Ask HN: How Do You Utilize Your Personal Knowledge Base?

I am always intrigued to read about how individuals construct, organize, maintain, and expand their personal knowledge bases. There's a wide range of tools at our disposal, including Obsidian, Notion, Markdown and plaintext, Zotero, Evernote, among others. Likewise, organizational structures are just as diverse - anyone here a fan of Zettelkasten?

Despite a couple of serious attempts, committing to the process for a few months each time, I've rarely found myself referring back to the stored information. More importantly, the process of adding to and maintaining the knowledge base felt more burdensome than beneficial. I've tried adjusting the content and format of what I'm storing in an attempt to make the experience more manageable, but to no avail.

My main motivation for exploring this further is my growing concern about my recollection ability as I age, and I'd like to fully exploit the available tools to counteract this.

So, for those of you who do have a functioning system that you use regularly - regardless of its simplicity or complexity - how do you employ it to retrieve information or enhance your understanding of topics? Insights into how your system operates would be useful, but are secondary for me at this point. I feel like I've read about all the possible configurations a system could have, yet I'm skeptical about the tangible benefits they can provide. I would be delighted to be proven wrong.

I keep everything on a wiki I run on a home server.

Over the decades, I think I've tried just about every method of maintaining my knowledge base, project notes, to-do lists, etc. And the only one that works even halfway decently for me is a wiki.

It's searchable, the simplicity of markup means I won't get side-tracked into wasting time on layout and eye candy, it's easy to search, if I have internet access then I can access it from anywhere, and the wiki I use allows simple embedded spreadsheets and other such functionality for more complex data.

Plus, it's very easy to allow others secure access to it for when I want to share notes, or keep notes that are updated by multiple people (such as when collaborating on a project), or to distribute very large files.

I use the Standard Notes[0] free tier. I organize notes with tags. I self-actualize things with my TODO, and everyone should do that. I'm often reminded of the phrase: 'Because I said I would'.

[0] https://standardnotes.com/

The secret sauce is orgmode in emacs.

My personal notes are a .org file that is backed up on a private GitHub repo.

I have sprawled about 5k lines at this point since around 2020.

Some things get a org-bullet (*) and a TODO.

Then I just do org-agenda and it pulls up a nice view of all my TODO items for pruning and prioritising.

Having an automatic agenda and the fact the bullets are tab-collapsible and can be used as an outliner is the only way my notes are not out of control.

My other writing is in apple notes (short lived) or exists in tickets. I’ve tried various things like zettlekasten and obsidian but nothing sticks for me.

My other daily task setting and personal planning is a bullet journal with a future log and monthly logs. Bullet journaling is how to get it all out and process and plan personal things. Actual Knowledge is in the org-mode.

For email I follow getting things done and have an inbox an @action and a @waiting folder. I keep inbox empty and the others get pruned every day.

I use Joplin and I am playing with emacs orgmode. So far Joplin has been a lot better at finding stuff I forgot about but knew a few letters that would be there (like ssh). I have many 1000s of notes; from emacs to notepad to ms docs to onenote to I forgot to Evernote to vim to notion to Joplin. And maybe back to the emacs. I use and have used it daily ; it makes me think clearer to write things down before implementing or discussing. I basically write down my mind voice to remember it verbatim.