Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

Re:Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge? by markpapadakis on Saturday September 01, 2018 @02:10PM (#17893158)

I use Dropbox to store everything. There are no files that I care fore that are not managed by Dropbox (or iCloud, for my photos/videos). I use iA Writer to create lists and documents for everything in Dropbox folders. I also have a folder for PDFs/papers (also on Dropbox). There are also folders for my study nodes ( I study codebases ), notes on personal stuff, notes on Programming, on pretty much everything. I use Spotlight (on macOS) to instantly locate what I need among the 100s of such files.

I ‘ve tried all kinds of ideas before settling for this setup, and they all felt forced or just too much trouble for what they were to me. Text files, Dropbox, and Spotlight have been a perfect combination for my needs for years now.

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Re:Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge? by dcx on Saturday September 01, 2018 @02:43PM (#17893318)

I do exactly the same thing. Nothing beats text files, a deep folder structure and full text search (and ubiquitous access via Dropbox). I get a ton of value out of my system.

The thing that I find really makes things click is to figure out/set up good keyboard shortcuts and then practice them, so that you are able to save files to anywhere in your organiser hierarchy very very quickly. Say an average of five seconds per file. They say a 10x quantitative change is a qualitative change; once I had this down, I started using it a ton more and treating it kind of like an extension of my memory.

For Mac users some useful starting points for this technique are Default Folder X and ClipMenu.

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Re:Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge? by wj on Saturday September 01, 2018 @07:33PM (#17894475)

I try to do this but having a plain text editor built into their site would make it much more powerful for me. There are multiple times a day where I find myself on a system that I don't have my Dropbox files synced to.

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Re:Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge? by juliend2 on Saturday September 01, 2018 @08:54PM (#17894792)

This, and I have, in the root-level folder, a folder for every spheres of my life. For example:

- Personal (health, finance, hobbies, spirituality, etc)

- Work (things for my company, invoices, PDFs for learning tech stuff, etc)

- Church (I volunteer for a couple of churches, so that's very misc)

The exact same structure exist for my Google Calendars (separated by spheres that encompass several projects/concerns).

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Re:Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge? by abledon on Saturday September 01, 2018 @02:13PM (#17893178)

Hmm I have a similar setup except I use gitlab private repo... but really there isn't that much of a need for a 'commit history' in notes... I think I'll try the dropbox approach.

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Re:Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge? by dahx4Eev on Saturday September 01, 2018 @09:54PM (#17895063)

How about a private git repo with SparkleShare?

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Re:Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge? by MapleWalnut on Saturday September 01, 2018 @03:45PM (#17893595)

I do the same with plain text files. The only problem I have is searching. I wish there was a Google for searching local files (i.e. concept search).

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Re:Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge? by akaralar on Sunday September 02, 2018 @10:10AM (#17897050)

For macOS you can download Alfred, it can search all your filesystem for text inside files

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Re:Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge? by cecja on Saturday September 01, 2018 @04:06PM (#17893674)

There was and I shit you not it was from Google.

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Re:Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge? by jonathansorum on Sunday September 02, 2018 @09:05AM (#17896831)

I miss it more than I miss Reader :(

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