Why do you keep a personal knowledge base? What are you trying to accomplish by saving content? What insights do you want to discover? What tasks do you want to achieve?
Ask HN: Why do you keep a personal knowledge base?
1–10 of 98 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why do you keep a personal knowledge base?
#2The key question when reading any article/book/whatever is the following: "if anything, what is actually important enough to remember from this article?", or in the case of PKBs: "What should be in my PKB and what should be discarded?"
By asking yourself this question explicitly and then actually writing down the key points you practice your own judgment on what is worth remembering and what is not.
Now the added benefit of a PKB is that you can actually keep these key points in a central location and reference them in other contexts or share them with others. You are basically doing prework for later (research) questions you might have. However I would say the biggest benefit is the process; explicitly writing down what is important and discarding what is not.
For more on this subject I recommend following @fortelabs on Twitter. He does a lot of interesting writing on the subject.
Re: Ask HN: Why do you keep a personal knowledge base?
#3For me it's just time. If I ever need to search how to do something more than three times, I put it in my notes.
Re: Ask HN: Why do you keep a personal knowledge base?
#4another benefit: writing something down burns it more into your brain, so u more likely will remember it without even looking it up
Re: Ask HN: Why do you keep a personal knowledge base?
#5My question, what program would one use to start his/her own personal knowledge base? Or do I have to be a software developer and create my own?
Re: Ask HN: Why do you keep a personal knowledge base?
#6Free Daily Accounts!
http://ghostmaree.boards.net/
Re: Ask HN: Why do you keep a personal knowledge base?
#7A mix of Google Docs for larger research projects and notes on my blog - I use Google search to recover them.
The blog entries let me save time if I return to a problem and tell me at what point I stopped.
Re: Ask HN: Why do you keep a personal knowledge base?
#8My question, what program would one use to start his/her own personal knowledge base? Or do I have to be a software developer and create my own?
This is what I am struggling with right now. Many people recommend org-mode but I don't like Emacs very much.
Re: Ask HN: Why do you keep a personal knowledge base?
#9When I started in my current job, I was effectively the single administrator (servers, network(s), clients) at a small-ish company (~70 employees using PCs), and there was a landscape that already was the result of 10+ years of growth without any central planning.
TL;DR - I was thrown into a relatively complex environment with little help other than asking the two guys who had done this before me, both of which were rather busy (they had done the administration a side-business of sorts). (I still wonder how they managed to keep the IT infrastructure running, but in my first few months, many of our users told me how happy they were that I responded to their calls for help right away rather than "sometime next week".)
I used emacs' org-mode. I kept a file where I wrote down every little bit of information I could gather. After 12, maybe 15, months, I had memorized everything I needed to know and stopped taking notes. So my example might not fit your question all that well. But for the time I was getting to know this company's infrastructure, its servers, networks, and people, that .org file was a lifesaver.
Re: Ask HN: Why do you keep a personal knowledge base?
#10My question, what program would one use to start his/her own personal knowledge base? Or do I have to be a software developer and create my own?
If you happen to be an emacs user and will only ever use the knowledge base yourself, org-mode can fill that role rather nicely.