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

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

#141

Post by tytrin » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 2:24 PM UTC

I have found that using a Bullet Journal ( a nice pen and paper solution) I can cover my Calendar, Tasks, and even general notes rather well. You can find instruction here: http://bulletjournal.com/ , but the best part is that it will work with any notebook you have lying around!

For Kanban's, I have used Trello, but got a little annoyed. I recently found this personal Kanban project: https://github.com/greggigon/my-personal-kanban It's use is very simple, and I find that it works well for me. A little difficult to share among a group though.

Finally for All the rest of my documentation: Keepnote http://keepnote.org/ This glorious little tool handled nearly anything you can throw at it. It supports Windows and Linux ( I am not certain about Mac), and it is search-able. I have used it from all my work related notes, specifically for debugging solutions, like Binding Exceptions in Telerik.

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

#142

Post by threepipeproblm » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 2:25 PM UTC

marktangotango wrote: post #81

WWKong wrote: post #5

After years of failed attempts I gave up trying to organize everything and started to brutally eliminate most of it. It has been pretty liberating.

I found that my bookmark lists, to do's, notes, personal project plans, everything went stale after a time anyway, if not acted upon. It something wasn't important enough to read, study, or develop, then it really wasn't that important. Thus letting it all go was much more palatable.

Exactly. I see bookmarks as a kind of todo now, which completely changed the way I organize them. (I do have a single folder called "reference" but I almost never go in there).

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

#143

Post by bpicolo » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 2:26 PM UTC

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…

This looks great! I've been trying out Airtable recently (also great...very similar homepage too) but this might fill in a few gaps for me. Thanks!

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

#144

Post by bpicolo » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 2:27 PM UTC

postscapes1 wrote: post #123

I have been using a service called Airtable.com (no affiliation) lately to organize tasks and projects. It is like Google spreadsheet and Trello made babies in my book when you utilize it's ability to add filtered Views and connect and link data across tables. Attachments from other services, calendar views and ability to do low level formulas are other standout features imho and it just seems to fit how I actually t…

+1 for Airtable. It's a great service to use.

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

#145

Post by PaulHoule » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 2:27 PM UTC

Elasticsearch

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

#146

Post by prophesi » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 2:28 PM UTC

csdreamer7 wrote: post #74

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?

I haven't used it with very large files (100mb pdf is the largest thus far), but I've had problems with making sure every client has the same version. SyncThing doesn't sync with those using a different major version, and some SyncThing wrappers aren't as good as others with keeping itself up-to-date.

This resulted in a merge conflict with a large KeePassX db file x_x

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

#147

Post by pavs » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 2:28 PM UTC

  * Asciidoctor - for Notes, snippets, documents, Projects.
  * SublimeText + Material Theme + Plantasks for daily to do and journal. (synced through dropbox)
  * Wunderlist - For grocery shopping list

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

#148

Post by Bartweiss » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 2:29 PM UTC

WWKong wrote: post #5

After years of failed attempts I gave up trying to organize everything and started to brutally eliminate most of it. It has been pretty liberating.

I've taken to using bookmarks as an 'aging' chamber. I used to plan on "going through" my bookmarks, which was an imposition. A this point, I bookmark interesting-looking things I don't want to read presently.

If they're still interesting later, they get read. If not - and this is maybe 80% - they get deleted. Storage is easy, so it's pretty satisfying to keep things and just not worry about deleting them later instead of organizing.

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

#149

Post by jordanlev » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 2:29 PM UTC

I've given up on task-specific tools -- because of both lack of structural flexibility and lack of data portability (several computers at home and work, mobile devices, family members you need to share a list with). Now it's all just text files in dropbox, with the occasional Excel spreadsheet for budget/money stuff.

Over time I've figured out a good organizational system (folder hierarchy) that makes sense to me so I know where to find things when I need them.

The "safety" of plain text files feels good to me for such personal / important data (after years of trying different apps/services, only to have them go out of business or cease development or not work on a different platform or have sketchy privacy policies).

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

#150

Post by gcr » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 2:32 PM UTC

erelde wrote: post #132

gcr wrote: post #90

Honestly, I just keep everything in a journal. I have a folder called "daypages" in my dropbox. Each day in my life becomes a file in this folder. Today's is "daypages/2016-10-26.org" That's about it. I don't really organize by project much. Each day typically covers the tasks that I intend to get done that day, along with places I've been / friends I've met. The occasional tearful journal entry punctuates the otherw…

PSA: if you like a thrill, don't do backups of your journal.

You monster. :-)

Backing up a folder of daypages is easy though. Backing up a cloud service like Evernote or Trello sounds more difficult...