Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

25+ years of personal knowledge management

dsebastien.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 72 posts

Re: 25+ years of personal knowledge management

#21

Post by rcarmo »

There’s a lot about this I can relate to (mind mapping, 20+ years of notes on a wiki at https://taoofmac.com, hierarchical, date-based storage of photos, building a personal CRM, etc.) but I have to question how much of it all is actually _useful_ and not, well, just packrat instincts that add so much background noise it dilutes any ability to actually find things.

search technology, in particular, seems to have failed us. Searching the Internet and our personal computers peaked sometime in the mid-2010s and has become steadily worse (witness Spotlight and it’s Linux and Windows counterparts). Contextual and topic searching has become “premium”. Finding an e-mail in your native language about taxes in 2016 would be impossible if, well, it wasn’t in “Personal/Finance/2016” — because there is just no way I can tell Siri (for instance) to find it for me, even if it was written in English.

And that’s the _easy_ part. Photos are a problem, too. I have an offline copy of everything filed by date, but have tried iCloud, Google, OneDrive, etc. Tagging people in photos is a challenge, and having weird, creepy “memories” reminders from any of those services popping up unprompted (and often mis-matched) makes me think nobody cracked that yet.

I do believe that we can do better than plaintext notes, but (at least so far) Zettelkasten and Obsidian aren’t it, either (I don’t get why Obsidian doesn’t leverage standard front matter, for instance, or why folder names can’t really be used as namespaces).

Re: 25+ years of personal knowledge management

#22

Post by poisonborz »

This post is also me! From time to time such pieces emerge on HN, some examples:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26269832
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29692087
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25623010
I'm actually also halfway writing one! Two remarks:

- It's really interesting to see strategies, but the overarching themes are often mixed up in a subjective soup. All sentences begin with "I" and this is understandable, but it's harder to grasp this angle. More constructive, one could separate better known general topics like "personal media/memory keeping", "mind/thought mapping/notes", "data hoarding/sorting (for general media)".

- On the other hand I'd also love to read a research/analysis on such articles. What are the general ways on how users approach digital data management, how do people juggle between these topics above? I wonder if a holistic view on this is possible, without the subjective decisions and narrativizing elements. I feel there is a niche between best practices (strategy given a specific scenarios) and personal stories (how I distilled it to my life).

Re: 25+ years of personal knowledge management

#23

Post by bachmeier »

If the author is reading this, please remove the fixed menu at the top. Eats a ton of space on a small screen and makes reading unpleasant.

This is more about data management than knowledge management. I'm the opposite of the author. I have little interest in archiving all my data. Not that there's anything wrong with it if that's your thing.

Re: 25+ years of personal knowledge management

#24

Post by dSebastien »

poisonborz wrote: post #22

This post is also me! From time to time such pieces emerge on HN, some examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26269832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29692087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25623010 I'm actually also halfway writing one! Two remarks: - It's really interesting to see strategies, but the overarching themes are often mixed up in a subjective soup. All sentences begin with "I" and thi…

I wrote the article.

Great points, there's indeed a lot of subjectivity in this one. I decided to keep it that way because I cared as much about writing down my story (and diving back into my memories) as explaining a bit how I managed to keep my sanity (to some extent ).

I intend to write more articles on the subject, diving deeper into each topic.

Re: 25+ years of personal knowledge management

#25

Post by 8fingerlouie »

I've long since "given up" organizing my files.

I was a long time user of one or more NAS boxes (first was a Synology DS101g+), and ran everything self hosted up until 3-5 years ago.

These days i just throw everything in the cloud, using Cryptomator[1] for privacy where applicapable, and everything else lives on a Mac Mini at home with a couple of USB drives attached, whose main purpose is backing up the cloud data. It also acts as a local server for media files, but i don't "hoard" as many files to confuse Plex enough that it can't figure it out.

For photos, i use whatever format Apple Photos use. I keep 300k photos in there, and it serves it up happily, and allows me to search fast enough by dates/locations and to some extent content.

