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Ask HN: How do you manage/organize information and knowledge in your life?

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Ask HN: How do you manage/organize information and knowledge in your life?

#1

Post by ay1n »

This is a general question, but I didn't want to ask specific one because I'm still trying to understand the bigger picture.

We "collect" data all the time, and sometimes it helps us learn something. On one hand we have things that were created by others: funny images, movies, articles on the web, books. On the other we have things creted by us: personal insights, thoughts, snippets of code. How do you manage/organize all of this? Do you have apps/tools for organizing specific type of information and if so, why this particular one? Do you have ideas how to organize/manage this efficiently?

But we're not only collecting information [0], we also learn from it. Most people store all this knowledge in their heads for their whole life, but I think it's not efficient (memory loss, can't search, not always reliable etc.), some people create some kind of personal knowledge bases (e.g. personal dokuwiki/mediawiki on localhost). How do you manage/organize things you learn?

It may seem that I should create 2 different topics, but for me both concepts are connected[1]. What I'm trying to find is an efficient solution to managing (almost) all the information that enters (and already is in) my life. I don't think that there exist a good app for that, I know that there are some that solve parts of this problem (evernote, wikis etc.), but I'm more interested in your ideas on the whole topic, how to approach this problem, where to look, how to think about this etc.

I'm curious about your solutions, ideas and "setups" for this problem(s). If you have any resources (books, research papers etc.) about the topic, I'd love to learn from them. Thank you for your time.

[0] as in bits on the disk, learning can be viewed as collecting new information, I guess

[1] I liked quote from a book, some code from LLVM gave me an insight into a compiler design etc.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage/organize information and knowledge in your life?

#2

Post by ay1n »

There is a 2000 character limit in the question box, so here is what I'm using now:

- pinboard for managing bookmarks (database of things that may be useful sometime; probably never) & reading list for articles

- I'm testing tagspaces (http://www.tagspaces.org/) for local files organization (mostly tagging research papers and books; didn't like Mendeley)

- cardav & caldav from owncloud for contacts and events

- anki as a memorization tool (spaced repetition) - from languages to my own mistakes (i.e. "lessons learned", so I won't repeat them)

- for insights, notes, ideas, things I've learned & everything else I use personal wiki (media wiki) on localhost. This is the biggest part of my "system", I have there entries like things to buy someday, current project's notes/resources, useful scripts, configuration snippets, notes from books, journeys, analysis of my own behaviour, personal journal, ideas for startups etc. But it's hard to organize, it becomes a mess very easly after some time. Also, I can't use it on mobile (I don't want to put all this on the web, there is a lot of personal info), it takes time to add new thing/entry (I need to think to which page new piece of information belongs etc.).

- simplified version of gtd as a meta-system managing this system and for projects/things to do

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage/organize information and knowledge in your life?

#3

Post by gexla »

Here is one idea.

http://lifehacker.com/im-ryan-holiday-and-this-is-how-i-work...

The take-away there is index cards. I like the idea of information being broken down small enough to fit on an index card. Reading a book, it could be one point, one quote or something of similar size.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage/organize information and knowledge in your life?

#4

Post by bsilvereagle »

I used to use OneNote pretty extensively for nearly everything. Recipes, course notes, thoughts while working on projects, lists of reminders, etc. The main problem with it was that if I wanted to search on something, I'd have to search X number of OneNote notebooks.

I've recently started to use fedwiki instead of OneNote, and things are alrightish. Fedwiki has lots of room for improvement as a wiki, and then as a knowledge store.

I think the ideal personal information/knowledge store would incorporate a tagging filesystem combined with something like OneNote/fedwiki. The tagging filesystem would allow PDFs, movies, etc to show up in searches with fedwiki/OneNote handling the plain text & images. Ideally the client that the user uses is something like fedwiki, where you can have multiple different pages open at once, but also allow you to pull in the PDF/video resources.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage/organize information and knowledge in your life?

#7

Post by ay1n »

bsilvereagle wrote: post #4

I used to use OneNote pretty extensively for nearly everything. Recipes, course notes, thoughts while working on projects, lists of reminders, etc. The main problem with it was that if I wanted to search on something, I'd have to search X number of OneNote notebooks. I've recently started to use fedwiki instead of OneNote, and things are alrightish. Fedwiki has lots of room for improvement as a wiki, and then as a kn…

For me the biggest downside of OneNote is that I can't use it on Linux/Unix (Wine doesn't always work). I didn't know fedwiki, looks interesting and I'll look into this, thanks for that.

Do you have categories in which single entries are grouped or you just add new thing and search for it later?

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage/organize information and knowledge in your life?

#8

Post by ay1n »

sp3n wrote: post #5

badly, i have hundreds of bookmarks, articles, documents that i haven't looked at since adding them - not quite sure what i'm waiting for but i spend a lot more time collecting them then actually reading them

Yes, I think this is a common problem. We collect things, because they seem worth reading/watching but never return to them. One thing is that some effort is required to read/watch those things but other thing is that we forget that we even saw that particular article/video. So, maybe bookmarks should have a reminder mechanism built into them of some sort? Sombining Spaced Repetition with bookmarking seems interesting.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage/organize information and knowledge in your life?

#10

Post by markbao »

I mostly use Simplenote for ideas and loose notes, and Quip/Evernote for more structured notes. All three sync to all my devices, and while neither are perfect for my needs, they are OK.

The problem comes from keeping everything organized (impossible with Evernote and Simplenote with their lack of structure, impossible with Quip since it's docs/spreadsheets-only) and in a way that works with my mind and workflow.

I'm working on sketching out what a unified personal knowledge management product might look like, which combines a kind of "inbox" of sorts of resources and notes coming in, and also a "personal wiki" with structured docs, and a number of people I know are also thinking about what a 'perfect' knowledge management system would look like. Let me know if you want to bounce around some ideas around.

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