Ask HN: Why do you keep a personal knowledge base?

I keep a record of any info that I learn (organized by topic) in Workflowy. I even keep a note of everything I do.

Basically my goal is to decrease the chance of going through the same process of learning something, multiple times.

I also think of it as a cache for Google. I sometimes search my knowledge base before searching Google.

For example: how to delete duplicate lines in emacs? I just found it in my knowledge base in under 3 seconds but would have taken more time googling (also more distracting)

This is exactly my experience too. I almost never go back to my notes. Only value creating notes is actual act of creating notes, it doesn't really matter what you use for it.

Please, for the love of all that is open source, someone create an open alternative to OneNote. It’s easily one of the best Microsoft tools ever, and there doesn’t seem to be a good equivalent. It also seems like the perfect pinboard-style lifestyle business.

Uses of a personal knowledge base:

- Recording and crystallizing ideas: most deep thoughts and informed opinions about things often don't materialize on first try. They are the result of many iterations, pivots and revisions. Writing them down helps one regain context quickly after leaving them for a while, which allows one to make incremental progress without being susceptible to the fallibility of memory searches. Writing is also frequently the best way to teach oneself something and to push oneself to identify gaps in knowledge and thinking.

- Sleep aid: committing ideas to (virtual) paper helps unburden them from one's active memory. This has inadvertent therapeutic effects as well. I'm one of those people who has tons of ideas racing in my head all the time, so this helps me sleep at night. On a related note, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or CBT (for managing emotions) can also be done through written therapy.

- Business ideas/hobby ideas: list of stuff to do when the right combination of opportunities arises. You can have ideas but not all ideas are ripe for execution. Having them in a cache as one is constantly monitoring the environment helps one time their deployment better.

- Latent solutions to problems: Richard Feynman had a trick where he'd be constantly thinking about 6 problems at any given time. When an attack presented itself due to sheer chance, he was able to execute on it quickly, and make himself look like a genius when in fact he had been thinking about about the problem for a long time and was merely lying in wait for the right piece of the puzzle to come along.

- Jokes/good turns of phrases: not for the purpose of plagiarism, but sometimes one needs a bon mot or an apt phrase for a presentation or piece of writing. Having a store of such phrases to synthesize from is much more reliable than drawing from memory alone. Many good writers/presenters aren't Mozart-like geniuses who can produce polished work on-demand: many maintain disciplines like this to aid in producing quality work even when their memory fails them.

- Travel destinations: sometimes we read about an interesting place and tell ourselves "we'll visit some day" but then never do because when the next long weekend comes up, we'd have forgotten all about it. Keeping a list helps one to quickly converge on a destination when a vacation opportunity arises.

At work I maintain a running txt file that acts as a journal, a time tracker to help with timesheets, and a scratchpad for real-time notes (meeting notes, action items, email drafts, code/config). I start a new txt file each year. Each week starts with a header with some goals for the week. Each day follows a similar pattern of highlighting priorities for the day.

Since it's txt file it opens quickly, is easily scannable and searchable. I will sometimes tag entries with phrases that I know I'm more likely to use later when I'm looking for something. The txt file is stored in dropbox and is typically open all day on whatever device I happen to be on.

I've found that tools that organize by things by folder or tag (Notational Velocity, Evernote) don't work for me - I lose track of where something went. Organizing by calendar/time allows me to remember "oh, the thing I'm looking for occurred before this thing".