Ask HN: How do you organise/integrate all the information in your life?

Hello fellow HNers,

How do you organise your life/work/side projects/todo lists/etc in an integrated way?

We have:

  * To do lists/Reminders
  * Bookmark lists
  * Kanban boards
  * Wikis
  * Financial tools
  * Calenders/Reminders
  * Files on disk
  * General notes
  * ...

However, there must be a better way to get an 'integrated' view on your life? ToDo list managers suck at attaching relevant information; wikis can't do reminders; bookmarks can't keep track of notes and thoughts; etc, and all the above are typically not crosslinked easily, and exporting data for backup/later consumption is hit and miss from various services.

So far, I've found a wiki to be almost the most flexible in keeping all manner of raw information kind of organised, but lacks useful features like reminders, and minimal tagging support, no easy way to keep track of finances, etc.

I understand 'best tool for the job', but there's just so...many...

> life/work (...) in an integrated way?

I like to keep them separate.

A Wiki (http://dynalon.github.io/mdwiki/#!index.md) works great for my work related stuff, while org-mode (http://orgmode.org/) works for everything else.

After years of failed attempts I gave up trying to organize everything and started to brutally eliminate most of it. It has been pretty liberating.

OneNote + Outlook works okay for what you're asking, but I have a hard time sticking with it because the interface isn't well-refined.

I like OneNote a lot more than I like Outlook, but the integration is reasonably good. You can create tasks from OneNote that give you reminders in Outlook, which link back to the rich-text "source material."

There are mobile frontends available:

http://orgmode.org/manual/MobileOrg.html