Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#11

Post by gcb0 » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 5:42 PM UTC

question is more about personal media collection. but title and most answers (so far) are about actual personal knowledge

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#12

Post by alexpetralia » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 5:43 PM UTC

ahane wrote: post #6

Tiago Forte has a lot of thoughts on this topic and a partialy free/paid blog: https://www.fortelabs.co/ I'm not affiliated in any ways but his ideas a really well thought out and apparently thoroughly tested with clients.

I would highly recommend the idea of "personal knowledge management" (PKM). I started being much more organized on this front starting last year and it is a gamechanger.

Personally I store raw thoughts and ideas in Keep, then transfer them daily or weekly to OneNote. Every so often I review the notes.

I have notes from anything important I've ever learned, ranging from technology stacks to economics to capital markets to psychology or personal well-being. I now never worry about losing thoughts or not seeing "the big picture" - it's a picture (note really) that I've saved over years now. And ever so gradually, I just build on that knowledge base, which I see as an extension of my own brain.

Edit: and if you don't use the cloud, _make sure you back up every few weeks_. It takes 5 minutes and you will really regret losing part of your brain if you break your laptop.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#13

Post by gnulinux » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 5:43 PM UTC

emacs org-mode. I make my own wikis for everything I want to remember.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#14

Post by davchana » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 5:44 PM UTC

Digital: Notes in Google Keep, Text files in Dropbox. Paper: Bullet Journal, Lists

Downloaded data: Folders PDF, Video, TV. Own Generated data: Photos in a YEAR/MONTH Labels Textual: In Dropbox, Excel, Text, Word

All data on master Hard Disk, two more copies.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#15

Post by kqr » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 5:46 PM UTC

This is a crossover between bookmarks and content curation. Also looking for a good solution.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#16

Post by IvyMike » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 5:46 PM UTC

I kinda went the non-organized method of organization: dump it all into a google drive and just count on search to find things for you.

A lot of people think of GDrive as pure storage but unsurprisingly Google search within drive is pretty good at finding stuff. Although when you know it's there and search fails, it's frustrating as hell.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#17

Post by shawn » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 5:49 PM UTC

Pinboard: https://pinboard.in/u:shawnpresser

Also, throw everything into your ~/Downloads folder and use ripgrep.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#18

Post by kennethfriedman » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 5:49 PM UTC

A combination of Pinboard (for links / images with URLS) and Notion (for personal notes, thoughts, and lists) works well for me!

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#19

Post by timwis » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 5:50 PM UTC

Personally I use markdown files synced with Dropbox and search with the silver searcher. But I think I better answer to your question is perkeep (formerly camlistore): https://github.com/perkeep/perkeep

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#20

Post by lgessler » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 5:53 PM UTC

Org-mode. Since it's a plaintext format it's easily searchable, and it's the most feature complete and ergonomic piece of software I've ever used for task tracking and knowledge management (including MediaWiki, TiddlyWiki, Google Docs, Evernote, plain txts, and more).

One major pain point: no totally seamless mobile sync that I'm aware of. I just write things down in Google Keep and transcribe them when I'm on my laptop next.