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How Do You Manage the Information In Your Life?
An anonymous reader writes "How do you manage the multitude of information sources in your lives? How do you keep track of the electronics or programming projects you're working on, or the collection of photos you took from your last holiday, or the notes and reading you're doing to learn a new language? Do you have a personal wiki, a blog, or maybe a series of tablet based notes, or voice recordings? Or is it pen and paper, and a blank book for each different hobby? I'm a student, and like most of you, have a few different interests to keep track of (as well as work). But I realise I also have a little OCD, and struggle a bit to keep on top of information (whether hobbies or personal life) in a way that I feel I have complete control over. So how do you all do it?"
also mercurial or git.
also journals.
Just have fun and do what comes naturally.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERbvKrH-GC4
I keep a very organized storage partition that has a folder for either m projects, games, music or whatever else. I know what I should be working on and I simply go to it. It sounds like you have a vey busy life and maybe should cut back a bit and focus on a couple things, versus several
I have a brain.
Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
I don't
I keep all the info of my life in txt files.
It helps that I can type really fast.
You're making all this too complicated.
Train your memory.
yep that's it I'm OCD about putting things in well named folders.
in my mind + google for less important things
warning pointless sig
Between long and short-term memory is intermediate-term memory. I let my brain manage it, unless it's something that I won't use frequently enough and might forget, in which case I toss it in a text file I call 'chaos' and surround it with keywords I can search for. I've been doing the 'chaos' thing for years now, kind of a catch-all database.
For me, it's PostIts. Different colors for different categories of things. I also have a composition notebook (from the back-to-school sale a few years back) in which I place PostIts with more durable information...and it's also where I keep all my various usernames and passwords. Change a password? Rip out the old PostIt, put in a new one.
Some PostIts go on my monitor, thinks I need to remember RIGHT NOW. I'll also put up working note phrases for projects, like IP addresses, port numbers, APIs, and important status return values.
Sometimes, though, appointments and PostIts don't work that well. So I use the calendar in my Android phone to keep track of time things, and set it to remind me sufficiently in advance that I can close out what I'm doing, put things in cruise mode, and get in the car and get to the appointment on time.
With my Mac.
Just as long at it is secret from your wife you are fine.
Virtual sticky notes on my desktop, and pinned tabs in my Chrome window.
I'd basically forget my whole life if I lost these things.
To prevent this day from getting worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD TH
Notes, ideas, documents - anything that I might want to find later. G-mail is my filing cabinet these days.
Three Squirrels
Look at the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology by David Allen. It's good at helping you keep track of all the stuff that's going on. Also, when I feel like my head is getting too cluttered, I do a brain dump into MindJet's MindManager software. It can help capture many disparate pieces of information visually and the process can yield some mental clarity . . .
If I have learned something, it's in my head. If it's not in my head, I haven't learned it.
Your productivity will increase exponentially if you stop trying to keep all of your information perfectly organized and all of your activities thoroughly documented. Keep a calendar of some sort so you can keep track of far out appointments, and keep a plain txt file for each subject.
For hobbies, it is important to realise that it is just that: a hobby. You don't need to document it all, nobody is going to audit you.
As for myself, I'm into electronics and programming.
I design a piece of electronics on my computer (schematic capture, PCB design), then I create the thing itself and tinker until it is as I want it. Then, I print the schematic and PCB layout, archive the computer files on a CD and put these in a binder that hold all my designs. That's it. I don't need more. When the CD falls to bit-rot, so be it.
Programming is even more simple. I write a piece of software and that's it. I don't obsess about keeping the source code forever. When my hard disk dies I have a backup. When that fails, well, too bad. No worries, most likely I wouldn't have looked at it ever again anyway.
So, moral of the story, keep only what you need to keep. The rest is clutter and it holds you back.
I organise my information in four ways:
...) in KeePass.
...). Anything related to my children's schools in a school folder. Recipies, downloaded literature, programs, photos ... And so on.
;-) even several years later.
Whatever I need to keep hidden (passwords, PIN codes,
Meetings, birthdays, days to put the rubbish out and whatever else time related in my calendar(s). I actually have a few calendars on computers and phones that I keep synchronised.
Names, addresses, telephone numbers, E-mail addresses, etc. in my contact list on my phone. I synchronise this with my other systems too.
Everything else goes in a hierarchy on the file server: Anything trade related, for example, in a trade folder organised by date, provider and type (receipts, contracts, proposals, warranties, policies, terms & conditions,
I find this system works well for me and I can always find things (sometimes to my wife's surprise
With multiple online news and interest sources (23 page 'home' page), personal financial software, investments, innumerable interests and hobbies. With my new Droid, I found myself inundated with even more sources competing for my interests and time. Realizing the current demands on my curiosity and OCD-like tendencies was bad now and was trending worse, I took hard inventory of my life and greatly simplified.
It was hard – probably not much unlike an addict to some degree. But the harsh ‘life cutting’ I did to remove extraneous demands and perceived demands was the fix, not a unified data source or Wiki.
Like most people on /. I carry a phone that has a handy-dandy built-in notes app and a calendar.
I use those tools, and with the aid of categorizing things as (not)?urgent|important (thanks 7 habits!), I do a great job of staying on top of my life -- from learning to play the guitar to today's work deliverables.
Things that are *important* get stuck into my Notes for the day, and added to my to-do-list when I get to a computer. Urgent or time-sensitive things get calendared for a specific time with notes attached immediately.
Another huge thing I do is /routine/. If I water the lawn every morning at 7:00am, I don't ever wonder what I'm doing at that time of day: I'm watering the lawn. Same goes for checking my email -- I do that on a very set schedule so that I can focus on whatever else in the meantime.
I think it was in Memento where it was said that Habits and routine make life livable. Throw in some discipline and you should never forget to buy your girl flowers ever again :D
I just post it all on Facebook and then use Google to find it. Fortunately Google knows all of my information so I can get to it using instant search and not have to worry about not being able to find my stuff.
I'm replying because I like your subject line. :-)
I organize my life by: Not having a complicated life in the first place. Simplify; simplify. And for my work, I use a calendar or dayplanner to write down appointments such as: Boss Meeting 2pm room xxx.
