#brainiac #emacs #productivity #system

Brainiac started as a way for me to organize my own work: meeting notes with my team, technical reflections, TODOs, and the many small but important thoughts that accumulate over the course of real engineering work. Over time, it became a stable personal system that supports both focused technical work and leadership responsibilities, without getting in the way.

I host stable versions of Brainiac on Codeberg.

In it's core this is a minimal Emacs configuration, built around the great Org-mode, with additional external tools mixed in to build a complete, sustainable, flexible productivity system. As it's built around text files, it can be synced across multiple devices with ease using e.g. Syncthing, Nextcloud, git, etc. It is complimented nicely with mobile apps like Beorg, Orgzly, etc.

Brainiac is not meant to be a polished product. It’s a living system, shaped by everyday use — the kind of system you build when you care about clarity, continuity, and reducing friction in knowledge work. If you use it, feel free to reach out with feedback, ideas, or improvements. Shared practice tends to evolve better than isolated solutions.

#emacs #brainiac #productivity #systems

Hello everyone!

I have been using the Brainiac intensively over the last months and made some changes to the configuration along the way. Get your update here or from Codeberg.

Improvements:

• Added journal.org to the list of refile targets.
• Reduced the width of comment, source, etc. boxes in brainiac.css.
• The attached items are now visibly listed in the drawer of the headline.
• Minor changes in the configuration, e.g. increase of idle time etc.

New things:

• Added org-crypt to the config, so that sensitive information can be encrypted if storing files on public servers.
• To integrate Brainiac into your system menu, I propose the following: copy brainiac.desktop to ~/.local/share/applications and brainiac.svg to ~/.local/share/icons.
• I added basic AI support by using a customized ollama-buddy-mini and running models locally with ollama. Although I previously stated that Brainiac would not have AI, the chosen combination presents a nice compromise between functionality and privacy.
• I also introduced the abbrev-mode as a template storage for some useful org templates and as a mechanism for storing AI prompts for future usage.
• In order to consolidate important functions and keystrokes, I configured a menu which can be reached by pressing C-c b using transient.

#productivity #reflection

I often read about people „living“ in their TODO list, meaning everything that comes to mind, is seen on the net, needs to be done someday (maybe), … gets jotted down and processed thru their productivity system. The purpose of this is to not forget anything and to live a quantified, but relaxed life, as everything is recorded and nothing is forgotten.

Although I can relate to the „nothing gets forgotten“ part, because I need this to ease my mind, having everything I need to do in a day, week, … added to my TODO list, makes me feel like a machine and I actually feel psychological pressure to „get those tasks done“. I do not like it.

Every once in a while I fall down that rabbit hole and start filling my main.org with everything possible. But then at some point the list gets too long and I start feeling that pressure of still having „so many open tasks“ when the day is done. The only thing that helps then is to radically go thru the list and delete all the junk that is not 100% a real task, that has to get done, or a note which has value and shall be kept.

#book #productivity

I read the nice book from Tiago Forte “Building a Second Brain” and in order to understand the concepts better, I created this small Mindmap as a summary.

As I like to play around Emacs, I used PlantUML and generated the Mindmap using Org-mode.