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

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161–170 of 272 posts

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

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

It's funny - I had the same insight and decided on the opposite solution. Many of bookmarks are an 'aging' zone, where content sits around until I'm bored and interested in reading it, or decide it no longer looks appealing and delete it. Things like speculative HN articles go there, and 90% of them become irrelevant while the other 10% become more appealing. I also have a reference folder for bookmarks, which I trea…

Yes, interesting how the same insight can lead to different approaches.

I used to work with a guy whose desktop was a complete mess and he would never try to organize the chaos. He had high screen res and it would take him a minute or two to find something on his desktop but he could do it. Then when it got full he would take the entire thing and paste it into a new top-level folder, called "old desktops". Of course this included his old old desktops folders, recursively. So the old desktops hierarchy became like archeological strata for everything he had ever done.

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

#163
My workflow:

Evernote (coupled with a ScanSnap document scanner) ->

  Documents
  Financial Statements
  Contracts
  Receipts
  Code snippets
  Infrastructure notes
  Invoices / POs / other financial docs
Google Apps ->

  Email
  Calendar
  Bookmarks (Chrome)
  Spreadsheets
  Docs
Doit.im ->

  To do lists
  Reminders
  Project Management (lists of to-do lists)
Handwritten ->

  Notepad+ for iPad Pro (then shared to Evernote)

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

#165
post #63
post #62

I'm piggy backing on this. I still have found my holy grail : a kind of knowledge management software where I could just stuff things probably with tags. Not only links (I have pinboard for that) but ideas, snippets of knowledge etc. This would be online (not necessarily self-hosted) and I'm willing to pay for that. Accessible via smartphones and potentially with an email gateway would be great. I don't think mindmap…

Evernote seems to meet each of these requirements.

Yes, from what I heard, it could be a good fit, but I only see negative comments about evernote so ... :)

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

#166
To Do lists: emacs org-mode and agenda. I have one 'todo.org' file with top-level headings for each project. I keep an org-agenda buffer open to display the todo's scheduled for the current day. I try to go through my todo file once a week and clean it up, archiving 'DONE' items and deleting items that are no longer relevant or haven't been touched in a while. All my emacs org files are synced via dropbox. BTW, org mode really is amazing. I keep finding little nuggets that delight when reading about others' org-mode setups.

Bookmarks: Pinboard, as well as pocket/instapaper for offline reading of bookmarks.

Financial tools: Mint by intuit to keep track of all my accounts, numbers/excel for budgeting.

Calendar/Reminders: Google calendar and macOS calendar. I use siri/google assistant to capture spur-of-the-moment things that I don't want to forget.

Files on Disk: Dropbox. Backblaze for backups. Google photos and icloud photos for extra photo backups.

Wikis/General Notes: Emacs org mode. I keep a journal.org file, that I sporadically update, as well as an ideas.org file for things I'd like to investigate/try build in the future. I use evernote for lists/notes from mobile devices as I haven't figured out a good way to use org files on iPhone/Android.

There isn't much overall integration, I just know that for important files I reference dropbox, Financials and Bookmarks have their own services, and then notes are going to be in emacs or evernote. Events/reminders handle themselves as I typically schedule them in the stock calendar/reminder apps and forget about them until I get a notification. I don't find the lack of integration to be a problem actually, as long as I know where to look for something based on what it is (e.g. notes -> orgmode/evernote, events -> calendar/reminders, files -> dropbox etc.)

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

#167
I'm using mostly my e-mail (I was into "inbox zero" before it was a thing to be honest). I have couple dedicated folders for archiving tasks etc. If I have something in my main inbox - it means that it is related to some task that is not finished (and it motivates me to finish it). Normally I have 0-5 messages in my inbox.

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

#168

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 had any issues with SyncThing so far, other than the initial setup faff! I haven't had to deal with any horrible merges, and as long as you take frequent snapshots you should be able to recover if the worst happens.

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

#169
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a big fan of amazon, but you could try Cloud drive with acdcli. $60 a year for "unlimited" (but subject to whatever limitations they care to impose) storage. I did find that doing several hundred GB of uploads with acdcli appeared to result in being throttled, but if you're doing daily diffs or the like you ought to be ok.

Thanks for the suggestion, I didn't know of ACD. Some issues on first glance though: - The $60 is €70. I think someone got the conversion rate backwards; - Acdcli does not seem to be able to actually write any files? The Github page mentions v0.1 is read-only and v0.2 should be able to write files. The current version is v0.1. - Actually, acdcli does not seem to do anything like incremental backups or encryption, it'…

I thought you had another solution handling the file creation and just needed a place to dump the files. I use acdcli to upload (acdcli ul) on a pretty regular basis, though.

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

#170
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…

> "it's only a `git grep` away"

Off topic, but how did I not know this was thing? You never know what you're gonna learn reading hn comments.

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