task-score

TL;DR: Use Amplenote for focusing on the most important and urgent TODO tasks.

Introduction

I’ve used many TODO app: vimwiki, Org mode for Emacs, obsidian-tasks inside Obsidian, Todoist, Notion and some more. They all have one major problem: the TODO items are static:

  1. easy to neglect the old and important ones
  2. procrastinate by picking the easiest but not most urgent and important tasks
  3. doing the low-hanging fruit giving you a false sense of achievements

Why Amplenote?

What sets Amplenote apart from others is its Idea Execution Funnel:

funnel

As you can see from the screenshot, there’s a calculated Task Score, so that each day it’ll show you tasks with the highest scores. As a bonus, it has great built-in keyboard shortcut support, so we could minimize touching the mouse:

no-mouse

I changed an entry to a TODO, then move it to my “devctrl.blog” note without ever touching the mouse.

Getting Started

Amplenote doesn’t offer native Linux support, but it has PWA (Progressive Web App):

  1. Installing Amplenote

  2. It should create an Amplenote.desktop, so we could just launch it with the application launcher.

  3. I recommend this Amplenote 101 series to learn the basic keyboard shortcuts and how to take advantage of the Idea Execution Funnel mentioned above.

I auto-launch it on workspace number 1 so that I can quickly jot down TODOs:

sway-left

Conclusion

One caveat is that your data is hosted on their server. If you’re not comfortable with it, don’t use it. Also, it has paid plans but I find the free plan works well enough for me.