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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?

#251

Post by Leftium »

Taskpaper[1]: a simple text file that has conventions for tagging, search, filtering, etc.

I'm building an enhanced text editor that makes viewing/editing taskpaper files more convenient:

  - Interactive programmatic access via an embedded scripting console
  - GUI for creating/editing tasks and tags (like calendar widget, autocomplete)
  - Enhanced views, for example:
    - Calendar view
    - Priority view (automatically sorted by @due(DATE) tags)
    - Bookmarks view
    - HTML "linkified" view
  - Recurring tasks
Some other influences besides Taskpaper:

  - Bkmks [2]
  - Drafts app [3]
  - Simplenote [4]
  - Notational Velocity [5]
I originally tried to build an enhanced editor for Todo.txt files[6], but the format was too limiting.

[1]: http://www.taskpaper.com/

[2]: http://www.bkmks.com/

[3]: http://agiletortoise.com/drafts/

[4]: http://simplenote.com/

[5]: http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/

[6]: http://github.com/Leftium/todo.html

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

#252

Post by srpeck »

hypertexthero wrote: post #250
cloverich wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and keeps your information synchronized between them. Is the implication that the browser-based wiki is not storing your data on a central server (e.g. always synced) but should provide some other way to sync? (I'm working on something in this ballpark, genuine curiosity).

Yes. Something like: 1. Download and install a wiki application to each computer we use, including pocket ones. 2. Editing the wiki on each computer saves to offline local storage. 3. An option to define a personal central server is available in settings. If this is activated and our login credentials are set each app auto-syncs with server automatically whenever wifi is available or a 'sync' button on the top-right…

I created EncryptedGist [1][2] to cover part of this use case. It gets me Vim backed by GitHub Gists on any machine I happen to be working on. Adding localStorage would be easy [3], but undesirable for my main purpose - I do not want any of my personal information remaining on the machine.

Edit: And just in case it wasn't obvious, I prefer to maintain my todo list/logs/notes/projects/bookmarks in a single plaintext file. Grows about 30k lines/year. Vim search/grep and some basic structuring/naming conventions go a long way.

Top of the file is my todo list with priority order of top 3 tasks. Next is a 'Waiting For' list. Last is a 'Projects' list for longer term, high-level categories. This fits on a single screen. Completed tasks, meeting notes, logs, bookmarks, etc., go below in chronological order and are all associated with a date. This system has worked well for the last decade or so with minor changes.

[1] https://github.com/srpeck/encryptedgist

[2] HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12475070

[3] https://github.com/srpeck/encrypted

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

#253

Post by cryptomango »

apple's notes app - I just breakdown notes into 3 segments -> Learning, Task-List, and Finance.

My task-list is broken down into times and days like: Task List — AM - morning MD - midday PM - afternoon N - evening

Oct 25 • AM - send email for x

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

#254

Post by cscharenberg »

terheyden wrote: post #248
atmosx wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use tiddlywiki and I am very happy with it. Too bad dev has been discontinued though,

Discontinued? It has over 100 contributors, and the last stable release was two months ago ... I think it is very much alive: https://github.com/Jermolene/TiddlyWiki5

That's great news! I didn't know it was still actively developed. I played with it... criminy how many years ago did it first start? I liked it then but it was brittle and slow.

It looks great now, functionally and speed-wise. Obviously computers themselves changed a lot in that time to give the speed improvement.

Looking forward to playing with it again now.

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

#255

Post by smarterAvgBear »

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…

Have you tried zimwiki? http://zim-wiki.org/

* It's basically a collection of text files

* Uses a markdown like syntax

* Has built in git support, so you can use git for versioning and looking at edit history.

* There is a gui that let's you edit in wysiwyg style * Can link between pages

* Written in python, so pretty much runs anywhere (no proper android/ios app still though)

* Todo item support

* most importantly, it's open source

* plugin system so you can add functionality easily

I pretty much use this as a knowledge management, daily task tracking system. It has a journal plugin that essentially creates a files for each day, similar to what you are doing.

I have it for both work and personal stuff.

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

#256

Post by patrickdavey »

nextos wrote: post #225
palunon wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Do you know one that doesn't ?

Unfortunately, I don't. But I plan to write one soon.

Please do write it! What I love about vim is that it is (to me anyway) a DSL for editing a document. The language has verbs "delete, copy, change" and nouns (paragraph, document, line) etc. that you can learn and combine. So once you understand how the language works, you can do a huge amount with it.

I'd love to see a similar thing for emacs, outlining how it is supposed to be used and explored and fits together.

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

#257

Post by newfolder »

noir_lord wrote: post #157
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…

I do something similar but I gave up using org-mode (mostly because that was all I was using emacs for and I spent more time configuring the thing 'just so' than I did actually using it. Now I just keep everything in plain text and aliased it to 'tj' (todays journal). alias tj="touch ~/Dropbox/journal/$(date +%d-%m-%Y).org && code ~/Dropbox/journal/$(date +%d-%m-%Y).org" Effortless backups as well (and as a side bene…

The NSA are making backups of your backup. Double win.

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

#258

Post by mcovey »

I've never found one place to keep everything, so it goes into many different places. The only thing I need to remember is where everything is, which is a significantly shorter list than what everything is. I mainly use Fastmail.com, Pinboard.in, MEGA.nz, Lastpass.com, and InoReader.com. At work we use Google Drive a lot to share/edit.

If there was a service that could do email, calendars, contacts, notes, passwords, bookmarks, rss/atom feeds, file storage/sync, and document editing well and in an integrated fashion (at least all within the same interface), that would be great, but I doubt it will ever exist. Google has made all those things, but they don't offer any sort of combined solution and have about 3 different versions of notes/to-do/bookmarks, none of which are integrated with anything else.

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

#259

Post by falloutx »

mcovey wrote: post #258

I've never found one place to keep everything, so it goes into many different places. The only thing I need to remember is where everything is, which is a significantly shorter list than what everything is. I mainly use Fastmail.com, Pinboard.in, MEGA.nz, Lastpass.com, and InoReader.com. At work we use Google Drive a lot to share/edit. If there was a service that could do email, calendars, contacts, notes, passwords,…

> If there was a service that could do email, calendars, contacts, notes, passwords, bookmarks, rss/atom feeds, file storage/sync, and document editing well and in an integrated fashion (at least all within the same interface), that would be great.

I have been using hive.com[0] with my team for this one week, it doesn't do all of the things you mentioned, but it does put a lot of work stuff closer.

[0]https://hive.com/

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