My data (movies, music, etc) is backed-up from the c: drive to two USB drives, one of which is put in a safe along with birth certificate, medical records, and other life crucial information that I don't want to lose in case of fire.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
What is it like to have a brain?
On my monitor at work, or on the fridge at home.
Other than that I figure, if I don't remember it it probably wasn't that important..
http://orgmode.org/
It's very powerful once you get the concept.
Emacs org-mode (http://orgmode.org). Your life in plain text. Nothing else compares.
You can manage everything from multiple projects to email. And it's free. I was a bit hesitant at first, but now I depend on it for just about everything. The collaboration features including secure document sharing, calendaring etc is amazing. No wonder so many huge corporations and universities have moved to google exclusively.
Give it a try, it may fit your needs.
CVS or SVN for projects of one or a few persons. Like:
$ cvs co geo
$ cvs co foo2zjs
$ svn co gnome-manual-duplex
etc.
Photos: organize by year
Use a paper notebook for a lot of things. It's redundant and inefficient but sometimes I'll high-level outline something in the notebook, then retype it into OpenOffice to add detail. Just how I worked, but also this was mostly before I had a netbook to tote around.
Actually had a couple programs on my Handspring Visor, of all things, that I kind of wish they had desktop version of so I could pull the databases in (Progect, Knowledge), if only for nostalgic purposes at this point, since that stuff is years old by now. They're pretty basic, for the most part: Progect is just an outliner with cool features, especially for planning and project management, and Knowledge is just a list maker with cool features and categorizing/tagging ability, and I've never found anything like that for the desktop.
Lately I've been really liking Freemind ( http://freemind.sourceforge.net/ ) for planning and brainstorming ideas.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
Obviously real men post all of their life information onto the web and let the others back it up and then use Google to look up what the heck happened to them in their lives.
It's mostly a sad picture.
You can't handle the truth.
Not very well.
I think you have to determine what is important to *you*. I've whittled down the books, photos and music, movies, notes, etc that are important to me first and foremost. It makes organizing, cataloging and backing up the information easier. I'm not suggesting if you have 2000 photos of your kid to get rid of them. But shurely, there's some information junk lying around that you don't need anymore. It might also mean reading books just lying around and deciding if they are keepers or just make some notes of what you read and then recycle (or better yet) donate the book to the library or a friend.
The fact is, if you think you have a little OCD, chances are your life is disorganized. I'm there somewhat too. But, in the last few weeks, I've done a lot of the above. I have to say, its made my life easier, less weight on my shoulders and I've been able to accomplish more. I don't have OCD, but I can tell you that this is certainly rewarding to accomplish.
I haven't found the best way to organize it yet. I'm struggling a bit with backups and debating wether keeping digital or "analog" (paper, print) copies of my information is the best.
How do you feel about having a brain?
I have an install of Redmine that I use to keep track of all my personal projects and todo lists and such. It's great because it's a single place where I can put stuff I'm working on, future ideas, break larger projects into tasks etc. That's useful for putting down tasks that I'm not going to get to immediately, as well as future projects. I have a few ideas for Android apps that I won't have the time to work on anytime soon, but whenever I have an idea I can go mark it down so when I do decide to go work on it some day, it's all there. I also have a separate project for ongoing stuff. For example, "organize tax stuff", "fix bathroom cabinet door". It's a convenient place I can go note things down when they occur to me without needing to drop everything to go work on it immediately.
Ask yourself what that information is worth to you first. Then try to find a solution that works. If administering taking care of the information costs much more than it is worth, then you are doing something wrong.
My photos are quite important to me, so I have a GPS to be able to geotag them. Then I index, categorize and sort them in a image management system, keeping information of which off-site media they are backed up to.
Other bits of information is far less important, so them I have less advanced systems for taking care of. Your priorities might be different, thus needing different systems.
Having said that, I found iCalendar and AddressBook of Mac OS X to be really handy and since they already sync wirelessly with my 7 year old phone and my second gen iPod, I can carry a copy with me at all time. But usually I have PostIts until I come home to enter new data. It is handy to have one place to keep it all in, but that information is not critical to me.
Oh, Delicious Library and the likes are really nice when you try to remember which friend borrowed that film from you. Oh, yeah, I forgot that I am a grumpy old fart that still have my films on physical media :-)
Pretty old-fashoned from pre-computer days. I pretty much can keep track of everything in my mental memory after a daily refresh.
My first line of defense is that I try to keep things to a minimum. If I have more than 3 things going on, I will delay most of them and do a mediocre job on the others because I'm not focused.
However, to answer your question, the best strategy I've ever used was a single notebook to track everything. Every item gets a bullet and every day gets a new page. If something didn't get done, it gets rewritten on the page for the next day. That means everything is in one place and having to rewrite the items every day is annoying, so items I don't really care about will be dropped from the list. If necessary, the bullets can reference outside information like, "Implement request in John's email 'Need a favor' received on 10/24/2010."
If you decide to resurrect an old project, you can flip through the notebook to find the bullet items regarding that project to help get yourself back up to speed.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
Now, I'm sure this thread will get many suggestions how to improve your "information management", many might prove helpful in finding and refining you own ways - but ultimately, it all fails at some point; there's just too much of it all.
Learning to let things go will be crucial. I can't know what might work for you - maybe always listening (to the point of a habit), without exceptions or excuses, to that nagging voice telling you something is a waste of time? (say goodbye to those many certainly interesting things you won't ever finish reading) Maybe regular breaks (force yourself to them, an alarm clock on the other side of an apartment for example), thinking idly about the singular tasks at hand? Maybe separating stuff to work PC/area and thrash PC/area? Or maybe something completely different.
In the end, while technical solutions are helpful - your main effort will be at not circumventing them, not wasting any gains.
One that hath name thou can not otter
iLife,TaskPaper, Circus Ponies Notebook.
This is an OS X based outlining system that supports images, sounds, text, pretty much whatever. I use several outlines. One contains general information, from password and login data for every web site I use to ideas for t-shirts and guitar tabs; the other is an organized timeline, a diary of sorts, that has every year since I was born in it, and all the events I have been able to remember from before I started using it, and all the significant events since (much more dense there, of course.)
