Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 272 posts

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

#41

Post by galfarragem »

For the bulk of my personal organization (file organization, note taking and todo lists):

https://github.com/galfarragem/hamster-gtd

My stack is becoming simpler as I declutter my life. On last update, I quitted Evernote and my notes are now managed on a text editor. I still use other tools for:

- collaboration (Trello, Slack, Gmail)

- finances (Spreadsheet: informal balance sheet updated every quarter).

- RSS (Feedly)

- image references (Pinterest: images with searchable descriptions. Unfortunately their search engine is bad, worse than Evernote's)

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

#42

Post by pavlov »

DrNuke wrote: post #39

I have a 16GB iPad, about 12GB available. I keep all I really need within 6GB and remove the dead wood weekly. It is still a few thousand documents but, alas, I am fully in control.

...alas, I am fully in control.

Great existential touch there with the "alas"! I'm now picturing you as the Hamlet of personal task management.

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

#43

Post by wuschel »

As simple as possible, no "dashboards" needed :)

-- Calendar for events e.g. Google Calendar

-- GoogleMail with its task function for emails

-- one file for yearly, quartely and weekly goals

-- a normal file structure, with a README in each respective project folder, all literature, documents contacts, work, etc

-- one hard copy lab book for conceptual work.

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

#44

Post by peterfisher »

* white sheets of printer paper for drawings and sketching out ideas * evernote for storing everything long term. from photos of notes, typed notes, and drawing made with iPad. (i have about 3000 notes going back to 2008) * omnifocus for todos * google calendar for events/meetings * simplenote/notational velocity for anything which doesn't need to stick around but needs to be recorded quickly

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

#45

Post by timeout27 »

http://freeplane.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page Freeplane - mind maps

I've used txt files/folders, then excell/word, then markdown (easy to write & read), and wiki. Then I found freeplane, started to play with it and never got out, its incredible: use plain text or html (to format your notes), insert images, links to external files/folders, the visual mind-map representation gives a great overview of your notes and lets you organize in a foldable tree (branches, parents, childs) your notes (like in deeper layers of detail).

After the initial text/html nodes, branches and folds, I started to use "styles" to add icons and automatically format certain nodes with a background color (ex: TODO=yellow backgrnd, DONE=green backgrnd, PROBLEM=red backgrnd, ...)

Never really got into other freeplane features such as "notes" view or node-attributes. But it all went up to another level when I discovered that its possible to create http://www.freeplane.org/wiki/index.php/Scripting:_Other_lan... freeplane-scripts (in groovy or java or javascript, or any other JSR 223 language like Ruby). And using freeplane-script I started to make my own scripts, to automate repetitive tasks and improve its behaviour for my needs.

Why is freeplane better than the others methods I tried before? It organizes knowledge in a foldable tree, that gets bigger and bigger over time, and after a few years, its just easy to "find" in the notes. It also performs quite well (my maps are huge, huge, years old huge)

Have a look and decide for yourself.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=freeplane

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

#46

Post by dangom »

patrickdavey wrote: post #33
diegoprzl wrote: post #10

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.

The transition couldn't be easier with Spacemacs:

http://spacemacs.org/ https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs

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

#47

Post by [deleted] »

patrickdavey wrote: post #33
diegoprzl wrote: post #10

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.

[deleted]

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

#48

Post by nithinr6 »

I've a Trello personal board with To-do, Doing, Done lists along with a 'To read/watch/listen'. I send everything interesting that I see to the To Read list and once I finish going through an item, if it's interesting enough to be saved for later, I send them to Pocket and tag it appropriately. I've a special tag called 'Toolkit' to save frameworks and other techniques that I cross-tag with other generic tags. I also add notes for videos, podcasts etc as comments.

Right now my Trello board is organised based on the work I need to do for a week. I haven't really experimented with changing this frequency though as it pretty much works for me now. And a lot of times, I need to sub divide my weekly tasks and for that I use checklists. When needed, I create separate reminders for these sub tasks using the Reminders app(primarily because it is super fast and syncs well across my devices).

When I need to look for something, I first use Spotlight to search for it as it can search across all of these apps. Works most of time, but I have to search individual apps for better results at times.

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

#49

Post by lucb1e »

laxatives wrote: post #24

* Emacs org mode to prep for meetings, maintain TODO lists, and general notes * Also keep Slack open when I am working. If someone needs something, they can ping me on Slack and I will be available within 5-30 minutes. * Gmail stars for everything I can't address immediately. Everything else is dealt with immediately and inbox count is 0 for most of the day (both work and personal addresses). * Iphone calendar (with…

> * Iphone calendar (with alarms) for everything I am putting off for later or need to schedule/remember

Any particular reason you mention "Iphone" calendar and notes, is there something special about them? Or will any old calendar (with alarms) and notepad app work and does the brand name not matter?

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

#50

Post by nazgob »

There was a great thread some time ago on HN about PKB (personal knowledge base). You might find there a lot of info. It prompted me to look for new solutions, I made a good progress but I'm still not happy. The best thing I use and can recommend is TiddlyWiki. I keep it in Dropbox so I can access it on mobile.
Post reply on HN