Suggestion: Treat one tool as your "canonical" todo tracker (these could be separate tools for home / work). Take todos from other sources (slack, email, meetings, whatever) and routinely consolidate them into your canonical tracker. When you're working, work exclusively off of the tracker.

Offline, I keep a simple paper bullet journal during meetings. I'll note action items with a bullet point (other notes get a hyphen). After meetings are done, I review the bullets and either complete them or commit them to my canonical tracker. Bullets get crossed out when this happens - full cross if I completed the bullet, half-cross if I committed it to tracker.

I took it from David Allen's 'Getting Things Done'. I'd recommend it for anyone looking to start or adopt a similar system.

Perhaps keep a paper notepad/planner (Like a police officer or fighter pilot etc.), for tasks that aren't that important this would save a lot of mental effort.

In terms of automation, it strikes me as just another learning curve (which may well be worth it, e.g. learning emacs) but it would be wise to cut down before automating if possible.

Sounds silly but it makes sense to me

Every tool I use serves a different distinctive purpose so its easy for me to remember.

I organize my chrome bookmarks A-Z, its a single location that links all my favorite webtools together. As things change I compact and reorganize these folders, they all point to different tools and links.

https://i.imgur.com/axyETpk.png

Like computer science, just remember what information resides where. Use pointers for everything, find out whats at that address afterwards. I am always constantly optimizing where those pointers should point too, so its always organized to me.

Things change all the time so I rarely setup a wiki and rarely ever use tools like IFTTT either. Most times, there's a wiki that already exists specific to your needs. I learned to keep things really simple starting out (paper and pen, no computer, traditional file folders) and evolved it, slowly adapting to new tools per my use cases over the years. So every decision I make is based off compounded decisions and history made previously

Tools don’t solve productivity problems. Systems do. Figure out your system and then use only the minimum set of tools you need to implement the system.

1) dokuwiki - https://dokuwiki.org

2) monthcal - https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:monthcal

3) todo - https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:todo

But the main point should be to reduce the number of tools. They are a lot of great tools but they mostly focus on one area. But there are other tools, like our own https://zenkit.com/ , which combines several other tools to give you one place to work in.

Write your own shell or whatever scripts to customize and automate (git, rsync etc)

To keep distractions to the minimum, stay away from gui apps and try to rely on cli for productivity as much as possible - it takes time to find stuff that works for you but it's usually worth it (check out some awesome cli & ncurses tools)

Sounds like you have wayy too many if you have to ask this. Doesn't it?! Maybe you would be more productive if you didn't use any 'productivity tools' at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17892731

Separating them just gives me two unrelated pools that I then have to cross-correlate.