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Yes, filing the notecards is essential. Something I try to do is keep my physical notecard files small. Besides the inbox file, urgent and important notecards

Yes, filing the notecards is essential. Something I try to do is keep my physical notecard files small. Besides the inbox file, urgent and important notecards are the only ones I keep in a physical file. It's surprising how fast you can go through a thousand notecards. So effective filing is a must. And for me, that means maintaining digital archives. Something that, on its own, is a whole topic for discussion. Once again, I recommend GTD by David Allen if you'd like to dive deeper and avoid reinventing the wheel.

kd5bjo 7y ago
GTD's a wonderful system for keeping track of things you should be doing, but I find his filing system for everything else to be a bit lacking. I've supplemented it with ideas from The Card Index System¹, traditional library card catalogs, and Umberto Eco's recommendations in How to Write a Thesis. At the moment, my card index fills most of my center desk drawer. It may outgrow that soon, but I have no intention of culling it down; it's quite literally an index into my own memories, to help me remember things. ¹ https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.216804/page/n7 https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.216804/page/n7
- DailyHN 7y ago
  Yes, I agree that GTD isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. David Allen, in GTD, recommends an alphabetized system. Something that I don't do because all of my reference material is digitized and easily searchable. Search-ability is the primary reason I avoid keeping a large physical file system. I take inspiration from multiple books written about productivity and organization. Other books that have been highly influential in my systems are: - Principles (Dalio) - The ONE Thing (Keller) - Organize Tomorrow Today (Selk, Bartow) - Productivity Planner (more of a journal than a book)
  - kd5bjo 7y ago
    Interestingly, it's the lack of searchability that made me gravitate towards a physical system. It forces me to think about the situations I may find myself in when I'll want a piece of information, in order to file it in the correct place. This has the odd effect that I'm more successful at finding things in my paper system than I ever was with an electronic one, though it's probably of little use to anyone else. I also find that flipping through the notecards to file or look up something serves as a pretty good idea-generation engine.

kd5bjo 7y ago

GTD's a wonderful system for keeping track of things you should be doing, but I find his filing system for everything else to be a bit lacking. I've supplemented it with ideas from The Card Index System¹, traditional library card catalogs, and Umberto Eco's recommendations in How to Write a Thesis. At the moment, my card index fills most of my center desk drawer. It may outgrow that soon, but I have no intention of culling it down; it's quite literally an index into my own memories, to help me remember things. ¹ https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.216804/page/n7 https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.216804/page/n7

DailyHN 7y ago
Yes, I agree that GTD isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. David Allen, in GTD, recommends an alphabetized system. Something that I don't do because all of my reference material is digitized and easily searchable. Search-ability is the primary reason I avoid keeping a large physical file system. I take inspiration from multiple books written about productivity and organization. Other books that have been highly influential in my systems are: - Principles (Dalio) - The ONE Thing (Keller) - Organize Tomorrow Today (Selk, Bartow) - Productivity Planner (more of a journal than a book)
- kd5bjo 7y ago
  Interestingly, it's the lack of searchability that made me gravitate towards a physical system. It forces me to think about the situations I may find myself in when I'll want a piece of information, in order to file it in the correct place. This has the odd effect that I'm more successful at finding things in my paper system than I ever was with an electronic one, though it's probably of little use to anyone else. I also find that flipping through the notecards to file or look up something serves as a pretty good idea-generation engine.