The collapsible outline format is ideal for a timeline; All decades but the current one are closed; all years in the current decade but the current one are closed; all months but the current one are closed; so the display is very compact, yet I have almost instant access to anything, any time, organized and coherent. Just as an aside, once written, I was able to recall a lot more by reading it to myself as if it were a story... concurrent events floated up to the surface almost unbidden... highly recommended if you're into journaling.
For everything else, it works very well, though a lot depends on the initial format you pick. Mine ended up with six root headings.
Under each of those are many more headings and megabytes of textual content I've generated over the years. Also images, musical performances (of mine), poetry, etc. Some of it came from text files I maintained prior to obtaining this software; I'm glad those days are gone. I'm sure other's organizations would be different, mine grew somewhat organically, and I might do it differently today, but it works extremely well as is, so then again, maybe not.
I'm not affiliated with the program developers at all; I'm just a really satisfied customer. For the money, the organizational chops I gained were hugely worth it.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Mindmaps :-)
Basically using GTD.
I carry a stack of index cards everywhere. Write down every single damn thing that I need to ever think about.
I get home, throw them all in a pile.
Either late that evening, or early in the morning, I go through and make a list on a fresh index card of the things I need to take care of that day. Things that relate to a certain topic, say, musical endeavors, get put into a stack of similar cards. When I can, I pin these to the wall in columns by topic. Things that would only require a few clicks on a computer are generally done immediately.
Documents relating to these topics go into folders on my computer where digital, but anything that can be reasonably printed is printed, and put into a filing cabinet. The cabinet does not have a great deal of organization, and is a weak point. It does have a lot of papers about shit I'll hopefully read someday, and scrawly crazy notes that are probably garbage.
I've tried OmniFocus, the To-Do feature in iCal, different online todo lists (Remember the Milk?), and the ToDo app and Notes app on my iPhone. None of these things are working great for me. I'd like to perhaps 'go digital', but I haven't found the right setup. Hoping I'll get some fresh ideas from the comments here.
Long live the BSD license
Have you tried the "Not giving a fuck" method?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wS5xOZ7Rq8
It makes life much simpler...
Do you have a personal wiki, a blog, or maybe a series of tablet based notes, or voice recordings"
What? Your a student. Not a CEO. If you have so much data and photo's that it requires a database and a wiki to keep track of then its probably not making your life any better.
Try spending some time enjoying life rather then organizing and documenting it.
I have to return some videotapes...
Well, I don't, actually. I just drown in information overload, really. It's kinda sad when you think about it.
...~50 regularly replaced sticky notes and 40 magnets. Nothing beats whiteboards for overview.
I just try to ignore most of it... Besides, eventually I'll wake up in a new life, so who cares about this passage? Eventually we all wake up and realize it is time to move along and with less baggage, the better.
I have a lousy memory so over the past fiteen years, I have set up a series of about 20 Filemaker databases where I keep all the information that I don't want to lose. The strength of Filemaker for me is that it is easy to set up and that the database allows full text searches. Each database is set up using a template that automatically puts in the creation date and time and the modification date and time.
For example, when I started surfing the net in 1996, I set up a Filemaker database for all the interesting web sites I might want to come back to that includes the URL and a text description of the database. Over the years I have about 7,000 entries in the database. What is interesting is to go back and see what sorts of sites I was visiting say in 1998.
Whenever I see an interesting article with information that I may want to access again, I just copy all the text into another database along with the URL of the information. That database now has about 40,000 entries since I started keeping it in 1999.
I have another database that I started keeping in 1992 with all the phone calls that I make and receive and another database. That was very useful to me when I was a project manager and had to keep track of about twenty subcontractors and my agreements with them on what deliverables I would get from them and when they were due.
I have another database that I just call text where I edit text files for emails I send, or slashdot posts like this one before I post them. That one has about 30,000 entries so far.
I even have a database that I keep of slashdot stories that I have submitted and which ones have been accepted. Periodically I do a dump of that database to my web site.
I like to write non-fiction, and if I'm working on an article, then I have a web site set up where I can use a personal Wikipedia to keep track of references and footnotes like this one I have been working on for a while of Stanley Ann Dunham, the mother of President Obama, who grew up in my hometown of Ponca City or this one on the Pioneer Woman Models that I recently had accepted for publication in Oklahoma Magazine.
I don't recommend this methodology for everyone, but it works for me.
In soviet russia, your brain has YOU!
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
Freemind for organising and planning things.
tiddlywiki for random useful information I've come across.
As to remembering. I don't, I have delegated that process to other people.
Deleted
My life is overflowing with paper records, so I took a few steps get some control:
1 - switched to paperless statements whenever possible, and auto pay everything.
2 - used a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner to quickly and easily scan in existing (and new) paper, and use Acrobat to OCR it. ScanSnaps are worth their weight in gold
3 - heavily rely upon OS X's Spotlight feature to find crap
4 - use Bento to to get a grip on projects. I highly recommend Bento for organizing structured info. It's a simple database to be sure, but very, very easy to use.
Write the things you need to do down on postits. Put into a "todo" area on a door or something. Then take two[1] out, stick them into in-progress and do them[2].
Each one completed gets a sweetie.
[1] Limit the number, and do the important ones first. The more you have going on, the longer it takes and the less you actually get done.
[2] keep it real, and short. A week or two at most. Y'know, break things down into stuff that can actually be done.
Deleted
The one thing you really need in this day and age is a way to keep track of passwords. Then you can have long, un-guessable, unique passwords for all those blogs, wikis, e-mail accounts, and online calendars you set up. And no, using "e-mail me whichever minor variation on my standard password I chose for this site but can't figure out right now" is not good enough. I use KeePass (or, as I prefer to capitalize it, KeepAss) which works great as a secure password database. I keep three or four copies of the database on various thumb drives in various locations (can't be too careful, you know, if some building burns down). Even if your mail account is hacked, they're not going to get your bank account too. The peace of mind will in itself help you stay organized!
A personal Subversion (source control) database is great for things like lists, letters, papers, coding projects, Ph.D. theses, etc.
