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

Unscheduled todo goes into ~/todo.

Documents are in ~/d/org where org is the organization (school/company name). There are often subfolders, like subject name for school. Archive in ~/d/org/_archive/year. If a project is still running, it is still in the ~/d/org root, not in the archive, regardless of how many years it spans. I might sort by year inside that project folder if there are files ready for archiving.

Personal projects I generally sort by language (~/p/py; ~/p/php; ~/p/txt; etc.), for some reason that works well. Projects that I don't touch anymore (use nor expand) go into the archive folder (~/p/_archive). Maybe I should start sorting the archive by year as well, but it's not big enough to warrant that yet.

Collections like downloads, disk images, temporarily cloned git repositories, etc. go into separate folders, which makes them easy to manage and clean up. Unless they really belong with a project (code dependency) or cannot easily be re-downloaded, then they go in the project's folder.

https://nachapp.com

For anything which I can't figure out a way to tie to one of my current goals, a helpful general rule of thumb is that, it may not actually be that important to hold on to. There are of course exceptions, but they're few enough that a nice folder structure on my hard drive can catch the rest.

I've been using Pinboard for a while as a bookmark list, but find the lack of any structure beyond tags a bit limiting. Just feels like I'm dumping links for the sake of it and will never really end up referring to them again.

It's a non-linear graphical (in two senses of the word) knowledge management software that stores universal links to all of your stuff, local and in the cloud. It also does notes, tags, and script nodes (which can for example be used as alarms / reminders) and represents EVERYTHING as a great big graph.

The main UI element is a TableTop, which is also just a node in the graph that acts as a visual slice through it. Nodes (normal and other TableTops) can live on any number of TableTops.

Non-nerd users can see the TableTops as an infinite number of large work tables with your de-duplicated documents on them.

I have to work on the TL;DR. I also have to work on not rewriting the prototype every few months. :)

1) there is no single tool to track all of the things I track in a single place 2) the one-thing-well method is still my favorite (one tool tracking one thing well) 3) the plain text approach is the only serious future-proof approach (I also couple this with commandline-only tools)

That said:

* todo = taskwarrior

* time = timewarrior

* bookmarks = buku

* finances = ledger

* configs = git

* notes = restructuredtext

* gym = csv

I also couple these data with some other tools, including: Vim with RestructuredText support, Zsh with TaskWarrior/TimeWarrior shortcuts, Google Docs to have gym CSV on the phone, etc.

- Spurn ~. It generally gets cluttered with machine specific stuff.

- The primary goal is to preserve knowledge.

- The data should be easily readable in 20 years time on hw/sw not yet invented.

My 'digital life' goes in its own folder (eg /foobar), which is Syncthing'ed around to various machines, and backed up periodically. It's very big, and contains a snapshot of 'everything' I want to preserve.

Cron run various scripts to pull data from multiple services (e.g. Pinboard, DayOne, etc) so if they ever go down, I have the data I created on them.

I segment documents and projects that I create / work on from those I've just downloaded to use. This results in a fairly simple top level folder structure:

- docs: Documents and textual data

- dev: Projects, design work, development etc

- external: External tools, software, etc

- media: mostly video/audio

Projects of course do live in their own git repos.

Tools:

- Emacs org mode for notes, todos, etc (best in class)

- DayOne for journaling and notes while mobile (integrated with org notes)

- Pinboard bookmarks

I'm not a huge fan of using fancy project management software tools, because fashions change, tools go out of date, data gets lost etc. Straightforward text files for most things is the best combination of usability and persistence for me. Wikis are great, but suffer from this - they need maintaining, software needs updating, the database format could change, etc. A bit of work to get a text based system going is totally worth it ;).