Some of your best work happens when you’re not working at all.
New on the blog: incubation, invisible effort, and why stepping away is sometimes the most productive move.
🧠 “When you’re not working, you’re still working”
Read it here → open.substack.com/pub/nestful/...
Most productivity tools are built on a single idea: that time is fixed, linear, and manageable.
But what if that’s not how you experience time at all?
New blog: What productivity systems often get wrong about time
blog.nestful.app/p/what-produ...
Routines are fragile. Habits are not.
You don’t need to hit the gym 6:30 AM every day—you just need to show up consistently.
New on the blog: why fixed timing breaks, and flexible rhythms stick.
🌀 Spontaneous Productivity in practice → blog.nestful.app/p/the-power-...
Productivity doesn’t have to feel like a chore. Reframe tasks as experiments. Make a mess first. Turn obligation into curiosity. Here's how: blog.nestful.app/p/how-to-ref...
Obsessed with organizing? Same. But after a year of trying to “perfect” my system, I realized something: hyper-organization is just procrastination in disguise.
Messy doers might be onto something. Read why: blog.nestful.app/p/myth-of-th...
Writing anime? Kishoutenketsu’s 4-act structure can be tricky to outline, so here’s how nested workflows in Nestful make it seamless. See how I used it to break down The Promised Neverland pilot (SPOILERS ahead!): blog.nestful.app/p/ways-to-us...
#AnimeWriting #Kishoutenketsu #Screenwriting
Scheduling sucks. Spontaneous Productivity is the answer —ditch the rigid planning, let urgency sort your tasks, and just get things done. No stress, no rescheduling, just action. Read more about the thinking behind Nestful: blog.nestful.app/p/spontaneou... #productivity
Due dates are killing your productivity – here’s how to do the real work instead: blog.nestful.app/p/due-dates-...
Freelancing: 3 clients, zero structure, and a calendar that mocked me. How I ditched the Tetris of task-blocking for Nestful’s ‘just do it’ list: blog.nestful.app/p/how-i-jugg...
Breaking work into subtasks feels productive, but it’s a trap. You tackle the easy bits first, while the real work sits untouched. Here's how to stop coasting on low-hanging fruit and start making real progress: blog.nestful.app/p/due-dates-... #productivity
There's this blog post about why Nestful was rewritten in Gleam:
blog.nestful.app/p/why-i-rewr...
Vleam 1.0 is out! It allowed Nestful, a Vue app, to Incrementally add @gleam.run for a much better end-result.
github.com/vleam/vleam
Nestful Desktop has an unlimited trial! Download links at:
nestful.app/download/
The wonders of software development is we make our own tools
The wonders of software development is we make our own tools
Why Nestful ditched #typescript for @gleam.run:
-> Truly type safe
-> Errors as values
-> Exhaustive match
-> No more language-in-a-language
-> Simple delight
-> Like TS, Gleam can be incrementally adopted
More here:
blog.nestful.app/p/why-i-rewr...
Even if you decide Nestful is not for you, the approaches behind it can be taken to many other apps, for a bit more hassle.
Use it to your advantage!
A Nestful task board with three columns: Today, Tomorrow, A Week. Each column has some unrelated tasks in it that is a subtask of some project. For example, Birthday Cake is in the due today column, and is a subtask of grocery shopping. Upper Body is a subtask of Workout, and is due tomorrow.
We keep managing projects but we forget they all compete for _our_ time, which is what we should really be managing.
Nesting and bubbling up items allows separate tasks competing for our time to be directly compared and prioritized according to their urgency indicators.
That's where Nestful comes in, by doing Spontaneous Productivity accounting on your behalf.
Instead manually handling a list, Nestful has, well, nesting.
Nesting is an extremely powerful tool because it allows you to compare the urgency indicators of unrelated tasks.
The best example for UI is a due date, the comparison of tells us the relative urgency of tasks.
There are many possible other indicators. For example, task completion percentage. A task that is mostly done is less important than one you haven't even started.
Well, there isn't really a way to achieve a perfect list. We can, however, get pretty damn close by:
1. Offloading urgency (UI) indicators to task creation
2. Automatically order list according to urgency indicators
3. Be able to update said indicators
A UI is information comparable between tasks.
Whenever you reach Spontaneous Productivity time, you open your evergreen list of priorities and do the top item.
No planning, no worrying, no rescheduling.
We can't just list our tasks in any order, that's a lot of friction. So how do you achieve that evergreen list of priorities?
A daily agenda with following events: Spontaneous, Meeting with Fred, Spontaneous, Monthly All Hands, Spontaneous, Training Session
To achieve said goal, we need an _evergreen_ list of priorities, in which task are always positioned correctly*.
With that list, instead of planning every little thing, your calendar will look like this (see attached picture).
Every non time-restricted even is SP time.
* more on that later
That universal truth makes the meta-timespend that is scheduling a mostly useless endeavor.
Except for time-restricted events (going to a movie, client meeting, etc), wouldn't it be better if you'll just immediately know what's next, the moment you are free for another task?
That's the goal.
Spontaneous Productivity is an approach to maximizing one's own time by avoiding scheduling almost completely.
Scheduling is time spent in order to spend more time later. Ask any software developer and they'll tell you the unavoidable truth of the universe:
People suck at estimating the future.
Nestful's How to Be Productive Part 1: Spontaneous Productivity
Although Nestful is very customizable, it was designed with a specific use case in mind, in which it shines.
That use case has several components, and the first and most important one is Spontaneous Productivity 🧵
🎉🎉🎉
If you're already using Vue and are tired of reading TypeScript prose, give Vleam a try!
Fun fact for the v6 party: @vite.dev is what enables Nestful to invisibly incorporate @gleam.run into its Vue components, via `vleam`:
github.com/vleam/vleam