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Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

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Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#191

Post by TeMPOraL »

DEADBEEFC0FFEE wrote: post #174
klenwell wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't start with figuring out a method to organize your information. You will end up overengineering your org method. I think this is an important point. I like to start with a few simple rules: - To retrieve information, I should know where to start: a Schelling point.[0] For me, this is the home page of my wiki. For wenc, it's a Google Doc. - It shouldn't take me more than three clicks to get from my starting point…

> It shouldn't take me more than three clicks to get from my starting point to the information I'm looking for. I see this sort of criteria and really don't agree. There are many operations that take more than three clicks. Navigation a UI is a graph in itself, and we can handle way more than 3 nodes. In the same way that I can remember how to get to work, or get a book from one of my bookshelves. Anyway, small point…

Trivial inconveniences.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-tri...

There was a joke in one of Stephen Hawking's book that each equation included in the text cuts the number of readers by half. In a similar fashion, you can imagine that each extra step you need to get to the information will cut the number of occasions you do so by half. If you want the system to benefit you daily, in many areas, it has to be as simple and seamless as possible.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#193

Post by jeremejevs »

johntash wrote: post #181
alecmev wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moved to Notion from Marxico+Evernote a couple of months ago, haven't looked back.

Are you using the free plan, or the personal paid plan?

Free for now, but will start paying when I run out of blocks (the usage isn't as high as I expected, only at ~500 out of 1000 right now, though I have imported 4-5 years worth of notes).

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#194

Post by nickjj »

I keep things simple. The following process has served me well for ~20 years:

For brain dumping text I put things into text files, named by YYYY-MM such as 2018-08.txt and they all end up in a notes/ folder.

Then I have a bunch of folders for things that are non-text, organized by whatever it is. I try to keep folder nesting at a minimum.

Searching text is super simple with grep and searching for specific files works well enough with file searching tools (and are also easy to browse manually).

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#195

Post by based2 »

Trees -> Typed nodes -> Graphs

MacInTouch More (1)

macOz Omnigraffle (2)

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MORE_(application)

(2) https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle

Notes:

TreeSheets: Free Form Data Organizer

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15057392

Quetree – A Q&A site that is tree-based and hierarchical

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17848846

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#196

Post by wenc »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #191
DEADBEEFC0FFEE wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It shouldn't take me more than three clicks to get from my starting point to the information I'm looking for. I see this sort of criteria and really don't agree. There are many operations that take more than three clicks. Navigation a UI is a graph in itself, and we can handle way more than 3 nodes. In the same way that I can remember how to get to work, or get a book from one of my bookshelves. Anyway, small point…

Trivial inconveniences. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-tri... There was a joke in one of Stephen Hawking's book that each equation included in the text cuts the number of readers by half. In a similar fashion, you can imagine that each extra step you need to get to the information will cut the number of occasions you do so by half. If you want the system to benefit you daily, in many areas,…

Fascinating observation, and could be a corrolary to Nudge theory [1], which won Richard Thaler his Nobel Prize this year, which says Opt-in rather than opt-out is more effective for changing behavior.

Underlying idea: friction disincentivizes.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#197

Post by jonathansorum »

cecja wrote: post #102
MapleWalnut wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do the same with plain text files. The only problem I have is searching. I wish there was a Google for searching local files (i.e. concept search).

There was and I shit you not it was from Google.

I miss it more than I miss Reader :(

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#198

Post by alltakendamned »

edwintorok wrote: post #129
zubspace wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, they have one exception to the "being bad at managing collections of the world's data that I didn't write" -- they do have very good "web clipping" functionality. Instead of saving url bookmarks that might suffer digital rot, you can use the web clip tool. Let me warn you: I tried to use OneNote this way. The web clipper is really nice and I used it heavily to clip everything interesting on the web from my…

Sometimes the pages can still be found on archive.org, archive.is, etc. but I usually find out too late that a page I bookmarked wasn't actually archived. I've just found this Firefox plugin [1] that automatically sends your bookmarks to archiving sites. (one at a time, so unfortunately this won't immediately help with existing bookmarks, unless you visit them all again). [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/…

I wrote a little script that I run as a daily cron job which fetches all URLs I bookmarked/saved in Pocket and submits it to archive.org.

I wish more people would do that as link rot is a very real thing, certainly for technical information often saved in gists or github repos that are often harder to find back.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#199

Post by TeMPOraL »

wenc wrote: post #196
TeMPOraL wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trivial inconveniences. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-tri... There was a joke in one of Stephen Hawking's book that each equation included in the text cuts the number of readers by half. In a similar fashion, you can imagine that each extra step you need to get to the information will cut the number of occasions you do so by half. If you want the system to benefit you daily, in many areas,…

Fascinating observation, and could be a corrolary to Nudge theory [1], which won Richard Thaler his Nobel Prize this year, which says Opt-in rather than opt-out is more effective for changing behavior. Underlying idea: friction disincentivizes. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory

Yeah, sounds like the same thing.

I would not expect you could get a Nobel Prize for that, though. Maybe Scott Alexander should start submitting his articles wherever it is you need to submit them to get a Nobel in economics.

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