, habits, and to-do lists in a positive way. And it does largely achieve that, at least for me. The thing with any habit tracker/daily task app is that for it to be effective, you need to make a critical inquiry about your goals in life and then go in to set them up in the app. In a sense, you are developing your “virtual self” that mirrors what you want to be in reality. It’s a continuous process to reflect and see what other things you would like to incentivize artificially. On that point as well, you can create separate accounts for school, work, or any other segment you want.

To-do

The classic to-do list everyone has. I use Microsoft because it syncs flagged emails to Outlook’s calendar, so it is integrated. I don’t use it more often for daily tasks than I would like, just because I’m not the greatest at estimating what to do for the day. It is mostly used to store book lists of what I plan on reading next, and things I need to review. It serves as a general backlog for categories.

(I skipped PDF, but it’s some generic one that I always have to check htop for)