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

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31–40 of 272 posts

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

#32
A lot of the changes I've made to my personal information architecture have to do with avoiding getting stuck on the things I don't need to worry about yet. I've tried to make personal wikis many times, for example, but the friction is too high. I do want more of a "searchable database" for my stuff, still.

* Calendar as overarching to-do, covering errands, appointments, blocks of "do this work". Sometimes I follow it closely, other days it is largely a suggestion.

* Mindmapping to collect notes, outlines, brainstorm. Lately I've used Coggle [0] for its easy sharing. When I need to add details, the nodes may grow into Gdocs links.

* "Scratch" text file when I just need to jot work things down and I really don't care about the organization yet. If it becomes more lasting I tend to move towards the other tools.

* Trello[1] when I want to cut out more discrete tasks over a longer period and log their status.

* Riot.im[2] to talk to myself. This is something new I'm trying, which is that I can start a conversation without having someone in the room yet, by thinking "out loud". Then I can subsequently invite people in to continue it. A tiny nudge in context that distinguishes it from dumping a text document on someone.

[0] https://coggle.it

[1] https://trello.com

[2] https://riot.im

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

#33

Emacs. - Todo lists and reminders. org-agenda. - Bookmark lists. org-capture and org-protocol. - Kanban boards. I don't use this, but kanban.el. - Wiki. Org-mode files and grep/ag with helm. - Financial tools. ledger. - Calendar/reminders. Org-agenda. - Files on disk. dired, org-mode. - General notes. Org-mode. - Literate programming. org-babel. - Mail. mu4e. - rss. elfeed, gnus, or rss2email. - git. magit. - irc. er…

Org-Mode is the one thing that makes me want to move from vim to emacs.. but I just don't feel like investing the time in getting proficient with emacs at this stage.

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

#34

Out of curiosity, is anyone interested in some sort of app for this purpose? Like, organizing references to all your other data, thoughts, relationships. I'm not sure how it would work - just thinking about it right now.

Yesterday I've discovered Airtable, you might wanna check that out if you need something like this.

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

#35

Emacs. - Todo lists and reminders. org-agenda. - Bookmark lists. org-capture and org-protocol. - Kanban boards. I don't use this, but kanban.el. - Wiki. Org-mode files and grep/ag with helm. - Financial tools. ledger. - Calendar/reminders. Org-agenda. - Files on disk. dired, org-mode. - General notes. Org-mode. - Literate programming. org-babel. - Mail. mu4e. - rss. elfeed, gnus, or rss2email. - git. magit. - irc. er…

Can you set up phone alarms/reminders with org-agenda or something similar?

I can think of two easy solutions. One would be to synchronize Google Calendar and org-agenda and let Google Calendar manage the alarms/reminders in the phone. This already exists.

The other solution would be to develop an app which polls emacs/org-mode for alarms/reminders. AFAIK this doesn't exist but it would be pretty easy to make.

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

#37
I use vimwiki for most things (in Dropbox), you can keep todo lists etc. in there. I'm moving towards a per-project wiki as well. I built a horrible hacky android app which hooks into any of the "sharing" menus which just appends a link into my wiki, so that's quite handy.

For email, I've really been enjoying Google Inbox, the ability to sleep items is nice, and the reminder function is quite a handy TODO list of sorts.

But mainly it's the vimwiki for me.

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

#38

Emacs. - Todo lists and reminders. org-agenda. - Bookmark lists. org-capture and org-protocol. - Kanban boards. I don't use this, but kanban.el. - Wiki. Org-mode files and grep/ag with helm. - Financial tools. ledger. - Calendar/reminders. Org-agenda. - Files on disk. dired, org-mode. - General notes. Org-mode. - Literate programming. org-babel. - Mail. mu4e. - rss. elfeed, gnus, or rss2email. - git. magit. - irc. er…

Great solution!

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

#40

Emacs. - Todo lists and reminders. org-agenda. - Bookmark lists. org-capture and org-protocol. - Kanban boards. I don't use this, but kanban.el. - Wiki. Org-mode files and grep/ag with helm. - Financial tools. ledger. - Calendar/reminders. Org-agenda. - Files on disk. dired, org-mode. - General notes. Org-mode. - Literate programming. org-babel. - Mail. mu4e. - rss. elfeed, gnus, or rss2email. - git. magit. - irc. er…

Org-Mode is the one thing that makes me want to move from vim to emacs.. but I just don't feel like investing the time in getting proficient with emacs at this stage.

You can try Emacs with evil (extensible vi layer). It's still a major time investment though.
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