As for photos? I just stick them in a dated folder when the camera starts getting full. Once a year, I pick the ten or fifteen best and put them in an online gallery for family and friends to view. I assure you, that's all anyone wants to see, and nobody cares if they're not in perfect chronological order.
You shall see a cow on the roof of a cotton house.
This has been working well for me for approximately 8 years or so:
http://boykin.acis.ufl.edu/~boykin/2005/projects/directory_policy/policy.html
The main benefit of organizing by year is that once the year is gone, you know that directory will never be written to again, so backing up becomes so easy, I actually very regularly do it. A little rsync, a few computers, and periodic DVD burning means I haven't lost any data in a long time.
jabber: johnynek@jabber.org
I use the Evernote web site, Mac application and iPhone app to capture information from the web, from images, from PDFs and assorted notes. The apps sync to the Evernote site and any image or PDF is OCRed so I can search on any text in them. I use multiple tags on each record so, combined with the ability to search any text contained in the item, I can easily locate anything in my data store. A day-to-day example is, I take a picture of any prescription label I get with my phone and send it to Evernote. Then, I can easily find it wherever I am when I need a refill. I also scan in receipts and then destroy the originals to cut down on the pile of paper that used to obscure my desk.
I keep track of to-do lists with Remember the Milk. I've never liked the name but it's the best task manager I've used. I can set up multiple folders for GTD-type use and it also has an iPhone app. I can create, maintain and complete apps on the phone and it pushes a notification each morning with the tasks that are due that day.
Not affiliated with either company, just a satisfied user.
There are various sayings: "A mechanics car", "a builders house" referring to the fact these items are often in states of disrepair.
For my situation as an information technologist I:
- am not OCD or driven in other "special" ways.
- pour everything I can into my job
- follow very formalized process at work. versioning, policies etc.
At home, I am the opposite. My excuse is there is nothing left after work. My music is scattered far and wide, I own the same CD twice, I have downloaded albums more than once, my finances are in disarray - I do pay bills in good faith, but I loose them. I dont track services on my car and it is frequently very overdue in road tax, maintenance etc.
I do use formalized process for coding at home (hobby stuff) but do so little these days. The one constant is insurance. I make sure that is up to par.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Part of information management is making that information useful. To that end, I keep track of mistakes I've made and how they can be prevented in the future. Not only is organization of incoming information important, but what you do with that information.
Every once in a while I review the list of errors and corrective actions to verify that I'm not repeating mistakes.
Except for the stuff I forget, which must not have mattered anyway or I would have remembered it. And if I really should have remembered it my wife reminds me in such a way as to make certain that I never forget it again.
Works for me.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I use Evernote (http://www.evernote.com) for just about everything. It allows me to easily combine text (vast majority of my notes are plaintext, obviously) with images, files, voice notes, etc. It's a great tool that stores everything in the cloud and syncs to clients on Mac, PC, and most mobile platforms. I've been really happy with the solution.
For task management, I bounced back and forth between OmniFocus on the Mac and Outlook on the PC... haven't really found a solution I'm happy with. As a result, I pretty much use an old-school paper to-do list that gets regenerated daily in a Moleskine-style notebook.
jrjBlog
When I first started using a feed reader, I was very worried about the prospect of forgetting information I'd learned from various articles that I found important. I'm not super old yet, so I was interested in everything from raising kids to getting a job to preparing for retirement. Initially I tried to use Del.icio.us to manage this information, but found its lack of built-in heirarchy to be a big negative.
So I started using JotSpot (now Google Sites) to keep track of everything. From experiences (how to interact with the opposite gender) to academics (programming!) to big life goals, all of the most important "revelations" and things I learn go on there. This personal wiki is absolutely invaluable to me in helping with my peace-of-mind and future planning. Someday, I hope that it will work as a sort of legacy... maybe a distilled version of what I've recorded could be passed on to my kids as a kind of "historical record".
And Google Tasks is awesome. Another commenter mentioned OrgMode, but I find the online nature of Tasks to be absolutely essential. When I sit down to do work, the first thing I do is open a separate tab with Tasks in fullscreen [simple] mode (mail.google.com/tasks/ig), make sure everything's prioritized properly, and begin.
and I ignore most of the rest. I keep all my email in text files and generally just grep them when II need to call up a piece of information (such as an order date) that I have forgotten.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
1. It has to break things into enough separate categories that you aren't overwhelmed with massive lists.
2. You have to be able to have the system with you at all times, so you can make note of things as they come up.
Whether you use something paper-based, text-file-on-computer-based or app-on-an-iPhone based is really a matter of personal preference. I like pen and paper, but maybe I'm just old-fashioned like that.
Isn't that what your brain is for?
For work related items, yes I use file and folders with appropriate text/documents or calendars with reminders but for you personal life? Are you serious?
Did you come to me because you have a brain?
-- Cheers!
I use Microsoft OneNote. You can have notebooks for various projects, and each can have various tabs and groups of tabs. Each tab can have a number of pages (and groups of pages). Each page can be a mix of text, graphics, sound clips, etc. You can set it up so that PrintScreen captures to Onenote. Apparently, OneNote is also good with a tablet computer as it does handwriting recognition and drawing tools. It can sync with Outlook for task management.
... if only there were a good linux equivalent.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Important information you just know, everything else is not relevant.
For programming projects, I store them in SVN, or if they are small, I stick them in my 'programming' folder. When I check out from SVN, they go in programming too.
For photographs, I throw out all but the best, and store them in my pictures folder, with a date and descriptive name.
For languages, I keep a small notebook that fits in my pocket and every time I hear a word that jumps out at me, I write it in the notebook. Eventually all of it has to go into the brain, so that is a temporary storage (for Chinese characters, flashcards work better than a notebook). Then you can throw your notes away, and the dictionary holds the stuff you don't know.
These are all pretty standard methods.
For art, I take a picture of the stuff I like and store it in my 'art' folder. Then I throw the paper away. Part of being organized is throwing stuff away. Don't try to hold onto everything. Most of it doesn't matter. My art doesn't matter, it's just fun.
For math, try to figure out what the core concepts are, then remember which book you have to look in to figure out the specific details (of equations or whatever).
