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

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

#61

Post by thaumaturgy »

meesterdude wrote: post #56
thaumaturgy wrote: post #17

1. 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…

One of the problems of keeping everything in your head is trust. People forget! Maybe you have a great memory, but eventually it'll forget things. And it should! otherwise there won't be room for any new stuff. I don't think we have infinite storage available; at some point things have to be erased to make room. But also, keeping that stuff in a system you can trust frees your brain to do other things. Instead of fal…

Yeah, I've messed around with Method of Loci off and on over the years, but it hasn't done much for me. Probably I'd just need to put the effort in to it, and I haven't. My natural tendency has been a grab bag of sorts; if I want to recall something, I think about a category -- "people", "projects", "trivia", etc. -- to kind of prime my brain in some way I don't really understand, and then it just pukes out a bunch of stuff until the thing I'm looking for pops up. Like, if I'm trying to remember an actor's name, it goes, "face -> action movie -> movie box was dark blue at night -> heat -> Val Kilmer". It's usually pretty quick.

You're right though, brains are pretty fallible. If something's really really really important, I do have backups. Usually email, or text, or paper.

...but, honestly? I'm scared to death of old age. It scares the piss out of me. One of the things about it that really gets to me is the idea that I might be 90 one day and not recognize people I care about, or remember anything about myself, or have any idea what's going on around me. The smartest elderly people I know are all very mentally active, and always have been, so even though there isn't good scientific evidence for the prevention of alzheimer's through puzzles and brain teasers and the like, I do it anyway.

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

#62

Post by sfilipov »

ay1n wrote: post #7
bsilvereagle wrote: post #4

I used to use OneNote pretty extensively for nearly everything. Recipes, course notes, thoughts while working on projects, lists of reminders, etc. The main problem with it was that if I wanted to search on something, I'd have to search X number of OneNote notebooks. I've recently started to use fedwiki instead of OneNote, and things are alrightish. Fedwiki has lots of room for improvement as a wiki, and then as a kn…

For me the biggest downside of OneNote is that I can't use it on Linux/Unix (Wine doesn't always work). I didn't know fedwiki, looks interesting and I'll look into this, thanks for that. Do you have categories in which single entries are grouped or you just add new thing and search for it later?

I use the web app on Linux - still better than Evernote for basic tables (which is what I find myself creating often).

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

#63

Post by ivansavz »

cmpb wrote: post #51
ivansavz wrote: post #20

I have totally given up hope on classifying all the interesting things I find on the web each day, so I use an uncategorized save all strategy. I save all opened and downloaded files (mostly PDFs) to ~/Desktop/ and I also bookmark things there (by dragging the URL icon onto the desktop). After a few weeks the desktop becomes a complete mess, so I use a script[1] that puts files into subfolders (by extension), and the…

I like this idea since it solves the issue of easily persisting things you may want to keep around, but wouldn't it limit the types of things you can persist (e.g. can you easily persist ideas/snippets this way)?

Ideas no, but I sometimes drag snippets of text to the desktop too and they get saved as `.textClipping` files.

I think ideas are folder-like structures so I usually create a folder to store code/links/pdfs/clippings specific to that idea, then file away that Idea folder as one piece.

My general advice is to spend less time planning and more time doing, else you might get stuck on what Ze Frank calls "Brain Crack" http://youtu.be/0sHCQWjTrJ8?t=8s

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

#64

Post by renaudg »

aikah wrote: post #24

By the way,is there a solution for windows or linux that would take SQL like queries and allows one to search among files in a computer. Something like : SELECT All *.jpg as image FROM /myfolder/** where image.creationDate > yesterday and image.size Then either display the result in a window or as text. Something that would combine find,grep+pipes into something more "userfriendly".

You've just described MacOS X's 10 year old Spotlight feature : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_%28software%29

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

#66

Post by Chevalier »

Trello - ESSENTIAL kanban system for project management and daily organization. I'm an absolute fanatic for Trello.

OneNote - The greatest program ever made. OneNote isn't useful for short-term to-dos, but I couldn't live without its organization of my long-term work.

Pocket - I never have time to read articles, and they're unpleasant to read on a squat laptop screen in any case. Pocket lets me read them on my tablet, in the subway, with gorgeous formatting.

Google Calendar - The whole Google ecosystem is ridiculously useful for organization, including auto-additions to your calendar from Gmail and Google Now's intelligent suggestions.

Gmail - Particularly the five-tab filtering. Holy shit. I had no idea how disorganized my inbox was before I could filter away the dreck.

Google Keep - It's been displaced somewhat by Trello (in terms of grocery lists, etc.) but it's still great for medium-length notes that you'd like to read on the subway or something. I store a huge amount of poetry in mine.

Google+ - The BEST place for photos. I don't understand the fashionable hatred. G+ is by far the best photo backup/organizer/enhancer/sharer I've ever seen, and the G+ social network is WAY better than Facebook's clunky organization. I'm amazed that Facebook is so bad with photos... isn't that pretty essential for social networks? G+ is just too good to be ignored forever.

