Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

1) The system isn’t just “the wiki” or “Notion”. The system is composed of both the tools you’re using AND the habits/expectations of the humans who use them. So, this is not just a matter of buying a tool. Its a matter of choosing tools AND designing a process made of humans habits.

2) The system will get messy and unused unless there is regular attention & time allocated to tidying it.

3) If you want people to do something, recognise and incentivize it. If there is a person who habitually sends out concise notes after meetings, make sure that their performance review recognizes that contribution.

4) A habit has three parts: {:situation, :action, :reward}

Example:

Situation: At the end of a retrospective meeting, we have learned of a need for a runbook on how to handle a type of automated alert.

Action: The team lead updates a runbook and tags a junior engineer to review it for missing context.

Reward: The team lead feels satisfaction that they’ve set their team up for future success. They add a bullet point to the notes to use during their next annual review.

We have since switched to Nuclino (https://www.nuclino.com/) and are pretty happy so far. Refreshingly simple, lightweight, and focused on getting the essential features right. We are now moving away from Google Docs as well and trying to consolidate all knowledge in Nuclino. It's almost perfect for our needs, only a few nice-to-have integrations are missing (and will hopefully be added soon).

Finding the right tool is only half the battle though, getting people to actually use it and keep the content up-to-date is usually the real challenge. Switching to a more user-friendly tool certainly helps, but it isn't enough to create a culture of documentation.

To organize and share our knowledge at work, we use the project management tool we developed: https://en.beesbusy.com

We create projects and tasks for specific topics and use comments for updates. And for more complete information, we can add a link to shared documents or an attachment. For instance, we created processes templates that can be updated and duplicated.

I find it very useful because knowledge is then organized in a workflow perspective: for instance, our product roadmap information is updated by everyone on a daily basis.

Since Beesbusy can be used for any type of project and has a mobile app, I also use it to organize my personal life. I share projects with my wife (shopping list, travel plans and so on) and I have everything in one place.

I would also recommend using a wiki for in-depth information. We use the Gitlab wiki for its simplicity, and we add links to its pages from our Beesbusy tasks.