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

I just practice, a lot. I exercise my brain like a power lifter exercises their body.

For instance, I know the names and some basic information of everyone at the bank branch I frequent. I go up, say, "Hi ____, how're the kids, did you have a good time last weekend?" It's nice for them and a little mental workout for me.

When I'm out and about, I briefly memorize random things: movie showtimes, things I heard on the radio and want to look up, prices of things in the store (so I can price-compare later; e.g. I know Safeway has my cereal for $3.99/box with the club card discount, which is slightly better than regular price but not as good as the occasional 2-for-$4.99 sale at Raley's). I try to really look at the people around me and memorize different facial features and notice different things about them, and if I'm not distracted, then I try to flip through them all mentally when I get in the car. (But this also makes big crowds more overwhelming.)

I play Go. I have a small local club with some friends, and we play religiously once a week, and I play or study more often in my spare time. It's a game where you can improve quite a lot by visualizing the game board several moves in advance, and the game board can get pretty complicated. It's a really good workout for my working memory.

When I'm reading, I try to memorize most of the previous paragraph immediately, memorize the bullet points of the previous page when I get to the next page, and the next day I try to remember the gist of what I read. If I can't, I go back and re-read it until it gels.

Stuff like that. It all sounds silly written out, and like a lot of work, but it's second-nature now. I just do it automatically.

Exercising memory is kind of a two-part process. You have to be able to put things in your brain (typically this just means practicing paying attention), and you have to be able to recall them later. I think the recall part might be the bit that a lot of people forget to do. I quiz myself all the time on what I just memorized, so my recall is pretty good.

Oddly, the harder thing I've been struggling with more recently is forgetting on purpose: there's a bunch of stuff in my brain that I don't need, and learning how to forget that stuff is a trick I haven't figured out yet.

Things with well defined start/end dates or with very high priority/high cost of missing (ie flights, parties, reservations, deadlines): calendar (I use my iphone calendar with alarms if necessary)

Things with less well defined start/end dates: starred emails/browser bookmarks toolbar

Menial things that need to be in the near future (ie groceries, laundry, shopping): Leave something out of place as a reminder, or put in calendar with alarm if urgent

Things with low priority/low cost (ie things to read/learn/listen/watch, fitness goals/accomplishments, future trip plans, long term plans, misc notes): iphone notes

Also keep a notepad at everywhere I work regularly (home desk/office desk) and in my backpack with notes

I also feel its very important to maintain 0 unread emails in all of my inboxes. Makes it much more feasible to stay up to date on everything and avoid missing anything important. 90% of the time I'm awake, I will read any incoming mail within 15 minutes and respond immediately if necessary.

For GUI: Windows search can do this with the datemodified:* and size:* operators, or just click the Search tab in the Explorer ribbon to see buttons

To organize the text files; over time I build an index of categories at the top in CAPS, and each category heading below is also in CAPS. Then when I save / retrieve / cull information I search the category "Case sensitive" to locate it quickly. Once major groupings can be identified and corralled, I separate those into independent text files. It's work.

For Chrome bookmarks I build similar categories but this can get unwieldy if not maintained and subdivided on the regular.

If it matters; all my local files reside in one of two folders (or downstream of them). One is for current "in flux" files & the rest goes in the other "archive" folder. I do encrypted backups on the "in flux" often and the "archive" far less often to external drive(s) & the cloud/online. I have a third "clients" folder but all the files there are temp and go back to their respective servers and I don't backup any of it.

I concur with sp3n concerning over-collecting, often I get back to something and it's already obsolete or maybe not at all. As a result I end up in a data cull session from time to time.

Don't like paper and would love to migrate all to 100 percent online one day.