4 ms·
It's funny because I used to be more obsessive about storing my knowledge when I was younger. I kept track of tidbits of information using various systems (emac
by allenu 6y ago
It's funny because I used to be more obsessive about storing my knowledge when I was younger. I kept track of tidbits of information using various systems (emacs wiki mode or OneNote), but as with you, I always reverted to paper, not so I could "look up" information again, but as a way of sketching out ideas. I might refer to the notes a few weeks later, but beyond that, likely not.
Now that I'm in my 40s, I don't care as much about recording information I encounter (other than for work). If it's worth knowing, I can look it up again. If not, ignorance is bliss.
- grugagag 6y agoSame here, 40 and not very information junky anymore. But it probably has to do with the fact that anything is nowadays searchable online and also that there is so much information (even here on HN) that if you save it even selectively it is a sea of information. I use the "one tab" plugin and rather than closing the tab I save it to the one tab archive. Most of the time I never look at it again
- nikisweeting 6y agoI noticed this was the case when I used tools that made it hard to search through my archives. But once I switched to tools with better full-text search, I actually find myself using my archive all the time. It turns out just knowing that I have it and that its easy to search lets me rely on it a lot more when doing research on things I've read about before.
- grugagag 6y agoIt could be and you're probably right, I just personally lost interest in preserving too much information. Of course once in a while I come across a piece of info that I do save but whatever I slap into some text files is enough to me, most of the time I don't need to look it up anyway or I forget it even exists. And regularly I purge it and that feels good. Maybe I've reached my limits... But I do understand the need if one's line of work requires to or there's a need to for research, these tools can be very useful.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago> Now that I'm in my 40s, I don't care as much about recording information I encounter (other than for work). If it's worth knowing, I can look it up again. If not, ignorance is bliss. I tend to keep a notes file precisely because it's such a pain to look up some things. If I want to know the exact set of qemu options that I want, for instance, I would have to piece things together from the man page, and/or try things from a half-dozen different blogs, most of which will be incompatible with each other or the version of qemu I'm using (in fairness, qemu networking options have changed a lot over time as they improve things; this might be an extreme example). Or, I could open my notes file, type /qemu<cr>, and grab one of a handful of commands that I already have composed and be done.
- kaetemi 6y agoSame, went through a wiki and onenote stage. Didn't last. It piles up, and becomes a chore. Paper outlasts everything. Easy to organize spatially, sketch things, recompile notes, put many pages visible at once, decorate the walls... Unimportant papers end up on archive stacks with little effort. Recently started using a synced folder with plain Word documents, though, alongside the paper. For writing the more elaborate drafts, and mobile note taking.
- funcDropShadow 6y agoFor me Word documents are the anti-thesis of plain ;-)
- lifthrasiir 6y agoI went through approximately same stages, and eventually found that the knowledge base is mostly useless. What it matters turned out to be my own words: my personal notes on the subjects, my worklog, my emotions etc. These bits are something you can't easily reconstruct without a right context, and keeping the context is getting harder and harder as you are getting older.