For events in life, keep a journal/blog/whatever. Am I missing anything?
Qxe4
i keep my most important documents crumpled up in my important paper basket. crumpled paper makes the document more 3d'ish and easier to find. i leave determining the fractal dimension of a crumpled piece of paper as an exercise for the reader.
I have Asperger's and tend to be rather OCD about this kind of stuff. I managed to cut myself away from this kind of information insanity and alphabetizing everything (or putting in meticulous time order, whichever fit the documents/events) by just letting go. Throwing out stuff, and not taking new in unless absolutely needed.
Those that I need like family pictures, documents to do with work/hobbies/bills/warranties and such are organized in the simplest manner possible (iPhoto for pics, tree structure for docs). Spotlight search (Mac) used for finding stuff.
Birthdays synced to the calendar on my phone, any scheduled events likewise, and possible to take short notes on the phone if needed.
I found that I vastly prefer using a small (A5) notebook for most note taking (school/work/ideas). A moleskine (or something in that size category) fits better in the pocket, though.
By cutting down on saved/organized info I got more time to do things I actually LIKE doing (as opposed to feeling an uncontrollable urge to organize something).
... But sadly when I read your question I thought of myself.
It depends upon what you're tracking. Blog for writings (old school papers and new), KeePass for logins, XML and Subversion for tracking books, CDs, games, gas/fillups, technical projects, and the like. (It was Excel, then Access, then SQL, but XML is line with my technical interests and allows much more flexibility.)
If you're thinking about using Web sites, make sure there's a good way to get your data out. Otherwise, if you're serious about it, you'll end up wasting time when a better option comes along, or you're forced to migrate.
But if you can just learn to let things go, I think you'll be much happier.
emacs org-mode. Thank you Carsten.
I just leave the important emails unread on my phone until I action them.
Goes into Omni Focus
The number two is to have a solid back-up system including off site.
My photo's are so manifold that most are on a couple of TB drives, the most recent several 100GB also on the laptop.
The trick is a logic nesting of the folders, in this case first the name of the camera, then the year, next the month and possibly a subject.
When a specific subject is worth marking I append it to the number of the file, a quick CTRL+F in the file manager will bring it up.
There are document folders with distinctive names like company name, then the subject. In case of a simple thing I shouldn't forget I might send myself a mail, the Thunderbird search option is very helpful.
For the more private stuff like tax returns and banking I use a Truecrypt folder.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I run a little program on my Kubuntu laptop called Basket. It is no more than a container for every kind of information imaginable - text, images, links, you name it - but it has been incredible in helping me organize things. I tried everything from pen-and-paper to Lotus Organizer, and at one point started to build my own application just for keeping a diary and similar stuff. But Basket simply has it all.
In fact, it comes with a set of files that you can import and implement David Allen's Getting Things Done (see note above).
Highly recommended. And I have no affiliations with the developers.
for appointments & important & immediate todos i use whatever apps my current phone has
TODO.TXT unimportant todos, like bands, books, films i really want to see or find, projects i'll never do
REF.TXT any information that i couldn't just google quickly, specs, solutions & workarounds i've found, short refs for programming languages, list of words i always spell wrong, contact information, boring personal things like passwords and account information
DIARY.TXT personal things i'm more interested and involved in, like diary stuff, ideas, writing, what i thought of a book, some emails from gf
BITS folder for diagrams, scans, and other non-text stuff that the text files relate to, completed schoolwork i want to keep, screenshots of online registrations & receipts, also all my photos
the text files don't have complex hierarchies, i just search them. i sometimes add a few extra keywords to an entry to make search easier
To keep track of homework assignments, I developed a small app called hws that manages classes and due dates.
You are young, and have not met the big disasters of life yet, like a divorce with children, the death of a loved one, the bad decisions with life-long consequences. At your age I liked keeping track and archives, even bank statements many years back. Not a good idea. Your past starts to grow on you, and can slow you down on your way to new pastures. So remember to build in mechanisms for forgetting all but the most essential stuff. Use Facebook and Linkedin to keep track of people, keep some nice pictures, but learn to delete and forget. You will thank me later.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
I find it amazing that so many people have responded with such low tech solutions. I use my calender function in my Iphone to remember stuff that I'm supposed to be doing. It doesn't do a great job (I had a task scheduled for today and didn't remember it till I read this) but it's better than post it notes. shoehornjob
The ability to store information in a myriad of ways is great - when it's necessary. I understand the effect a little OCD can have on you though. It's not difficult to find or create software to keep track of every minute detail about your music, your hobbies, your household inventory, your finances, and everything else in your life.
The part you appear to have trouble with is determining the degree of detail that you really need to manage. It's like scope creep - you can always add another column for more data. But do you really need all that data? When and how will you use it?
Everyone who advocates simplifying is on track but saying it and doing it are totally different for someone with OCD tendencies.
Pick one area and examine it - music for example. Do you really need all the covers and lyrics and notes that accompany an album? Or just the barebones of: artist, album, song titles? If music is your passion you might need all that information.
Or look at finances. Sure, you could make an entry into something like Quicken for every penny of income and expense and have a great record for taxes and all kinds of things. But do you need that much information? As a student, I suspect that a notebook or a spreadsheet with each month's bills and income listed and a balanced bank account would work fine.
As someone with a bit of OCD and ADD, it is tempting to try to keep track of every little detail of my life on a computer but is it necessary? I have discovered that it is not.
Also, if your paper habits are messy, that's a good sign that eventually your electronic habits will follow the same path. I find that, after the first week or two of great data entry, my electronic systems become as tiresome, if not more so, as my paper methods. Who wants to fire up an app to enter the $5 latte they bought that day? So, that receipt gets set aside until there are more. Next thing I know, I have the same piles of paper I've always had and the weight of a huge amount of data entry besides.
Once you know what you truly need to track and maintain, then you can look for the appropriate solution(s).
