If you follow this blog very much, you know that I play with a lot of productivity tools. A trend I’m starting to see emerge is the idea of having tasks mixed in with your notes, and I really like it.

It can be a tricky thing to pull off. With any task system, you don’t want those tasks to get lost and forgotten. In many cases, if you save some tasks that are mixed in with your notes, they’re likely to be forgotten and orphaned over time.

I’ve seen two good examples of this recently, and there are likely others. The first place I saw it was in Asana, the task management system that we used at GreenMellen for a while in 2014/2015. While we eventually moved away from it for other reasons, the ability to add a task in the middle of a conversation was brilliant, and something I miss now.

The second is with Roam Research.

Roam Research

My current personal task system is in Roam Research. Roam’s task system isn’t great, in general, but the ability to add tasks on the fly is absolutely amazing. Below is a simple example from a few weeks ago; I’ve still been working on my interstitial journaling during the day, and then can just mix tasks in whenever I want:

As I mentioned above, Roam is an imperfect system for tasks, and would be unmanageable for our full team right now. For me, though, it’s a perfect way to deal with personal tasks throughout the day, and I hope other products begin to integrate similar systems in the future.

If you’re interested in using Roam for tasks, here’s a bit more about how I do it:

A popular feature that has found it’s way to all major operating system (not only Windows and Mac, but iPhone, Android and others) is “night shift” mode, where your display shifts to show more colors from the warmer end of the spectrum, with less blue light.

When you first enable it, most systems default to turning night shift mode on at sunset, so the lack of blue light will help you sleep better. The science is incredibly divided on the benefits of this, though I personally find my eyes more relaxed when looking at a warm-shifted screen.

Glasses

Another way to tackle this is with blue light-filtered glasses. Almost every major eyewear company offers them, with similar results. Rather than change your screen settings, you can just wear these glasses.

As a glasses-wearer, I considered this approach. Instead, I did something different — I set all of my screens to be in “night shift” mode 24/7.

Setting night shift

I’ve set this up on my two Windows computers, my various Chromebooks, my Pixel 5 and my iPad. They all handle it slightly differently, but with roughly the same result. The only tricky part is that some systems won’t let you just turn it on 24/7 — it has to be a daily schedule. In those cases, I have it turn on at 4:00am, and then turn off at 3:59am, essentially making it work 24/7.

Not for designers

The one caveat to changing the color temperature of your devices is that, of course, the colors are less accurate. If you’re a designer, or someone that has a reason to need to see precise colors, this approach probably isn’t a good one to take. In that case, I’d likely suggest getting blue light filter glasses so you can wear them to avoid strain, but then take them off when you need to see accurate colors.

Have you tried using night shift 24/7? How’d it work out for you?

I’ve been trying to read more over the past year, and for the most part have been pretty successful. Much of that is due to simply making it a higher priority, but some tools have helped along the way — a big one is brain.fm.

The app is essentially just specially-created music that you listen to that helps you focus. Along with helping you focus, it can also help drown out extra noises around you, so it’s kind of a win-win.

The info on their site sounds a little hokey, but it really works. Here’s what they have to say:

Brain.fm holds patents on key processes for creating functional music, including technology to elicit strong neural phase locking—allowing populations of neurons to engage in various kinds of coordinated activity—and technology to remove distraction in sound.

This makes our music unique, purpose-built to steer you into a desired mental state. In other words, we’ve found new ways to create music that helps you do what you need to do.

That sounds messy, but it works! When I put on brain.fm to read a book or to take a clarity break, it really helps me tune out and zone in.

The cost

The big downside to brain.fm is the cost. It’s not outrageous, at $6.99/mo, but there are a lot of free options out there. I actually canceled my subscription for a while, but eventually came back because I found it to be superior and worth the $7 a month.

Your other options

Beyond special tools like Brain.fm, you can look on YouTube or Spotify or whatever you like to use and you’ll generally find two other directions you can go.

Binaural Beats: This is somewhat similar science as brain.fm, though this is focused on giving you slightly different sounds in each ear. It works well, but my problem is that most of the tracks I find are pretty short and the song switching is a hiccup I don’t care for. The brain.fm sessions can go 90 minutes at a stretch, which is excellent.

Video Games: Another popular route to go is video game soundtracks. They tend to have high energy, and more importantly, no lyrics. Some people swear by them. I’ve tried and found them to be pretty good at times, but I again struggled with finding consistent winners.

If you need something like this to help escape distractions while you read or study, brain.fm is worth considering. They have a 3 day free trial — not super long, but enough to at least see what it’s like.

If you use something else that you find works well, please leave a comment and let me know!