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Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

#61

Post by maryrosecook »

I use a single app, Bear. It's a nice notes app (think Evernote but with a really refined UI).

My main goal is to have everything in one place: My journal entries, minutes from meetings at my job, project plans and working notes, book/article/film summaries, quotes, reflections. (Bear has both a Mac and iOS app which means I can note things down from anywhere.)

This enables a few things. Search across all my information from one search box. A strong incentive to take good notes because I know I'll be able to find them and reference them later. A 15 year chronicle of the things I've done.

The older blog posts I've written aren't in Bear. This is kind of dumb because they're some of the deepest and most hard-won knowledge I have. Long term, I want to move them into Bear. More recently, I started a new blog that I publish from Bear. This feels much better.

As for learning, I have a few processes that relate to recording:

1. Highlighting useful/interesting passages in books and writing notes in the margins with my thoughts on the material. For really good books, I'll pull out the highlighted passages and notes and organize them into a summary of the book in a note in Bear.

2. I have a note for each skill I'm working on (e.g. designing software architecture, estimating time frames, getting buy-in on an idea). As I practice it I'll write down things I've figured out or reflections on my application of the skill or relevant notes from books/articles.

3. I'll sometimes reference my notes about books/articles as I'm working. E.g. For some reason I've referenced the note that contains a summary of an article I read about the React lifecycle like a zillion times.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

#65

Post by Noumenon72 »

eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 wrote: post #7

Try Anki, a spaced repetition flashcard software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anki_(software) It is intended for memorizing things, but the fact that it forces you to divide knowledge into pieces small enough to fit on a flash card also helps to organize it. And you can have different card stacks in Anki, so there also is categorization of knowledge. Cf. the "Zettelkasten", a physical flashcard system which is actu…

I just switched IDEs/operating systems, so I'm using Anki to help me learn that Cmd + Shift + Z is revert changelist and so on. When I'm waiting for something to compile, I tap Anki and let it reinforce my memories that were about to expire.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

#66

Post by jonsen »

bhouston wrote: post #59
jonsen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What age did you notice it change?

In my late forties. The quality of my lectures became fluctuating. Thought it was temporary but soon realized that on average it was slowly but steady downhill. Edit: Should say, that’s twenty years ago and not the slightest indication of dementia today. But significantly harder to handle complex things in my mind only.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

#69

Post by throwaway823882 »

ImaCake wrote: post #42
jll29 wrote: post #19

After trying out various ways, online and offline (including studying Luhmann's famous "Zettelkasten" http://ds.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/viewer/image/ZL1A1001/1/#topDo... ), and the one that I stuck with is using plain text files. One's knowledge is too valuable and important to entrust it to a particular binary format that can soon no longer be read. Plain text is durable, portable, easy to process using UNIX command lin…

Why not use markdown instead instead of .txt? All good editors (including vim etc) have great support for markdown and you get plenty of great simple features without much crap getting in the way.

...you know you don't need an editor with support for Markdown, right? Markdown is a plain text format.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

#70

Post by aristofun »

This general “knowledge management” question is like a “time management” one — usually meaningless and sometimes a form of escapism.

When you don’t have any particular emotionally charged goal(s) in mind — no time/knowledge management technique would really make a difference.

But some of them might give you a good illusion of something important going on.

And as soon as you have specific important goal in mind (like preparing to specific exam, getting lawyer license etc.) — almost any approach you feel comfortable with will do the job.

You usually dont need to review possible options in advance, the goal itself gives you hints and guides (if preparing for exam means remembering a lot of scattered facts - you’d probably end up with some anki cards on your own etc).

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