I've found that I only use organization solutions which I can have access to at any time. For example, a todo list is of little use to me if it can only be found on a single desktop computer. Because of this, I've found that solutions which allow access via my smartphone work best for me. That being said, it sucks entering information in via a tiny touchscreen or keypad. The obvious compromise, it seems, is to use web-based services that can sync with smartphone apps; cloud computing in other words. There are a lot of services that offer this, but I've only found a few that fit my last criteria that the apps be functional during times with no or limited internet access. These are as follows:
Total cost is $10.00, not including the USB stick. And it seems to cover all the various forms of personal data.
-Grym
Anyone knows where I can get memtest for my brain?
Dilbert RSS feed
But I realise I also have a little OCD, and struggle a bit to keep on top of information (whether hobbies or personal life) in a way that I feel I have complete control over. So how do you all do it?
I have a prescription. Works like a charm, aside from some tenseness in the jaw and occasional vertigo.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I think it's on the GRUB menu somewhere, but I can't remember the key to access the menu when I boot up my mind in the morning.
http://hiveminder.org/
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
I write everything down
Primarily I use this pen/notebook setup I got from OfficeMax
Stack of Pocket Notebooks OM96732 for $8.29 - http://imgur.com/yZwyL.jpg
Divoga Tribute Pen Set for $9.99 - http://i.imgur.com/WW8jg.jpg
Then put the two together, leaving the pen twisted open. - http://imgur.com/IqMCx.jpg
Generally writing important stuff on the right side pages
Less important stuff on the left side of pages
Lists in the back pages of the notepad
And when less important/urgent stuff accumulates I either
* Fold the top right corner of the page, so I can quickly flip to the current page.
* Transfer all the important stuff to a current page, rip the page out, fold it in half, and put it into my wallet.
And whenever convinient, I process those less important/urgent items reference.
1) Type it up in notepad
2) Copy that to Excel
3) In the second column of excel, I type in on of these folders:
OntTheGo, SpeakWith, HouseWork, Computer, Reference
4) Copy that back to Notepad, and save it as a TXT file
5) Import that TXT file to http://toodledo.com/connect_text.php
6) Go through each folder, and then "Star" whatever looks important/urgent
And then either carry that around in my iPod Touch $149 refurbished
http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals/ipod
Or pay $15 a year to Toodledo, for the ability to print out formatted folded booklets.
http://www.toodledo.com/booklet.php
You are on the highway headed strait to Nervous Breakdown City if you think that keeping track of all those devices and methods you've mentioned is going to be possible throughout your life. I recommend you take a timeout and get into Zen Buddism or Stoicism. A very good example of the basic principles of those applied to modern life you can find here, an article on low information diet by author Tim Ferriss.
I've been into computers and modern information technology since 24 years and have come back to reducing the material goods I own and the stuff I worry about to the amount that I had when I started studying. 99% of the people I meet in everyday life continously bite off more than they can chew, raking away upwards of 11 hours per day with studies, work, yoga, jogging, carousing with buddies every odd night, gym, mingling with dozens of art and media projects at a time, networking, family and tending to their S.O., etc. ... and you my friend sound a bit like one of the lot.
Mind you, I do keep notes of everyday things - in one single book that I carry around with me. All goes in there, aside from some notes I take on my blackberry and less than a handfull of textfiles on Google Apps and my PC when I haven't got the book on me. I spread my to-do lists that way too, which keeps the items on them below 20 at all times - a strategy I highly recommend to *anyone*, as long 2-do lists don't get done. I've had that blank spiralbind artscetch notebook for 6 years now and I expect it to fill up within the next two years or so. Then all get a new one. Makes maybe a dozen notebooks for my entire life, which actually is a reasonable amount if you ask me. They also serve as a sort of diary, which I've come to like.
Digital Life wise I use google apps for a few online notes and Git to version and sync my Workfiles, Music and Fotos across my MacMini and my Ubuntu Laptop. I do have a delicious account, but if I'm honest, I hardly revisit more than 5 Links of more than 200 any more than twice a year - and even then it's only out of curiosity about what was so important back then. I too have upwards of 60 software projekts that I started throughout the last decade and have never finished, most of which I archived away last year. I still have 10 or so lying around in my 'Work' folder and i've dragged around more webdomains than I will ever be able to handle ever since the first dot-com bubble. I expect to get two or three of my personal projects on the road within the next 2 years if I'm lucky, and by now I'm smart enough to know that they'll only gain critical mass if I stick with those from there on out. ... Or do you think the Kernel or the Blender 3D Toolkit would've come this far if Linus Torwalds or Ton Roosendahl would be switching projects every odd month and caring about every fart on their facebook network?
No Sir. There is a lot of productivity advice out there and a bucket load of Lifehacks you can use to trick your life and yourself into getting things done, but the first move is to reduce the things you want to handle to that handfull that you really care about to see them through even if things get rough or you lose your job or switch careers. If you don't do that, no amount of tooling, portable computers and scheduling strategies will be able to get you on track because you yourself are the bottleneck.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Gmail and a carefully organized NAS storage box. I break it down to /area code/ house number/ interest (portfolio, work, images + photos). I move around pretty often and generally always remember what apartment i was living in when i create something or have photos I'm looking for.
I have looked for a way to keep everything in one place, but it has always turned out better for me to keep things separate. The main thing I do is to have certain programs pop up in the morning, as well several times a day to keep reminding me of daily events I need to do. My favorites are two that I wrote myself - a calendar that allows direct entries into each day and a daily minute by minute reminder program of things to do. I signal everything from lunch time to to mow time to shower time to floss time to bed time. Scheduling programs truly make life simple to manage. I do ignore it sometimes. If an event I have entered becomes a nuisance, I delete it.
I keep logins, passwords and account numbers in KeePass. I keep notes in PSPad. I keep notes that need accompanying graphics in the free TreeDBnotes. I keep programming examples in another PSPad that is separate from the other one. I keep phone numbers in AddressCube. Note categories can be a pain, so I add new categories as I find I need them. Here are some below:
Addresses.note
Animals.note
Banks.note
Birds.note
Browsers.note
Camera.note
Computer Misc.note
Dates.note
Financial.note
Flying.note
Freeware.note
Ham Radio.note
Health.note
Miscellaneous.note
Misc Settings.note
Omens.note
Passwords.note
Phone.note
Programming.note
Purchases.note
Recipes.note
Remailer.note
Source Forge.note
To Do.note
Vocabulary.note
One thing that has always eventually burned me is to delete information I think that I no longer need. It is best to have a file to put EVERYTHING you decide to discard before deleting it. Call it your 'UnBurned Bridges' file.
