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

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

#21

Post by dpweb »

All appontments meetings personal and work - in a single Outlook calendar. All work related notes in a single OneNote workbook (text searchable) All code files/projects - on Onedrive in cloned repos from Github, so I can include them locally and commit to GitHub as needed. Lastpass for passwords and credit card info.

One unique thing I started doing, I use this program called ClipX which lets you have a popup of your recent clipboard entries. Its will let you save to a text file. So, everything I clip, code snips, passwords, etc.. goes into a single text file - so I can just Ctrl-C something and forget about it. Six months later I just do a text search in this file. Its gets big (10MB or so) and I back that file up and start with a new file every year.

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

#22

Post by ay1n »

gexla wrote: post #3

Here is one idea. http://lifehacker.com/im-ryan-holiday-and-this-is-how-i-work... The take-away there is index cards. I like the idea of information being broken down small enough to fit on an index card. Reading a book, it could be one point, one quote or something of similar size.

Will read the article, thank you.

In the past I've tried to use POIC system[0][1] but it wasn't really that efficient and the biggest 2 problems were search (mostly full text, I could find entry from a particular date quite easly) and portability - over time it becomes a big physical thing you need to store (I move quite often).

I agree with you about dividing (almost) everything into single pieces of information and adding to the system, but I'm still trying to figure out how to do this well.

[0] http://pileofindexcards.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

[1] http://lifehacker.com/the-pile-of-index-cards-system-efficie...

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

#23

Post by ay1n »

b6 wrote: post #9

I recently started keeping track of a lot of stuff in Tiddlywiki (in server mode). I keep a browser tab open to localhost:8080.

I've used Tiddlywiki in the past but I didn't quite like it (just my experience, I know that a lot of people use it). Switched to dokuwiki and after that to media wiki and I'm using this now, but as you can guess from the question, I'm trying to find/build something better for my needs ;).

How do you use Tiddlywiki - do you often search or do you know where did you put some note? What in your opinion are pros and cons of this wiki? What do you think is the biggest problem?

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

#24

Post by aikah »

By the way,is there a solution for windows or linux that would take SQL like queries and allows one to search among files in a computer. Something like :

    SELECT All *.jpg as image FROM /myfolder/** where image.creationDate > yesterday and image.size
Then either display the result in a window or as text.

Something that would combine find,grep+pipes into something more "userfriendly".

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

#26

Post by frik »

ay1n wrote: post #2

There is a 2000 character limit in the question box, so here is what I'm using now: - pinboard for managing bookmarks (database of things that may be useful sometime; probably never) & reading list for articles - I'm testing tagspaces ( http://www.tagspaces.org/ ) for local files organization (mostly tagging research papers and books; didn't like Mendeley) - cardav & caldav from owncloud for contacts and events - ank…

I tried a personal wiki (MediaWiki and SharePoint) on localhost too and encountered the same problems (hard to reorganize, secure mobile access).

So I switched back to plain text, using the Markdown syntax format. Sync works fine with IMAP based email account (note apps on iOS & Android support that too). For visual complex documents I use a WYSIWYG HTML editor and the HTML format. SVN/Git repo to preserve the edit history. And I coded an desktop/enterprise search engine myself to search through PDFs, HTML and various Office formats - similar to the discontinued Google Desktop search and some enterprise search software.

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

#27

Post by ay1n »

tunesmith wrote: post #12

Still figuring this out - I have DevonThink to collect/catalog but I find that I don't often get in there to search, so that information basically rots. Same with my web bookmarks, many are several years old. As time goes on I find that information is basically useless unless I either internalize or act on it. So I tend to use information to adjust either my anki decks or my goal maps, and then I try to deliberately…

I never used DevonThink, can you tell me what are the your personal biggest pros and cons of this program? Also, what do you think is the biggest problem of this/similar systems?

I can sympathize with bookmarks problems, not only they rot, but after few years there is a lot of 404 (pinboard provides archiving bookmarks but that is a paid service).

Do you have a lot of Anki decks of just a single "random things from the bookmarks"? Do you use Anki every day or rather infrequently?

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

#28

Post by krapp »

Ironically, one of my unfinished personal projects is a project manager, so I can organize myself better, but I find just pasting random stuff into a notepad++ tab does the job most of the time. I also have a ton of browser bookmarks organized by nothing in particular (most of my logins actually say "Login") and a lot of random stuff in my downloads folder, repos I found interesting, pdfs, etc.

So I guess my answer is "poorly," but somehow it seems to work.

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

#29

Post by ay1n »

pyre wrote: post #14
ay1n wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I think this is a common problem. We collect things, because they seem worth reading/watching but never return to them. One thing is that some effort is required to read/watch those things but other thing is that we forget that we even saw that particular article/video. So, maybe bookmarks should have a reminder mechanism built into them of some sort? Sombining Spaced Repetition with bookmarking seems interestin…

This is further fuelled by recalling something (e.g. an article you read), and not being able to find it again. For example, a while ago I read an article that talked about peanut allergies being less prevalent/severe in Europe than the US, and Europe having more cases of other allergies (like apple allergies). It then went on to talk about different pollens that may react with our bodies to trigger certain allergies…

Yes, I know the feeling. So even if I know that I won't return to 90% of my bookmarks, I'm adding all of the interesting things so if I'll need it in the future I'll have pretty small set of links (rather that billions from google).

Another thing is archiving all those bookmarks, since after few years a number of them is 404.

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

#30

Post by hammerandtongs »

org-mode in emacs

Simple text file that's actually more functional then almost any other solution, designed around allowing you to create and adapt new workflows and WILL be available and useful to you for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Org-mode

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