25+ years of personal knowledge management

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There is a solution between these extremes, which is:

Store all the data you want, but make a document stating clearly what is worth keeping after you pass on, and how to access it. Then just update the doc once a year.

IANAL, but this is standard advice a lawyer will give you when drafting a will/estate plan.

Nice reflection over personal data management. I can relate to several moments. I agree specially with one thing: that a good file naming convention is essential and is perhaps the most fundamental piece of data management in conjunction with a wisely chosen folder structure. ISO8601 is perhaps the most important standard in this regard, but I often used the compressed version YYYYMMDD (instead of YYYY-MM-DD), followed by _ and whatever descriptor is suitable.

But as others have already written I have overtime become less and less keen to keeping a lot of stuff. My family knows where the important documents are (say, for valuable inheritable stuff). Digital photos live in an external hard drive. Other things worth keeping for posterity like books, articles, letters, notes etc that may have intellectual, historical or emotional value for others can be kept in a less than 32 Gb external drive.

The rest is just ephemeral dust or electrons ... as perhaps we all are after all :-)

It's pretty much a media thing here, too. I've never heard anyone use it in normal conversation.

I love this! I'm exactly like the author except a little less organized.

Some of my insights just to add to this: 1) I started curating existing collections to delete/cut down size. So I have a tv shows folder and I made a _cut folder and moved every show that I wasn't sure if I liked or if it was something I wanted to keep. This left the main folder with only my _absolute favorite_ shows.

2) I use sqlite for movie/tv/music/game/bookmarks databases and i try to combine data from different sources so like I combine imdb and boxofficemojo data in one sqlite db so that I know how many theaters every movie opened in and the rest of the info like actors/director/etc.

3) I make websites with lists and/or "collections" of the movies/things I like the most, and my personal stuff like code. That way I have to select and curate all of the items so that they are organized and accessible. Making a website is like publishing so can't publish drafts or half-finished stuff. Making a website for something really helps finishing the organization and collating all the disparate info.

4) Scraping info for all new movies/games/tv shows into the sqlite db's. Website for searching/browsing based on genre/whatever, and having the info locally (no third party).

5) Only publishing working code without any cruft to github. Makes it so I know every single commit in the commit history works and there is no need to organize everything since it was already organized and "fixed" when commiting. Also is essentially ALL code that I care to keep (I have a lot more "work in progress" code locally but that doesn't matter, only the published finished code matters), and of course local clone of all the repos.

6) I have a text file with all my command line one liners, tweaks and tricks for linux and/or website things but this is the one area where I am less organized. I don't externalize all the things I "know" as much, but I want to. I use my own memory for most things like that but would be nice to have a knowledge graph of some kind - looking into Obsidian.

Anyway great post.