I use a tree-based organizer called "MyLife", with a "node" (folder) for each main topic, and subtopics as needed. Example: Cars * AlfaRomeo * RollsRoyce * Dodge Dart etc.
Journler changed my life. Will move to MacJournal soon since Journler is not being updated anymore.
I've had a file open in one window (text or Word doc, doesn't matter), and used MS search in another window to look for a unique word in the file. Search often won't find it even when I can see it plain as day.
- TaskCoach (www.taskcoach.org) for anything that warrants a task list (desktop + iPod Touch app is a great combo!)
;-) Also, I find that with some hobbies and interests it's helpful to not use a tool or keep track for a while because it's a good way to let the more important things rise to the top and weed out the things that don't matter so much.
- Dropbox for getting to files from everywhere
- {Ne,E}vernote - Evernote on my work computer (WinXP) & Nevernote on my home linux machine w/ Shutter for screenshots
- text notes on my iPod Touch for random, non-sensitive info I need close at hand
- email (IMAP + local backups)
But as many others have said, my brain is by far the most useful tool.
Ha! How very insightful! (No mod points ATM).
On topic: I have different machines for different tasks - if I can't keep up with what happens on them, so be it. As long as you can decide on what is really important, you'll be fine, even if you "miss" stuff.
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
I use the Mp3 player for voice recordings/notes when I am out and about. I use the calendar on the wall for appointments, grocery lists, rent amounts, and such. I use facebook notes for info that I don't care about with regards to privacy. I try to follow the engineering principle of KISS or keep it simple stupid when dealing with the volume of information.
I regret that I only have one mod point to give per post.
I use the power of my mind!!!
It's not going so great.
A very simple, offline wiki is well-suited to recording all sorts of information.
Since all I need is text with tags and the occasional equation in LaTeX, I found that Tiddlywiki works great. It's an amazing self contained wiki using only HTML and Javascript. The main idea is to be able to very quickly develop lists, outlines, etc. in a browser I have open anyway.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Man, I am always booting into the wrong Brain Operating System in the morning. I need to remember to change the GRUB default to my morning OS, but between showering and racing through breakfast, it always slips my mind by the time I run out the door.
I remember using google desktop search once. It was awesome. However, in order to work it had to phone home, which is a deal breaker. Something that will not attempt to contact the outside world, and still searches pretty good would work well for most information that you want to keep.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Q: How Do You Manage the Information In Your Life?
A: I tell other people on basis of impulse. Garbage in, but seldom garbage out.
All rites reversed 2010
Don't remember stuff you don't need to. Most of my technical memory is in books and websites I have bookmarked. Can't remember some obscure API in the javax namespace? Who cares? I have a book for that. Can't remember that particular syntax in PHP? Who cares? Google it.
But the stuff I can't look up online, like what's going on with my friends, who's dating who, etc. That info is the important info in my life, and it's the info I commit to wetware.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
I try to keep stuff simple and make it a natural part of my routine (that way its gets done). Plus I try and have a backup system, just in case.
- Gmail for notes to myself and digital emphemera
- delicious for bookmarks, internet links, recipes, articles (the feed of my links is backed up via email to my gmail)
- 2x hard drives for photos & music (don 't worry about movies, since I only watch them once). Flickr also for photos.
- Dropbox for all recent documents (the type of stuff you would find in PC's "my documents" folder) - this syncs across my pc, netbook, and allows access to my documents via my phone.
- a big drawer for all hard copy receipts & documents. once a year at tax time it gets sorted and the stuff I want to keep gets put into a folder for that year.
They key is that all electronic stuff is searchable, so need to worry about tags, folder structures or databases (with the exception of folders for mp3 albums).
Everything is backed up (with the exception of hard copy stuff - too lazy to scan it)
I like the idea of evernote - but what happens if evernote goes down? Everything will be lost. That said I am a little reliant on Gmail. But if google goes down, then the internet has imploded anyway.
I'll see your hokum and raise you a boondoggle.
I know I will get a lot of flack for not offering a Linux, FOSS, or "cloud" based solution but I really feel OneNote is the best personal information organization tool out there. I keep all my class notes, personal records, everything in there. You can attach or link to external documents just by dragging and dropping. It automatically synchronizes between my laptop and desktop. My laptop is actually a Tablet PC so I can hand-write my class notes right on the page. Then I can search for words within that handwriting instantly. If you drag a picture onto the page then you can even search for words within that picture. So you can just take a picture of someone's card with your cell phone, drag that into OneNote anywhere you like and be able to find that instantly later. OneNote is basically an outlining program but it has a lot of features of a word processor. However, do not attempt to use it as a word processor because it is not designed for that. You can organize all your stuff into "Notebooks" which constitutes anything under a particular folder you simply designate as a notebook. Each Notebook can be anywhere you want to store it. Then you create "sections" within that notebook which are each an individual file. Then you create pages in that section. The pages can even be organized into a hierarchical structure with up to three levels. Then you put your data on the pages in an outline or table format. You can put just about anything you want onto those pages. You can copy web pages or embed pictures or other files. When you double click on those files they open up in their native application.
Believe me I am no Microsoft apologist. I use to have a poster on my wall that said "Bill Gates is the Devil." But I love OneNote. I have tried many other outlining, note-taking, document organizing programs in my life. None were anywhere near as good or as flexible as OneNote. You can check it out here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/
I tried PIMs, Outliners, Wikis, HTML servers, etc, etc, etc. Dozens of things. I finally wrote a Python script that does what I need pretty well. Has a list of tasks ordered by date. One click date updating, an associated text box that I can cut and paste into, and a launch pad for computer operations related to the task. Functionally much like the Windows 3.1 Cardfile program, but more capable and doesn't need 16 bit OLE that hasn't worked in any OS since Windows 98 in order to launch operations.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Hrmm in addition, I use Google Calendar
With this rather rare but awesome Calendar app on my iPod Touch
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sched-sync-google-calendar/id331446738?mt=8
Good interface, and it works flawlessly offline
Is that you, Sheldon?
