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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?

#91

Post by tekacs »

I now use Notion (https://notion.so/, I'm not affiliated) to replace all of the below tools that I have used in the past.

- To do lists (prev. Org mode, OmniFocus, Things, many others)

- Bookmark lists (prev. raindrop.io, Pinboard, others)

- Kanban boards (prev. GitLab, Trello, others)

- Wikis (prev. MediaWiki, Confluence, TiddlyWiki, etc.)

- General notes (prev. my own tool, OneNote, Evernote, Simplenote, many others)

- Photos (I share using Notion and use Google Photos)

- Files (I share using Notion, but still use many services for this, including S3, Dropbox, GDrive, ...)

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

#92

Post by kowdermeister »

I don't find the lack of integration a problem. I use PushBullet as an inter-device-person tool to share stuff. Not perfect, but more than good enough.

  * To do lists/Reminders -> Google keep
  * Bookmark lists -> Chrome bookmarks (automatically synced, search works in content as well)
  * Kanban boards -> Trello
  * Wikis -> Nope
  * Financial tools -> Nothing
  * Calenders/Reminders -> Google calendar
  * Files on disk -> Total commander / Dropbox
  * General notes -> Asana
  * Music -> Google music
  * Videos -> YouTube
There's no real one platform beats all and in my opinion there won't be because there are so many things to get right that it takes a huge company and tons of resources to get it right.

Instead we have what we have today: lots of alternatives that act as replaceable parts of a bigger web. Luckily most of them have API-s and things like IFTTT and Zaiper exists.

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

#93

Post by tokenizerrr »

tekacs wrote: post #91

I now use Notion ( https://notion.so/ , I'm not affiliated) to replace all of the below tools that I have used in the past. - To do lists (prev. Org mode, OmniFocus, Things, many others) - Bookmark lists (prev. raindrop.io, Pinboard, others) - Kanban boards (prev. GitLab, Trello, others) - Wikis (prev. MediaWiki, Confluence, TiddlyWiki, etc.) - General notes (prev. my own tool, OneNote, Evernote, Simplenote, many oth…

I got excited for a moment, but then I saw Notion is only for Mac and also not self hosted. :(

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

#94

Post by tokenizerrr »

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #69
lucb1e wrote: post #52

Aside for scheduled items (they go in a calendar) and program-specific things (bookmarks go in Firefox), everything's a file. 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, regar…

How do you handle backups? I have a similar structure but on Google Drive (minus TODOs, for which I use Google Keep)

I have a similar-ish setup and use rsync.net. Ask for the HN discount.

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

#95

Post by tekacs »

tokenizerrr wrote: post #93
tekacs wrote: post #91

I now use Notion ( https://notion.so/ , I'm not affiliated) to replace all of the below tools that I have used in the past. - To do lists (prev. Org mode, OmniFocus, Things, many others) - Bookmark lists (prev. raindrop.io, Pinboard, others) - Kanban boards (prev. GitLab, Trello, others) - Wikis (prev. MediaWiki, Confluence, TiddlyWiki, etc.) - General notes (prev. my own tool, OneNote, Evernote, Simplenote, many oth…

I got excited for a moment, but then I saw Notion is only for Mac and also not self hosted. :(

It's a web app - the Mac app is only an Electron wrapper.

It works well on Windows/Mac/Linux/iOS/Android in the browser (I would know, I use it on all of those personally).

Self hosted would certainly be nice - I use their 'Export All' feature to keep a copy of my spaces for myself.

Incidentally I got lazy a while back and my very basic homepage (https://tekacs.com/) on the web is actually a redirect to a page on Notion (yes it requires JavaScript and doesn't SEO well, but amusingly I can update it in realtime whilst you're looking at it ;P)

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

#96

Post by lucb1e »

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #69
lucb1e wrote: post #52

Aside for scheduled items (they go in a calendar) and program-specific things (bookmarks go in Firefox), everything's a file. 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, regar…

How do you handle backups? I have a similar structure but on Google Drive (minus TODOs, for which I use Google Keep)

Yeah that has been an issue for years now.

I want encrypted, incremental, off-site backups with an open source client. That's basically it. Duplicity and a few other tools fit the bill, but contrary to what Duplicity seems to think, my SSD does not have >10 GB of spare storage that can be occupied permanently. Oh and prices of S3 or higher are ridiculous (even AWS Glacier is expensive compared to just hosting a hard drive at a friend's place), in that case I'd rather self-host it, so Tarsnap is out. And I'm not sure how much faith I have in backup projects that don't even claim to be stable like bup.

The requirements sound basic to me, but I've not found anything yet. I've started designing my own solution a while ago but ran into an issue with garbage collection on the server side (the old files kind of GC, like git has; not RAM). Perhaps I'll find some time to solve it, perhaps it'll remain an unsolved mystery for longer.

I've heard good stories about Tarsnap. If you have money to spend or if you can be very selective in what you backup (e.g. backup only documents/spreadsheets and not your whole SSD/hard drive), that might be a good option.

Duplicity is also great except it uses a lot of local state to determine which files it has already uploaded (at least, I'm guessing that's what it's for). Go for it if you can spare 1% of the backup size per incremental backup (yes, it accumulates).

My temporary solution is `sudo tar c / | gzip | openssl enc -aes-256-cbc | nc $server` or simply put: an encrypted zip file copied to my server. Not incremental so I don't do it regularly.

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

#99

Post by elorant »

I keep a detailed daily journal and every project gets its own journal with three separate documents. One to log progress, one for general notes and one for a to-do list. On the journal I write pretty much everything that I think needs further action. Then at the end of the day I move things from journal to the specialized lists/logs. It’s a lot of documents, that’s for sure, but it’s the only way I’ve found to keep everything tidy, especially since I enjoy working on multiple projects.

The journal I keep is on paper. I find that writing down helps me clarify things in my head. It works better than writing on a computer, perhaps because hand writing is a slower process and you get time to think things better.

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

#100

Post by codingdave »

One text file and one trello board.

I just throw in all my personal notes and to-dos in the text file. And remove them when things are taken care of. If it gets too crazy, I either get stuff done, or purge projects. LArger, long-term projects and pipe dreams go in the trello board.

Financial stuff runs automatically between direct deposit and auto-pay on bills. So I just put all mail or paperwork that show up on the desk in front of me, and if there are papers there, I do something about it, then put them in a filing cabinet.

Everything work-related goes into tracking systems at work.

So... just one text file, constantly open and with frequent edits, and a trello board I check out when I am caught up on things.

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