GDrive - Corollary to G+. Putting photos on GDrive automatically uploads them to G+, which again is just excellent. Google DEFINITELY needs to upgrade their 1TB limit to "unlimited," though... and offer auto-deduplication for identical photos for the billions of us with redundant photo hoards. Right now, GDrive prices are the highest on the market for limited storage and no extra features like deduplication or auto-organization. I still pay for GDrive just for G+ photo features, but Dropbox offers equal/better functionality and OneDrive offers much better value.

Kindle - You never realize what a burden paper books are until you have an alternative. Ebooks are incredible.

Calibre - Especially if you have a ton of academic papers or studies to pore through, organizing them in Calibre makes life infinitely simpler.

Spotify - Outsourcing my music collection to streaming services is GREAT. I'm now trying out Google Music, which lets me upload 20,000 MP3s to supplement the holes in Google's collection. (Perfect for unpublished songs and so on.)

Steam - The original Spotify for video games. All the same benefits, plus amazing sale prices that have forced me to buy way too large a collection.

edX - Coursera and Udacity also, but any of these are gold mines for organizing self-paced education.

Pidgin - Still the best instant messenger, though the shift toward closed networks is making it harder to use. That Google still allows Pidgin to access Hangouts via (limited) XMPP has kept me faithful. I don't understand why anyone would use something like WhatsApp and its crappy clients.

- - - - -

If anyone from Google is reading this, particularly from the Tasks team... just buy Trello already. GTasks is woefully inadequate, particularly when compared against Trello's unbelievably powerful kanban organization.

Also, I'm a little disturbed by how heavily I depend on Google. I don't see any viable competitors, though -- Outlook lacks Gmail's tabs and themes, OneDrive lacks GDrive's functionality, Facebook lacks G+'s insane photo features, WhatsApp lacks open APIs. I hope Microsoft steps up soon, because I don't see any other real competitors against Google dominance of web services.

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

#67

Post by read »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #17

1. 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…

One special trick I've used is to write an idea down when I have it. Another is to write more often to unearth my ideas. What's more valuable that storing existing knowledge is generating new knowledge.

You won't reach your maximum potential if you only try keeping knowledge in your head.

  The power of the unaided mind is highly overrated.
  Without external aids, deep, sustained reasoning is
  difficult.

  - Don Norman

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

#68

Post by bonobo3000 »

I've been using Kifi[0]. It lets you collect any webpage thats interesting, tag it with multiple tags, and search your whole collection based on tags/content of the page. I highly recommend it.

For example, I want to learn more and more about distributed systems, so when I see an interesting article, i tag it. When i have some time, i go through the relevant tags.

[0] https://www.kifi.com/

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

#69

Post by chubot »

ay1n wrote: post #13
chubot wrote: post #6

I wrote in this thread about using a Wiki I wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8753599

Just started reading. Most of the items on your list of things to fix I was thinking about for quite some time. Besides the comments, maybe you could write a blog post about your system and experience with it? I for sure would be interested. Do you think that solution to the whole personal knowledgebase problem should be solved from a single app perspective or is it better to think about this as a sort of ecosystem -…

Actually my main takeaway is that organizing information shouldn't occur in a single app. It needs to take advantage of the web as much as possible. The model I want is basically small "apps" joined by hyperlinks -- exactly what the web is.

The primary app is a wiki with unstructured text, outlined/indented text and hyperlinks. But, as mentioned, information comes other forms too: structured data like bookmarks, spreadsheets, images, etc. The web lets you express all those things (spreadsheets being the weak link, since it involves executing code). Reinventing it all within a single app would be a lifetime of work.

The web already has common patterns and facilities for log analysis and so forth. If you just make it a web site, you can track all your actions with web log analysis. Whereas if you make it some "app", then you have to reinvent the analytics.

I definitely considered doing more textual analysis, stuff like PageRank, and even semantic analysis. I think it's interesting to explore but I don't the cost/benefit works out right now.

I have over 2000 pages, but probably 500 or less are "active". That can mostly be managed with full text search, and nothing smarter. You just have to make the search fast, which isn't hard with that amount of data.

But, if you want to write more code and programs against the data, a web site is a good format for doing so. I basically use the Unix philosophy of independent programs and data, rather than the "app" philosophy of data locked up behind code / user interface.

My philosophy is just to optimize for speed and ease of both writing and reading. And then you use it more. And the more you use it, the more valuable becomes. Just like with learning itself, you start to make more connections once you have some existing knowledge/content to graft on to it.

I think the most important thing is the content, and not the tool, and as long as the tool is lightweight and fast, you will keep up the habit of entering content and (just as importantly) retrieving it.

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

#70

Post by nickthemagicman »

I have a bunch of text files in folders on google drive. The cool thing about google drive is you can sync it and it propogates to any web enable device.

Keep your life to three to five major things and this works really well.

Also, Don't go more than two or three folders deep. If you do you're organizing wrong.

I also scan or photo all of the paperwork I get throughout life put it in Google drive and throw the original away.

Also, you can put all your photos up on google drive. (Just not very private photos..)

Note: security/privacy concerns if you do this with personal stuff like medical or financial docs.

There's ways to encrypt it all on google drive just don't really have enough important info there to care.

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