<story><title>Ask HN: How do you manage/organize information and knowledge in your life?</title><text>This is a general question, but I didn&amp;#x27;t want to ask specific one because I&amp;#x27;m still trying to understand the bigger picture.&lt;p&gt;We &amp;quot;collect&amp;quot; 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&amp;#x2F;organize all of this? Do you have apps&amp;#x2F;tools for organizing specific type of information and if so, why this particular one? Do you have ideas how to organize&amp;#x2F;manage this efficiently?&lt;p&gt;But we&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;s not efficient (memory loss, can&amp;#x27;t search, not always reliable etc.), some people create some kind of personal knowledge bases (e.g. personal dokuwiki&amp;#x2F;mediawiki on localhost). How do you manage&amp;#x2F;organize things you learn?&lt;p&gt;It may seem that I should create 2 different topics, but for me both concepts are connected[1]. What I&amp;#x27;m trying to find is an efficient solution to managing (almost) all the information that enters (and already is in) my life. I don&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;m more interested in your ideas on the whole topic, how to approach this problem, where to look, how to think about this etc.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m curious about your solutions, ideas and &amp;quot;setups&amp;quot; for this problem(s). If you have any resources (books, research papers etc.) about the topic, I&amp;#x27;d love to learn from them. Thank you for your time.&lt;p&gt;[0] as in bits on the disk, learning can be viewed as collecting new information, I guess&lt;p&gt;[1] I liked quote from a book, some code from LLVM gave me an insight into a compiler design etc.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>thaumaturgy</author><text>1. Live simply. As I&amp;#x27;ve gotten older I&amp;#x27;ve found more and more value in not having too many things going on. Gradually I&amp;#x27;m sleeping better, eating better, reducing stress, and getting more exercise, all of which is important for the next thing:&lt;p&gt;2. Memorize as much as I can. It&amp;#x27;s an exercise; I memorize phone numbers, schedules, people&amp;#x27;s names, trivia, all kinds of stuff. I&amp;#x27;ve never found anything that matches the flexibility and utility of my own brain. I should use the best tool I have, and that&amp;#x27;s in my head. Technology is unreliable and constantly changing and difficult to organize and search. I&amp;#x27;ve been practicing this for long enough that now I&amp;#x27;m pretty good at it.&lt;p&gt;3. For everything else, I use a few simple systems: a few sheets of paper to the right side of my desk for scribbling and note-taking (meant to be discarded after a day or two), a pile of to-do to my left, a tab open in my text editor labeled &amp;quot;notepad&amp;quot; for longer-term stuff, and a well-organized directory of documents on my laptop with subfolders like &amp;quot;projects&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;writing&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;sysadmin&amp;quot;, etc. -- I try to keep this directory as small as possible by dedicating time here and there to either finishing or pruning projects.&lt;p&gt;I disagree that keeping knowledge in your head isn&amp;#x27;t efficient. I think a lot of people just don&amp;#x27;t practice it enough. Smartphones and computers and everything else make it really easy to not bother. But, my brain is always with me, doesn&amp;#x27;t require batteries (well...), can store any type of information I want, and can instantly recall it without having to craft some kind of search query or organize the information in a rigorous way. It is exactly the kind of database storage we all wish we had. It never changes data formats, it never tries to get acquired by a bigger company and then shut down, and it gets reception everywhere I go. If my brain were an electronic tool, I would want to use it all the time. And, the more I use it, the better it works.&lt;p&gt;(edit: oh yeah, and pinboard. Looove pinboard.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>meesterdude</author><text>One of the problems of keeping everything in your head is trust. People forget! Maybe you have a great memory, but eventually it&amp;#x27;ll forget things. And it should! otherwise there won&amp;#x27;t be room for any new stuff. I don&amp;#x27;t think we have infinite storage available; at some point things have to be erased to make room.&lt;p&gt;But also, keeping that stuff in a system you can trust frees your brain to do other things. Instead of falling asleep reminding yourself to buy milk tomorrow, you can leave it to the system to remember. The system being anything - a notebook, an app, or what have you. There is some good evidence that this kind of delegation allows for more high-level thinking to come about, since your brain is more free to do other things.&lt;p&gt;Now, as you&amp;#x27;ve touched on - sometimes technology screws you one way or another, and that trust is broken. So if you have no redundancy or backup or plan for that dependency, maybe you&amp;#x27;d be better off keeping things in your head.