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

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

#71

Post by akerro »

I have nextCloud with Calendar, Contacts and Tasks plugins. I have my meetings, schedules, todo-lists. It contains a lot of different types of lists, like washing, shopping, todo, list of ideas, contact birthdays, I've go dozens of it. It really works, I have reminders, notes, scheduling, tasks, progress meters.

I sync most important files between 3-5 devices with Syncthing. Devices are small and portable, 2x laptop, raspberry pi, netbook, I'm going to replace it with external drive connected to my Omnia Turris soon.

I have a few external drives with photos, music, films I liked, everything is evaporating online, torrent trackers are disappearing, content on Netflix is expensive and getting worse and worse, so I 'data-hoard' everything and backup at least twice once per month.

Like a year ago I opened a spredhseet where I log all my bills and it works for me as financial database, ~20 categories of expenses, each has some subcategories.

  * Kanban boards
 Yellow sticky notes on a fridge.

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

#72

Post by nextos »

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.

It's not as difficult as it seems. Actually I'd say that if you already know GNU Readline shortcuts (which are very helpful on e.g. Bash), it's an afternoon of work to learn the basics.

The problem is that most tutorials depict emacs as a bag of keyboard shortcuts. But in reality, there are some simple principles that are quite understandable.

And org-mode is so underappreciated. You can turn it into anything. I use it as a wiki and a kanban board. And it's amazing.

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

#74

Post by csdreamer7 »

rmhsilva wrote: post #60

I have a few principles: - 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 pre…

Slightly unrelated, how has SyncThing worked? Any corruptions with large files? Especially video files?

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

#78

Post by rcarmo »

Up until recently, I used a Mac for everything, so everything was on the native services:

  * To do lists/Reminders - macOS reminders
  * Bookmark lists - Safari bookmarks
  * Kanban boards - Trello
  * Wikis - http://taoofmac.com (https://github.com/rcarmo/sushy for the engine source)
  * Financial tools - Numbers or Excel
  * Calendars/Reminders - macOS Calendar
  * Files on disk - Dropbox + a NAS
  * General notes - Evernote (now OneNote)
  * Mindmaps - Mindnode (works great on iOS)
  * Photos - NAS
These days I have to use a PC at work (I'm at Microsoft), so a few things changed:

  * I left Evernote around 6 months prior to switching jobs because the app was becoming useless and migrated everything across to OneNote (which was free anyway). That gave me:
     * To-dos
     * Notes
     * Blog drafts (I wish it did Markdown, but...)
     * Occasional web clipping I want to keep beyond Pocket.
  * I started using Pocket more to bookmark stuff I'd want to follow up at home or on the move
  * I started using Chrome more (thought about Firefox, realized that Chrome also kept extensions synced the way I like it. Would switch if I could set up a private sync backend)
  * I started using OneDrive alongside Dropbox at home (I don't run Dropbox on my work laptop, but some files I might need at work like school schedules and stuff go on OneDrive)
  * Trello was replaced for work purposes by Office 365 Groups (works pretty well)
  * My NAS now backs up nightly to Azure
  * I use Outlook for work calendars, iOS to access everything (Outlook on iOS is pretty good and has its own isolated calendar, which suits me fine)
Mindmaps, reminders and to-dos are always with me on my iPhone (both work and leisure), so no need to sync them. My personal wiki only has public stuff and doubles as my blog, so the copious amount of public references I amass (see http://taoofmac.com/space/infoviz, http://taoofmac.com/space/dev/Python) is still useful regardless.

In general, I don't mix work and personal stuff (OneNote is an exception because it can _access_ different notebooks, but they're on two separate accounts. I generally access my "Shopping" notebook at work to check on to-dos and add stuff, then close it).

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

#79

Post by mattbgates »

I created https://mypost.io/ for myself which is a web content creation tool and lets you put up a web page on the Internet in seconds. I find it handy when I'm with clients and I'm writing a list of things they want. I can use it as a checklist and later on, go back and delete it if I don't need it anymore. I have used it for demonstration webpages or just to keep track of projects I'm working on or to-do lists or for brainstorming. I even built in a feature that keeps a list of all your saved URLs so you can return back to them at any time. If I am working with a few people on a project, I just share the URL and give them the password and they can work on it as well. Definitely useful. And yeah, it's a free tool.

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

#80

Post by ews »

After trying many different options, I am sticking with org-mode (encrypted with ELPA) + dropbox or syncthing for now. I schedule weekly sessions (usually on Sundays) to sort out all information, check if my TODO items are done or blocked and make sure all my tagging is consistent.

Only exception is when I am on the go and I want to take quick notes on my phone. For this I use google keep, making the notes sticky until I am in front of any of my laptops and dump the note into org mode again.

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