While i'm "too old" to buy into Spotify/Apple Music/Whatever, and still purchase all music i listen to, i do buy it from iTunes, and i let iTunes handle the organization. I simply backup the data (only music, as movies have DRM, so no point in backing it up)

For mail/calendar i also just use the standard MacOS/iOS mail client.

All of the above "works". It gives me a searchable interface to whatever i want to find, without me having to bother too much about how it's stored. Of course i organize files in folders/directories by content/purpose, but beyond that i don't do much sorting.

The only place where i still struggle to find a good workflow is for note taking. While i don't write many notes, i do take notes every day, but working from multiple locations, with different computers, and not being able to use the same cloud solutions across home and work networks, i find it difficult to find a "one true source" approach to digital note taking.

I'm currently using a RocketBook[2] for notetaking, which is essentially an erasable/reusable notebook that supports easily scanning and archiving the page thanks to a unique QR code on every page, along with a "checkbox" that specifies where the note should be filed (email, OneNote, EverNote, etc). It also does OCR, and supports sending my sometimes illegible handwriting as a PDF along with the OCR attempt.

[1] https://cryptomator.org/

[2] https://getrocketbook.com/

Re: 25+ years of personal knowledge management

#26

Post by dSebastien »

ffwd wrote: post #20

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/t…

I'm the OP.

Glad you liked the article

Thanks for sharing your approach, very interesting! You went way farther with the movie/TV/music/game/bookmarks management, that's super cool.

At some point I went batshit crazy with automation and actually automated scraping, downloading of episodes, tracking of what I saw and did not. But over time I just let it all go because I didn't have the buffer to maintain all that anymore.

I omitted various things because I got tired; the article was way too long already

Re: 25+ years of personal knowledge management

#27

Post by dSebastien »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #25

I've long since "given up" organizing my files. I was a long time user of one or more NAS boxes (first was a Synology DS101g+), and ran everything self hosted up until 3-5 years ago. These days i just throw everything in the cloud, using Cryptomator[1] for privacy where applicapable, and everything else lives on a Mac Mini at home with a couple of USB drives attached, whose main purpose is backing up the cloud data.…

OP here.

Thanks for sharing some ideas!

Over time I also reduced my time investment in all this. As years pass, we realize more and more clearly that our time is limited :)

Regarding note taking and your issue with having a single source of truth, you might be interested in the ideas I've shared on Reddit a few days ago [1]

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/PersonalKnowledgeMgmt/comments/tugn...

Re: 25+ years of personal knowledge management

#28

Post by dSebastien »

VariableStar wrote: post #16

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), follow…

Excellent points.

Ephemeral dust or electrons. I love that

Re: 25+ years of personal knowledge management

#29

Post by dSebastien »

10729287 wrote: post #6
zabzonk wrote: post #2

> digital native Don't know what that is. But I do know that saving everything is just piling up problems for your children. My Dad died 7 years ago, and left behind an astounding amount of data and programs on CD, VHS, hard drives etc. My two brothers, who were his executors (I was not doing well mentally at the time), looked at each other and said: "Shall we go through all this?", "No". And it went on a bonfire - p…

Frenchie here. Digital natives is a word we were always taught is en-US. Fun to read that you doesn't know it as a international user. Typical french startup bullshit ? This depict children born in 80s, 90s and supposedly comfortable with computer work and data as they were born amongst them.

OP here.

I'm French speaking as well. It's indeed surprising; I thought this would be understood by everyone ;-)

Re: 25+ years of personal knowledge management

#30

Post by dSebastien »

zabzonk wrote: post #2

> digital native Don't know what that is. But I do know that saving everything is just piling up problems for your children. My Dad died 7 years ago, and left behind an astounding amount of data and programs on CD, VHS, hard drives etc. My two brothers, who were his executors (I was not doing well mentally at the time), looked at each other and said: "Shall we go through all this?", "No". And it went on a bonfire - p…

Interesting take. I did not think about the burden I'd leave behind.

TBH this is easily solved by documenting what matters/is valuable and what isn't. But yeah, good point. Truth be told, most of the stuff I've collected really only matters to me. Most bits and bytes can be destroyed as soon as I'll be gone :p

Post reply on HN