Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

I use spreadsheets and custom 2D dsls. I get the best of tabular and tree structures. The latest iterations aren’t live yet, but there’s a lot of stuff on treenotation.org which is the foundation of what I use.

I consider it like a tool for clear thinking. There’s no punctuation or noise, pure signal. I build DSLs and then spreadsheets in those DSLs. Both the data and grammars are in 2D Lang’s. There’s no quotes, brackets, patents, etc. Everything is strongly typed (eventually, in practice I start with a lot of “any” fields and iterate on the ontologies as my knowledge of a domain grows).

Everything is backed by git.

I do a lot of visual modeling lately with my remarkable 2 eink tablet.

Just by remembering things. If I can’t remember it, it’s none sense.

For a solid understanding and remembering, I’m applying the knowledge by setting up a personal side project.

I furthermore push all my side project to a private git repo and if I really need to look up things, I always know on what project I need to look at.

I have recently transitioned from wet lab biology to knowledge work. Something I brought with me through the transition was the keeping of dated physical notes with a digital todo list (also with dates). I find being able to scribble the physical graph I want to make, a vague table, or just some comments or math from a research paper really helps. The digital todo list helps me find old notes as dates effectively act as relative page numbers and all that is needed is a ctrl+F and then a bit of a flick through pages.

I personally don't have the discipline to organise my digital notes post-hoc, so I focus on just making notes using markdown files and sticking them somewhere in my onedrive so I can find them later. I do have a notes folder, but there is stuff that has found its way elsewhere. Thankfully searching markdown files is very easy.

Beware you young men with fresh brains. Brains can and do get worn. I could say almost exactly your words about my younger self, but not anymore. Now I suffer badly from never having learned and trained a good note system. Get your external memory configured and operational in due time.