Hello guys. In this last month I’ve been preparing a setup so I can change carrers. I want everything to be professional, well organized and efficient. In order to do that I studied and tried to implement Tiago Forte’s 4 pillars of productivity method with only privacy-focused softwares. For now, this is my setup:
NOTES APP, TASK MANAGER & READ LATER APP (w/ web clipper)
Notesnook → For notes, quick tasks, and reading content storage.
CALENDAR
Proton Suite → Foundation for secure communication, calendar management, and protected file storage.
ANOTHER APPS
Anytype→ For organizational and document management of the office.
Actual Budget → Exclusively for personal finances.
GnuCash → Exclusively for the office’s finances and accounting.
Zotero → Organization of academic and research material.
LibreOffice → Creation of professional and personal documents, always password-protected.
Thing is: I used to do all that (except email and odt documents) in just one app: Notion. It was truly sad to leave because of privacy concerns. Also, the general lack of integration between apps bothers me a little, but it’s the price for having infomation encryption.
So I wanted to ask you (who certainly have considered privacy vs. productivity) what do you think of this setup? Any improvements? How do you managed to conciliate these almost oposite directions?
Be careful - I’m not sure how well GnuCash will scale outside of smaller businesses. It’s run locally only, and losing this information is quite dreadful. What’s your backup plans for ensuring you don’t lose financial data? Proton Drive sync?
No, just Proton Drive is enough. Actually my concern is to have adopted too many apps, losing possibility of a fluid workflow. What I can do is let Anytype absorb Notesnook’s function. I really like AT, but I don’t know if it is mature enough for trusted daily use. I wonder why it is not recommended by PG.
It’s indeed a small business. Yes, I planned to set the files directory on my clouded sync Proton Drive folder. I’d like to do the accounting of my business, and I believe Actual Budget is not ideal for that objective. Let me know if you have any suggestions!
You might be able to eliminate LibreOffice since you already use the Proton suite which includes Proton Docs. I haven’t used it myself but after creating a new document, it looks like it’s based on .docx rather than .odt. I’m unsure if it’s as mature as the Google suite which I believe allows you to open .odt or convert it to .docx, but if you had some free time you could check it out.
The only other way I’d try to further consolidate workflows is by using well integrated self-hosted solutions, such as Nextcloud and the various apps which integrate with it. But that might be needlessly expensive to set up for a small business as you’d incur the burden of maintaining reliability and security.
I’ve tried Proton Docs, but it is very insufficient for what I need on an office suite. LibreOffice is very, very fine and docs can be protected with passwords and PGP keys. I agree on the high cost of maintenance on Nextcloud, both on finance and management.
Guys, thank you a lot for your answers. Just decided to refresh my routine on Notesnook and the other apps. The reason for my sudden uncertainty was that of integrated productivity, which lacks on a pure notes app. But trying to manage an app like Anytype, though I had nice results, I realized that whole days of potential study passed away in mere
organization. It’s a kind of app that requires constant work and care, and that made me long for Notesnook, which is absolutely objective, private and allows a much simpler workflow.
In another words, in my desire for integration I’ve re-found a great value on simplicity and objectiveness.
Not a direct privacy suggestion: if there is not perfect privacy replacement, don’t harm yourself in using inferior tools just solely for the sake of privacy. I’m super interested to see how you make it work for your business, and hope you can get all the privacy respecting software you can.
However, if you have loved ones depending on you, or your business is how you feed yourself, choose where to place risk in how you setup your business so FOSS software doesn’t accidentally screw you over. FOSS has no warranty, and this is when it really becomes important.
EDIT: time can be valuable as well. If you spend 10 hours a week for 2 hours a week with certain software, that’s 8 hours you get back to enjoy life. Consider such tradeoffs as well.
It also means that you could go for not perfect solution like hosted Nextcloud. It might not be good as Notion, but it has better privacy policy. There are providers who might offer it with add-ons you need or even admin account, so you can install whatever add-on you want.
In this case you trust the provider, though most of them have been there for years and have very good track record. But always keep in mind that data breach is possible, and NC doesn’t have functional E2EE
I’m fine with Notesnook, but you got me curious, because I considered Obsidian once. What plugins do you use? And how do you manage to secure the local files? If I’m not mistaken, even if you sync between devices the new ones download all .md files so Obsidian can operate.
Well first things first Obsidian is closed source but hundreds of notable privacy / security heads vouch for it, so there’s still an element of blind trust.
When you download it creates a local vault folder. No account / sign up needed at all. I don’t use any of their online syncing as I self host the vault / all my notes. Their online syncing also requires creating an account which defeats entire point of keeping your stuff locked down. I also turned off automatic updates and blocked it completely on my firewall so it never pings in / out. It’s completely sandboxed and local.
In terms of plugins and themes here are my main ones (you can grab them all from github as opposed to downloading them from app)