&lt;p&gt;But you are human and your head is human by extension. it is faulty, imperfect, and not nearly as good at storing things as pretty much anything else. Even if its good now, it won&amp;#x27;t necessarily always be, and isn&amp;#x27;t in such good shape for a lot of folk. So I would not paint it in such a rosy light.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m curious, Have you done any experimentation with Method of loci?</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: How do you manage/organize information and knowledge in your life?</title><text>This is a general question, but I didn&amp;#x27;t want to ask specific one because I&amp;#x27;m still trying to understand the bigger picture.&lt;p&gt;We &amp;quot;collect&amp;quot; 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&amp;#x2F;organize all of this? Do you have apps&amp;#x2F;tools for organizing specific type of information and if so, why this particular one? Do you have ideas how to organize&amp;#x2F;manage this efficiently?&lt;p&gt;But we&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;s not efficient (memory loss, can&amp;#x27;t search, not always reliable etc.), some people create some kind of personal knowledge bases (e.g. personal dokuwiki&amp;#x2F;mediawiki on localhost). How do you manage&amp;#x2F;organize things you learn?&lt;p&gt;It may seem that I should create 2 different topics, but for me both concepts are connected[1]. What I&amp;#x27;m trying to find is an efficient solution to managing (almost) all the information that enters (and already is in) my life. I don&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;m more interested in your ideas on the whole topic, how to approach this problem, where to look, how to think about this etc.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m curious about your solutions, ideas and &amp;quot;setups&amp;quot; for this problem(s). If you have any resources (books, research papers etc.) about the topic, I&amp;#x27;d love to learn from them. Thank you for your time.&lt;p&gt;[0] as in bits on the disk, learning can be viewed as collecting new information, I guess&lt;p&gt;[1] I liked quote from a book, some code from LLVM gave me an insight into a compiler design etc.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>thaumaturgy</author><text>1. Live simply. As I&amp;#x27;ve gotten older I&amp;#x27;ve found more and more value in not having too many things going on. Gradually I&amp;#x27;m sleeping better, eating better, reducing stress, and getting more exercise, all of which is important for the next thing:&lt;p&gt;2. Memorize as much as I can. It&amp;#x27;s an exercise; I memorize phone numbers, schedules, people&amp;#x27;s names, trivia, all kinds of stuff. I&amp;#x27;ve never found anything that matches the flexibility and utility of my own brain. I should use the best tool I have, and that&amp;#x27;s in my head. Technology is unreliable and constantly changing and difficult to organize and search. I&amp;#x27;ve been practicing this for long enough that now I&amp;#x27;m pretty good at it.&lt;p&gt;3. For everything else, I use a few simple systems: a few sheets of paper to the right side of my desk for scribbling and note-taking (meant to be discarded after a day or two), a pile of to-do to my left, a tab open in my text editor labeled &amp;quot;notepad&amp;quot; for longer-term stuff, and a well-organized directory of documents on my laptop with subfolders like &amp;quot;projects&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;writing&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;sysadmin&amp;quot;, etc. -- I try to keep this directory as small as possible by dedicating time here and there to either finishing or pruning projects.&lt;p&gt;I disagree that keeping knowledge in your head isn&amp;#x27;t efficient. I think a lot of people just don&amp;#x27;t practice it enough. Smartphones and computers and everything else make it really easy to not bother. But, my brain is always with me, doesn&amp;#x27;t require batteries (well...), can store any type of information I want, and can instantly recall it without having to craft some kind of search query or organize the information in a rigorous way. It is exactly the kind of database storage we all wish we had. It never changes data formats, it never tries to get acquired by a bigger company and then shut down, and it gets reception everywhere I go. If my brain were an electronic tool, I would want to use it all the time. And, the more I use it, the better it works.&lt;p&gt;(edit: oh yeah, and pinboard. Looove pinboard.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>Having turned 32 this year, I can relate with all of your points.&lt;p&gt;Make life as simple as possible (&amp;quot;simplicity is the ultimate sophistication&amp;quot;). Use paper when necessary.&lt;p&gt;Also, try hard not to multi-task. It&amp;#x27;s been proven the human brain isn&amp;#x27;t built to handle it.</text></comment>