Ask HN: How do you manage/organize information and knowledge in your life?

1. A little bound paper notebook such as a Moleskine.

2. A mind mapping program -- I use FreePlane -- to store links, including links to files on my hard disk. An advantage is that I don't have to get the organization right on the first, second, or even third try.

3. A lot of the information in my life is not digitized, such as most of the sheet music in the world. So I now rely on my cell phone camera to record a lot of that stuff.

Amusingly, when I was in grad school, it was still considered to be an open question whether a person should get their own computer. The university computer store had a little guide, and the most memorable advice -- which certainly rings true in my life -- was: "Don't expect a computer to make you organized. If you have a messy desk, you will have a messy computer."

Do you think that solution to the whole personal knowledgebase problem should be solved from a single app perspective or is it better to think about this as a sort of ecosystem - one "module" for adding new things to the system, other for statistics[0], sync etc.? Also, did you consider semantic part of such system? So we can write programs that can make sense of all the things we have in the system?

[0] I was actually thinking about using machine learning to somehow finding the most important things in the wiki and suggesting tags/place in hierarchy of new entries

- For meetings, events, social obligations, I carry a small paper-based diary.

- For ideas and thoughts, I write them down. The idea is that the act of writing something down aids recall. For example, story and blog ideas go in a A5 notebook that I carry around with me, and I commit them to a digitally backed up document as soon as possible. Note-to-self lifestyle advice goes in my bedside drawer, to check on if I ever feel like I've forgotten anything.

- For things to learn and interesting articles, I don't do anything and keep my fingers crossed that the salient bits will have rubbed off on me, lurking in my subconscious and subtly improving my life forever after.

I'm not 100% sure that last one works quite that well.

2. Memorize as much as I can. It's an exercise; I memorize phone numbers, schedules, people's names, trivia, all kinds of stuff. I've never found anything that matches the flexibility and utility of my own brain. I should use the best tool I have, and that's in my head. Technology is unreliable and constantly changing and difficult to organize and search. I've been practicing this for long enough that now I'm pretty good at it.

3. For everything else, I use a few simple systems: a few sheets of paper to the right side of my desk for scribbling and note-taking (meant to be discarded after a day or two), a pile of to-do to my left, a tab open in my text editor labeled "notepad" for longer-term stuff, and a well-organized directory of documents on my laptop with subfolders like "projects", "writing", "sysadmin", etc. -- I try to keep this directory as small as possible by dedicating time here and there to either finishing or pruning projects.

I disagree that keeping knowledge in your head isn't efficient. I think a lot of people just don't practice it enough. Smartphones and computers and everything else make it really easy to not bother. But, my brain is always with me, doesn't require batteries (well...), can store any type of information I want, and can instantly recall it without having to craft some kind of search query or organize the information in a rigorous way. It is exactly the kind of database storage we all wish we had. It never changes data formats, it never tries to get acquired by a bigger company and then shut down, and it gets reception everywhere I go. If my brain were an electronic tool, I would want to use it all the time. And, the more I use it, the better it works.

(edit: oh yeah, and pinboard. Looove pinboard.)

2. Poor solution, but I email myself notes a lot. Usually from my phone, then I drop them into a folder in Outlook when I get back to my desk.

3. OneNote, for more long term collections. Microsoft did an amazing job with this product.