Issue 44 - Notebook and Pen Are the Best Productivity Tools to Organize Your Work

Pipe and Extension Types in Dart. Who is Hiring. Claude Code Best Practices. UTF-8 is Brilliant Design. Automate Newsletter with AI. Github CLI. Future Is Written in Dart. and much more.

Oct 12, 2025

Most people do great work, but they don’t have a proper place to store or organize their work and experience.

I am a productivity nerd and whenever I see an app that claims to improve my productivity by organizing my work, I’ve most probably used it. I’ve tried Todoist, Evernote, Notion, Google Keep, Trello, GitHub Kanban, and many other similar tools.

I’ve switched between these tools every year or two because I found something missing in one app that I discovered in another app. This cycle continued for 7 years until I finally settled down with just using a notebook and pen. The attached photo contains my 3-year journal, which basically sums up all my 3 years of work, my thoughts, my feelings, and my experience.

However, in order to be productive and organized, you need a system. For me, the Bullet Journal system works. The beauty of this system is that it’s highly customizable based on your needs. If you don’t find a feature, you can create it yourself, plus it’s your personal customized Bullet Journal version.

Also, looking back at your handwritten notes triggers a nostalgic feeling similar to how a similar smell or listening to an old song does. I’ve never felt this in an app when I was looking through my old notes.

Additionally, you remember more. Studies have shown that people remember things better when they’ve written them by hand. Apart from that, we as humans remember physical objects a lot more compared to digital ones. Hence, having a notebook and pen with us will help with memory retention and organization.

What is your best tool or hack to organize your work? Hit reply - I love hearing these stories.

Flutter with AI Workshop

AI won’t replace you. But a person who knows how to use AI will. If you are a Flutter developer and want to leverage AI in your day-to-day workflow, I am planning to run a workshop.

Checkout more details on flutterwithai.com

Apply Now

💡Flutter/AI Tips:

1. Pipe Operator in Dart

2. Prefer Extension Type over Extension

3. Fibonacci using Loop

1. Expert Flutter Consultant : Ello San Francisco, CA

We’re in the process of setting up our core app architecture & establishing key design patterns that will shape & define how we build agent-driven experiences and architectures. If you or someone you know is SF-based, is an expert in all things Flutter, and is interested in working on exciting technology in a highly collaborative domain that shapes kids’ education, we’d love to speak with you!

Salary Range: not mentioned.

2. OLX - Senior Mobile Engineer : OLX Remote

Join our Mobile App Platform team, working remotely from Poland or Portugal. As part of our 1,000+ tech team across multiple locations, you’ll collaborate with engineers, SREs, and product teams to build scalable, high-impact solutions, while reporting to an Engineering Manager who will support your growth and impact.

Salary Range: not mentioned.

✍🏻 Articles to read:

1. Everything I Know About Good API Design by Sean Goedecke

For the developers who build them, APIs are complex products that they spend time designing and polishing. But for the developers who use them, APIs are tools that they use in order to accomplish some other goal. Any time they spend thinking about the API instead of about that goal is time wasted.

2. Claude Code- Best Practices for Agentic Coding by Engineering at Anthropic

I started using Claude Code last month. I watched many videos on best practices that are derived from this great document.

3. Why Is India’s Most Health-Conscious Workforce Also Its Sickest? by Filter Coffee

Health information is available to everyone, but health expertise is not. People are trying to solve complex nutritional problems with Instagram trends or ChatGPT instead of expert guidance.”

Healthcare workers, ironically, know the most about well-being but face the highest stress thanks to night shifts and unrelenting schedules. Consulting and banking bring big paychecks but normalize alcohol-heavy client dinners. IT workers pop supplements more than anyone else but still undersleep and undersweat. Manufacturing, by contrast, shows the best physical activity simply because the jobs demand it

4. How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts by Ibrahim Diallo

Leadership in technical environments isn’t about being the smartest person in the room. It’s about being the most effective translator. Your value isn’t in having all the expertise. It’s in recognizing which expertise is needed when, and creating space for the right people to contribute their best work.

For example, to communicate...
Developer language: “The authentication service has a dependency on the user service, and if we don’t implement proper circuit breakers, we’ll have cascading failures during high load.”
Product language: “If our login system goes down, it could take the entire app with it. We need to build in some safeguards, which will add about a week to the timeline but prevent potential outages.”
Executive language: “We’re prioritizing system reliability over feature velocity for this sprint. This reduces risk of user-facing downtime that could impact revenue.”

5. UTF-8 Is a Brilliant Design by Vishnu Haridas

I love good design decisions that work for decades and are also backward compatible.

📺 Videos to Watch:

1. Keynote - The Future Is Written in Dart - Eric Seidel | Fluttercon EU 2025

The gaming industry figured out profitability 30 years ago with tools like Unity, Unreal, Blender, and more. We aspire for similar success in the app industry.

2. How I Automated My Newsletter Using AI. It’s Not What You Think

In this video, I want to talk about how I automate my newsletter with a combination of deterministic tools like Python, Readwise, and Obsidian, and non-deterministic tools like OpenAI API, Claude, and Cursor. I will also explain my system on how I collect content, save notes, export notes, process notes, and create the final newsletter.

3. New GitHub CLI Crash Course - First Look

Forking using the CLI is much easier when using upstream to stay up to date.
Creating and managing gists is also very simple.
Leave a comment

📦 Code from Packages

1. Shake

A Flutter package to detect phone shakes with directional information.

2. Spot

Spot is a toolkit for Flutter widget tests.
It simplifies queries and assertions against the widget tree (better finder API called spot) and visualizes the steps of a widget test as HTML report with automatic screenshots, the Timeline.

3. immich-app/Immich

High performance self-hosted photo and video management solution

1. This is too good

2. Try Catch Console Log

3. My Games Collection 🎮

👋🏻 That’s it, Folks

I am currently open for consultation part-time/full-time, specialized in mobile development with Android and Flutter. So if you are looking for someone to:

Build product architecture from scratch
Train existing developers to level up
Fix major bottlenecks in legacy codebase
Improve code quality
And most importantly, ship things faster

then reach out to me at info@burhanrashid52.com.

Widget Tricks

Discussion about this post