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Whether it’s improving your coding skills, helping you bring wacky ideas to life, or boosting your productivity, there’s no shortage of cool projects you can build with a Raspberry Pi. Thankfully, you don’t need to build anything complex to enhance your workflow. If you’re proficient in the arcane art of containerization, you can self-host some of our favorite productivity-enhancing tools on your tiny tinkering companion.

5Vikunja

With a shout-out to NocoDB

To-do list builders are perfect when you want to jot down your plans and keep track of your schedule. Thanks to its lightweight yet feature-heavy design, Vikunja remains my top recommendation for building itineraries and listicles on a private Raspberry Pi server.

Aside from its intuitive UI, Vikunja offers several ways to organize your lists and notes, including Gantt charts and Kanban boards. It also offers collaboration and access management provisions when you need to work with others to tackle your projects. That said, Vikunja is best used for solo productivity tasks, as NocoDB offers a more varied toolkit to manage larger projects involving multiple teams.

4Beaver Habit Tracker

A minimalist app to stay on top of your schedule

A habit-tracking service is a must-have when you want to improve focus and, more importantly, root out unproductive tasks from your schedule. But in the deluge of self-hosted timekeeping utilities, Beaver Habit Tracker stands out with its distraction-free UI.

Besides letting you add hundreds of tasks, Beaver Habit Tracker also offers a detailed history of your schedule, so you can fine-tune your checklist to suit your productivity goals.

3Nextcloud

Personal cloud hosted on a Raspberry Pi

Building a NAS out of a Raspberry Pi is an amazing project for tinkerers. However, for the average productivity-driven user, a personal cloud equipped with multiple utilities is better than a NAS-centric operating system.

Enter Nextcloud, a fantastic file-sharing server that you can deploy on your Raspberry Pi for added security and privacy. While its file-hosting features are enough to earn it a spot on this list, Nextcloud’s utility jumps to the next level once you pair it with some add-ons. Heck, a properly decked-out Nextcloud setup can serve as a solid self-hosted replacement for Dropbox, Google Drive, and other cloud platforms.

2n8n

Automate every aspect of your life

Automating tedious tasks can help you focus on more pressing issues and assignments. While home automation utilities and Raspberry Pi SBCs make a good pair, n8n is an amazing tool if you want to automate repetitive tasks on the software front.

From onboarding new employees on Slack and managing ticketing systems to fetching RSS feeds and storing new invoices, n8n can automate professional as well as personal tasks. While it can seem intimidating to beginners, n8n’s no-code design makes it easy to pick up with a few hours of practice. With the right n8n scripts, you’ll see your productivity soar in no time (though you might develop a crippling addiction to automation).

1TriliumNext Notes

A powerful PKM hosted on a credit-card-sized board

The note-taking ecosystem is chock-full of handy applications, especially on the self-hosted front. Having tried out a ton of services to keep track of my notes, I can confirm that TriliumNext Notes is by far the best application for organizing my ideas. UI-wise, it’s extremely easy to navigate, and its detailed search parameters let you retrieve even the most obscure notes in an instant.

Then you’ve got the mermaid diagrams, which let you convert JavaScript-esque codes into vector-based flowcharts. Heck, you can even design full-fledged illustrations for your notes thanks to TriliumNext Notes’ excaliDraw integration. However, the Mind Maps functionality is what seals the deal for me, as it’s the perfect tool for organizing my notes and linking them together inside a vast canvas.

Improving your productivity, one container at a time

Considering the vast expanse of services in the self-hosted realm, this article won’t be complete if I don’t mention a handful of other applications. If you’re tired of keeping track of invoices and bills, Paperless-ngx can be a life-changer. For folks tired of Microsoft’s Office apps, a locally-hosted LibreOffice suite can meet your document-editing and presentation-designing needs. As for spreadsheets, you’ll find Grist a terrific alternative to Calc and Excel.

For chefs and cooking maestros, you can deploy Mealie on your green SBC to manage your recipe repertoire. Finally, Home Assistant is the be-all-and-end-all tool to automate your smart gadgets, though I recommend using a mini-PC over a Raspberry Pi if you’ve got an arsenal of IoT components in your living space.