My Productivity Set-up

last modified: 2026-04-08 | tags: productivity, learning

The Thinkpad

The main driver of the show is this laptop I found at Goodwill for $65 + $10 shipping. I already had a laptop, but I wanted to find one for school because my MSI laptop with an RTX was not cutting it on the portability front.

That is why, on a fateful summer day, I decided to find a 13-inch laptop. It was only after I received it that I realized what a godsend it was.

The Specs:

This ThinkPad was seriously underpriced, and I’m glad I bought it. It 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 going1.

Terminal and Tiling Manager

I spent a couple of hours editing my terminal configs. I made sure to download a folder of images to randomize each boot with. And then customized my .bashrc to print something fun, like a quote or ASCII image. The tiling manager is another thing to customize. It allows me to consciously context switch between tasks.

Joplin

It’s a solid open-source note-taking app. I know Obsidian exists, but I already have a system going on for me in Joplin. I have 3 groups of tags for categorizing my notes. Each tag lets you view the notes or sub-notebooks attached. I’ll list them below for you to judge if they are effective. Overall, Joplin is a minimal and effective Markdown note-taker.

Habitica

The app aims to gamify daily tasks, habits, and to-do lists in a positive way. It does well for me. The effectiveness of any habit/daily task app relies on the person. You need to make a critical inquiry about your goals in life and then set them up in the app.

In a sense, you are developing your “virtual self” to mirror what you want to be in reality. It’s a continuous process to reflect and see what things you would like to incentivize artificially.

  1. It is better than VSCode for sure. ↩