productive

This post was originally featured on alastairjohnston.com How do you manage projects in your Bullet Journal? You can manage your future appointments, you can easily manage your to-do’s, all using The Alastair Method. The Alastair Method is a tool for managing your workload by helping you organize short-term tasks and long-term goals. But what about when you have something a little more complicated, something that has a bit more complexity, something like a project? I’ve been struggling for a while to find a simple way to track progress and key deliverables on project work that I do in my day to day employment. I needed to find a way to incorporate some of the techniques of the Kanban process for managing projects, but to do so on paper, for those times when I don’t want to be staring at yet another screen. When I couldn’t find anything

The Magpie Method = No Method + Every Method

Look for single decisions that remove hundreds or thousands of other decisions.

Semantic Versioning spec and website

How I built a web archive by hand, the tradeoffs between manual and automated archiving, and what I learnt about preserving the web.

Tired of migrating notes apps like Obsidian or Evernote? Learn how to build your own private, long-term PKM using self-hosted Directus for control & longevity.

A guide to basic digital hygiene.

I’ve been seriously traveling for more than 50 years, and I’ve learned a lot. I’ve traveled solo, and I’ve led a tour group of 40 friends. I’ve slept in dormitories and I’ve stayed in presidential suites with a butler. I’ve … Continue reading →

My personal Obsidian vault template. A bottom-up approach to note-taking and organizing things I am interested in.

How to reclaim your privacy in the surveillance age.

Life is too short for ugly XML.

Getting Started guide to web feeds/RSS

The prolific mind behind "Sicario" and "Yellowstone" only started his writing career at 40. The realest deadlines (a young family, a $350m ranch) have pushed him to grind at an unbelievable pace.

I've been creating small, hand-written websites to organise my files. It's a lightweight, flexible approach that I hope will last a long time.

How I built a solar-powered, self-hosted website with a Raspberry Pi to explore sustainable, local-first web hosting.

The best habit I made in 2024... I call it the “No Excuse Hour.” Sounds simple, but it changed everything. Here’s how it works and why you need it 1/ The “No Excuse Hour” is the first hour of my day.

Do "outline speedrunning": Recursively outline an MVP, speedrun filling it in, and only then go back and perfect. This is a ~10x speed up over the 'loading-bar' style (more on that below) Don't just read this article and move on. Go out and do this for the very next thing you make so y

3.9K votes, 286 comments. 5.4M subscribers in the coolguides community. Picture based reference guides for anything and everything. If it seems like…

This morning I got stuck in the slow lane behind an old man when I was walking down the sidewalk on my way to a Zoom meeting at my neighbourhood coffee shop. Rather than speeding up and hurrying past him, thoughts on my meeting, I did the opposite: slowed down

I suppose I’m a “list person”. Although I would …

Cassidy's current "stack" of task-tracking, calendar, and note-taking apps