I’ve never considered myself an organized person. In the last ten years, I’ve tried many different organization methodologies and tools, but I’ve always struggled with maintaining discipline. As a result, I’ve often forgotten tasks, neglected priorities, and ended up with a chaotic calendar. That was until I read this article by Jeff Huang: My productivity app is a never-ending .txt life log.

In summary, Jeff references a productivity concept that has been overlooked in recent years amidst the proliferation of productivity tools: KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). His approach emphasizes simplicity and has had a profound impact on my organizational habits.

Inspired by Jeff’s article, I decided to try this approach by writing in a single file in Notion:

  • Thoughts
  • Reminders
  • Analyses
  • My finances
  • Ideas
  • Summaries of activities from my job or personal life
  • And much more

This is an example of how my Notion looks:

Life log example

Suddenly, the magic happened ✨. This simple yet effective method has transformed the way I organize my life and work. It has definitely worked for me:

  • It helps me keep my mind focused on creating rather than on remembering.
  • I can quickly search for reminders on why I made certain decisions.
  • I can control my priorities and manage pending tasks effectively.

While I was building this discipline, my team at Vest was already doing an amazing job, powered by Jorge Bautista (one of our principal software engineers), documenting many aspects of our daily work like processes, learnings, contexts, etc. This allowed us to use Notion AI to ask it natural language questions about our daily job, saving us time. Inspired by this, I did the same with my life log, and it helped me to:

  • Summarize my weeks
  • Ask for context
  • Ask in natural language about a decision I took

This is how I ask to notion regarding “What I did the past week”:

Life log example

I’m still continue building the discipline of writing, but I has worked for me so far. Now, this is the first time I feel that all this AI hype is really improving my performance and time but I will do a second analysis by the end of this year.