For thoughts and ideas I use Evernote and it works very well. Have over 3000 notes now and it's fun looking back on thoughts, feelings and challenges I had years ago and how they've changed and evolved since then.
Ask HN: How do you manage/organize information and knowledge in your life?
31–40 of 86 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage/organize information and knowledge in your life?
#32I approached this problem and decided to try and solve it for myself just over a year ago. Firstly, I decided that instead of knowledge being segregated by medium (notes -> evernote, bookmarks -> Chrome, etc), it should be organised by purpose.
The most important purpose, I decided, was personal goals. Knowledge/information which is relevant to helping me achieve my own goals is the most important thing I should be focusing on, and should be extremely well organised and easily accessible. Any other interesting info that falls outside that is a bit of a shame to lose, but ultimately just a distraction and clutter. For this purpose, I developed this tool: https://nachapp.com
I believe the next level of information down would be general learning/knowledge. Stuff that doesn't fall under any specific goals, but is still useful information to know and understand (and may in disparate ways tie into core goals). For this, I'm currently using https://pinboard.in, although it's not ideal as it's again limited to a single medium. I have a solution in mind, but haven't started developing yet. If you're interested, feel free to get in touch and I can keep you updated (contact info in profile).
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage/organize information and knowledge in your life?
#33Nothing beat a filesystem to organize stuff, it also happen to be great way to find stuff fast..
- Folders like \doc \tutorial \ideas \recipics - Store everything in .txt and .odt - Replicate to favorit cloud storage
- For comunication: Fastmail, Skype
- Contacts & calender: Fastmail
- Keep a diary in a mail folder, I send myself a mail every now and then with a subject to an alias, that gets sorted into a "diary" folder
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage/organize information and knowledge in your life?
#341. Live simply. As I've gotten older I've found more and more value in not having too many things going on. Gradually I'm sleeping better, eating better, reducing stress, and getting more exercise, all of which is important for the next thing: 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 flex…
Having turned 32 this year, I can relate with all of your points.
Make life as simple as possible ("simplicity is the ultimate sophistication"). Use paper when necessary.
Also, try hard not to multi-task. It's been proven the human brain isn't built to handle it.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage/organize information and knowledge in your life?
#35I've come to find that everyone has a different solution, and lots of people have different priorities. A client of mine keeps everything in text files. I know another that does everything in excel. Others use some combination of apps and services (dropbox for files, omnifocus for todos, evernote for notes and articles) and that works ok for them too.
After trying several solutions, I ended up building a SaaS to manage everything. I found most things out there are fairly boring, and are not at all as powerful as what I wanted. It's basically a brain for my brain; so i can remain a scatterbrain and it can tell me when its time to water the plants, or if food in my fridge is about to expire. But it also handles all my notes, important files, time-series data, and historic dates.
But really, you have to figure out whats important to you and what system best aligns with that; and in the end you'll likely need to make a few tradeoffs to get something working.
But I think there are definitely some principles you can apply to any system you use; I can't recommend Getting Things Done by David Allen enough. His methodology is great, but even if you don't like it or can't use it for whatever reason, there are oodles of great tips; and it'll make you into a natural project manager / information guru.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage/organize information and knowledge in your life?
#36This is something I am constantly trying to get better at.
I have recently started using jrnl: http://jrnl.sh
I really like it because you can export it any many formats which I think would come in handy later to import the data, say a database. I always like the idea of a flat file for right now so you can ack/grep on the command line.
The cons are not great for assets such as images.
Looking forward to reading some other solutions.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage/organize information and knowledge in your life?
#37I just dump it somewhere (OneTab extension for web pages, random folders for stuff, note-taking for anything else).
Most of it I'll never need again (and probably look online for it first anyway, if ever), so it's really just to satisfy a compulsive need to have the impression I'm not "losing" anything. Rarely did I ever dearly miss anyhing on accidental deletion of my "stores".
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage/organize information and knowledge in your life?
#38I write a lot and have a lot of text files scattered all over my desktop with ideas, plans and notes. Everytime I start a programming project I also end up with a lot of text files with requirements, design decisions and implementation details. I kept all these ideas in plain text files because, none of the existing tools really fit what I wanted. I ended up creating a program to help with this based on the ideas of Doug Engelbart.[1] The program is still experimental and just deals with text at the moment but I still find it useful.
In terms of research papers, you may want to look at the ideas of Doug Engelbart. The process which you speak of, of collecting information and learning from it, Engelbart termed the CODIAK process. There is a section describing what CODIAK is in this paper[2]. (click on the CODIAK Process link in the table of contents). Engelbart speaks of this process in terms of groups and organizations, but the ideas apply to individuals as well. Engelbart's goal was to create an integrated "knowledge workshop", where all the different programs for organization everything would be integrated together and act as an extension of the human mind to augment people's abilities to collect and digest an ever increasing amount of information and knowledge. There is a lot of work left to be done in this area, but it is an important problem to solve.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage/organize information and knowledge in your life?
#39I mostly use Simplenote for ideas and loose notes, and Quip/Evernote for more structured notes. All three sync to all my devices, and while neither are perfect for my needs, they are OK. The problem comes from keeping everything organized (impossible with Evernote and Simplenote with their lack of structure, impossible with Quip since it's docs/spreadsheets-only) and in a way that works with my mind and workflow. I'm…
I'm very interested, will send you an email when I'll finish processing all the information from this thread ;).
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage/organize information and knowledge in your life?
#40I use vimwiki to collect, store and organise snippets links and references, then sync it to all my machines with unison. Helps if you're a vim user!