4 ms·

There are some good ideas in here. Personally I’ve abandoned all of my complex attempts at productivity and knowledge systems and have recently moved to the ev

There are some good ideas in here. Personally I’ve abandoned all of my complex attempts at productivity and knowledge systems and have recently moved to the ever reliable txt file. You can format it however you want, use fun ascii art, or just plain paragraphs. I’ve got a daily.txt where I prepend a new days section every day and put in whatever I want over the course of the day. I also create other files for courses I’m going through or projects as needed. The nice thing is using my editor I can make a file reference and hit gf and it’ll go right to a referenced file. But this “system” will keep on working regardless of what tools or system I happen to be using.

ahmedfromtunis 3y ago
It's clearly a nice and simple way to write data, but what about the other way around? How do you manage to find information when you need it?
- dinkleberg 3y ago
  Read data? lol it is usually just a write only system (aside reviewing the current info from the week). But since it is all in one place I just do search queries using my editor to find what I need. I don’t use tags, but it would be very simple to just append some #tags in my content and search for those.
- gkbrk 3y ago
  CTRL-F or grep seem like they would work well
- wharvle 3y ago
  I use Apple Notes and don’t bother to organize anything unless it’s a whole bunch of related material that I’m going to use together—notes for an rpg session, say. All the rest, I just make sure that I give it a title that I’ll recognize when I see it, and include words that I’ll likely use if I go looking for it with search. Been doing this for years, haven’t lost anything yet. It works so well that time organizing it would have been wasted.
  - falseAss 3y ago
    i've been doing the exactly same thing. Some risk is the data safety - years of log is attached to the icloud account is concerning.
    - wharvle 3y ago
      There exist programs to export them to markdown or what have you. Dunno how well they handle embedded media. I do a lot of copy-pasting screenshots or embedding PDF pages… or entire pdfs. [edit] “why screenshots?” 1) To record gui workflows, walkthrough-style. 2) to record whole screens of values from guis while preserving formatting perfectly (think: cloud dashboard vital stats screens for various resources) 3) to record short message exchanges from ephemeral messaging with all the formatting intact with zero extra effort. (Think: feature discussion in a periodically-cleaned chat channel; I can always turn it into text later if I need to, recording with screenshot is fast) 4) plus now that it’s almost as easy and reliable to copy-paste from images as from regular text, on macOS and iOS, why not?
  - tomcam 3y ago
    Having trouble with Apple notes syncing too slowly. Wife can update the shopping list but I won’t see it for 24+ hours. Unfortunately my life runs on it. Problem may be that my Notes file has become a 15G monstrosity?
    - tensor 3y ago
      I use reminders for shopping lists. They can also be shared. Hopefully they are not the same database as notes!
    - balder1991 3y ago
      Have you tried using Notion? For things that are mostly lists I prefer using Microsoft To Do though (I use it ever since it was called Wanderlist)
      - tomcam 3y ago
- BeetleB 3y ago
  Although I extensively use org mode, I didn't follow the GP's approach precisely because of this searchability problem. These days, however, vector DBs and doing RAG is getting close to changing my mind. I want to do less and less organizing, and more dumping, and use vector search capabilities to find what I need. Haven't set it up yet, but it's on my TODO list.

ahmedfromtunis 3y ago

It's clearly a nice and simple way to write data, but what about the other way around? How do you manage to find information when you need it?

dinkleberg 3y ago
Read data? lol it is usually just a write only system (aside reviewing the current info from the week). But since it is all in one place I just do search queries using my editor to find what I need. I don’t use tags, but it would be very simple to just append some #tags in my content and search for those.
gkbrk 3y ago
CTRL-F or grep seem like they would work well
wharvle 3y ago
I use Apple Notes and don’t bother to organize anything unless it’s a whole bunch of related material that I’m going to use together—notes for an rpg session, say. All the rest, I just make sure that I give it a title that I’ll recognize when I see it, and include words that I’ll likely use if I go looking for it with search. Been doing this for years, haven’t lost anything yet. It works so well that time organizing it would have been wasted.
- falseAss 3y ago
  i've been doing the exactly same thing. Some risk is the data safety - years of log is attached to the icloud account is concerning.
  - wharvle 3y ago
    There exist programs to export them to markdown or what have you. Dunno how well they handle embedded media. I do a lot of copy-pasting screenshots or embedding PDF pages… or entire pdfs. [edit] “why screenshots?” 1) To record gui workflows, walkthrough-style. 2) to record whole screens of values from guis while preserving formatting perfectly (think: cloud dashboard vital stats screens for various resources) 3) to record short message exchanges from ephemeral messaging with all the formatting intact with zero extra effort. (Think: feature discussion in a periodically-cleaned chat channel; I can always turn it into text later if I need to, recording with screenshot is fast) 4) plus now that it’s almost as easy and reliable to copy-paste from images as from regular text, on macOS and iOS, why not?
- tomcam 3y ago
  Having trouble with Apple notes syncing too slowly. Wife can update the shopping list but I won’t see it for 24+ hours. Unfortunately my life runs on it. Problem may be that my Notes file has become a 15G monstrosity?
  - tensor 3y ago
    I use reminders for shopping lists. They can also be shared. Hopefully they are not the same database as notes!
  - balder1991 3y ago
    Have you tried using Notion? For things that are mostly lists I prefer using Microsoft To Do though (I use it ever since it was called Wanderlist)
    - tomcam 3y ago
BeetleB 3y ago
Although I extensively use org mode, I didn't follow the GP's approach precisely because of this searchability problem. These days, however, vector DBs and doing RAG is getting close to changing my mind. I want to do less and less organizing, and more dumping, and use vector search capabilities to find what I need. Haven't set it up yet, but it's on my TODO list.