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
voice recordings? tablet notes?? How about this: fucking pay attention!!!
the people I know who fucking remember things are not talking into their tricorders, put two and two together and put that shit away and fucking listen!!
I keep project notes and action items in a single text file. JEDIT provides superb outline capability (once you turn folding on). A bit of syntactic coding on action items (i.e., each one ends with a date {09/14/10}) enables me to find them quickly through search (JEDIT shows all hits in a list) or using a simple script that retrieves the dated item and the context (i.e., the parents). Events and meetings go into a shared calendar, to coordinate with colleagues. Best of luck on the hunt for your method of organizing life.
You may get a lot of advice on different tools to use, but ultimately there's no substitute for actually being organized. That really great note-taking application or task list manager or photo manager might help you simplify some part of your process, but if you're not organized, an organizational tool won't make you organized.
But maybe your question is, how do I actually get organized? Well, there's no single way. It depends on what kind of information you're trying to keep track of and for what purpose. Taking notes for school? Well you'll need to know yourself well enough to know what works for you, and what you'll actually remember. A good place to start, though, is by writing it by hand in whichever way seems most natural to you, and then going home later and typing up your notes into a a form that you might understand even if you'd never attended the classes. Once you do that, you might find that you never need to revisit your notes because writing them and then rewriting them made you memorize them. But then that's just one suggestion, you'll have to find what works for you through some trial and error.
Keeping your computer organized? I find good old directories are highly underrated. Everyone these days want something fancy and automatic, but al well-chosen directory structure can go a long way.
And as some people have mentioned, when trying to be organized, what you choose to throw away is as important as sorting the things you keep. If you keep every file and every note you generate, trying to organize it all will be overwhelming. I used to have a rule about stuff in my closet: if I haven't used it or thought about it in 2 years, then i don't need it and should probably throw it away. Of course, there's less of a need to throw away digital stuff, but you can archive it off to some other medium and forget about it.
Shirt pocket mini notebook. Larger notebooks. Sticky notes. Random sheets of paper. Index cards, lots of these! Chaos, but I know where everything is. In my profession, I use a Rolodex program, but all the really important contact info goes onto a paper Rolodex.
Nope. I've David.
But if Sheldon does this too, then he's got good taste.
Never could understand why someone would buy expensive notepads, for a system which theoretically should be burning through these pages like crazy.
Even with 600 pages per pack, I still buy atleast two of these per year.
Best personal information manager I've ever seen bar none. Costs $99 but its worth every penny. Easy to use, intuitive interface, that you can organize the information the way YOU want to not the way the program says you have to.
www.Migrainesoft.com - Computer giving you a headache? We can fix that!
I juggle multiple projects, grants, articles in progress, conference presentations, you name it. For the ones that have any kind of paper attached to them (receipts, notes, annotated printouts, whatever) I put all the paper in a single large ziploc bag. At the very front goes a single sheet with the name of the project and the last date I changed the contents.
Throw all the ziplocs in a box. When you need to work on project x, rummage through the box and grab that ziploc & it's all there.. If the project generates too much paper for a single ziploc, then it's probably big and complicated enough to need a file drawer, and you're unlikely to forget that it's in progress..
Once a month or so have a complete rummage through the box - stuff you've abandoned can be pulled out and tossed or archived in some way, and you'll be reminded about other things you have in progress that have been off your mind for a while..
Or was that a Big Bang reference ;D
Hard to tell if I'm being too OCD/geeky on Slashdot.
You're probably going to hate this idea, but I manage most things through M$ Outlook. Tasks, appointments, address book, and notes all sync up nicely with home and work PCs as well as my Win6.5 mobile. For collections of stuff, I've been trying to organize everything in folder hierarchies by year and month for things like photos, by genre for things like music and video. But... Honestly I've gotten lazy and occasionally overwhelmed trying to categorize things, so a lot of digital crap just goes in a big pile I'm hoping I'll have an app. automatically sort out some day.
But then I figured out the trick to managing it successfully, which is to develop an even bigger tendency to procrastinate to serve as part of a counter-balance of passive-aggressiveness to the OCD part of your personality!
Just remember, whenever somebody asks you to do something, be sure to remind them that they're enabling your OCD by requiring you to accomplish something!
I'm honest enough to admit I lie to myself.
I still organize like humans have done for a couple hundred years - in files. I have a filing cabinet with all the bits I like to save - manuals, humorous bits, medical records, Christmas receipts. Everything digital is on a server - in similarly labeled folders.
I've started using Evernote for the stuff that doesn't seem to "fit" anywhere else, but I still organize it. I don't believe in the "throw it in a box and use search". That's a lazy way to keep more than you need, and to wade mindlessly through non-pertinent data. It doesn't play well with others, so - for example - I still have to enter data into my contact book even after I scan it into EN. I'm to old to start over and put everything in, and I don't trust the data format anyway.
For day to day stuff, Google calendar/mail/tasks is what keeps things running. I'm not really a "cloud" kind of person, and occasionally it bugs me that it could all be gone, but if I lost everything at Google today, it would be only the fleeting bits of daily life, as anything of value I strip out and store separately.
My advice - don't trust computer labels and don't trust the cloud. Make a solid folder system for your files - hard and soft - and stick to it. Back up the stuff you can't re-create, it's actually not that hard (I have less than 70GB of data that really matters, and half of that is probably not all that significant). Every few years, make sure you go through and prune the tree to get rid of stuff that really doesn't matter anymore.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
rm -rf *
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Fengoffice, MyClientBase, and important todonow stuff is on the desktop until it gets finished and filed. When the desktop gets too full of junk (three columns is my max) that's the signal to stop starting new and get to finishing up open projects.
As for personal stuff, I have a /home/me/mycrap directory that is chock full of stuff from the last ten years that is organized somewhat like a chimp throws feces. I leaf through it every now and again, but organized it aint..
Imagine a bookcase, each shelf housing a row of 3-ring binders, the binders of varying width (1", 2", 3", etc.), each devoted to a different collection of related items, the spines labeled to indicate the subject of the collection (Notes on Books I've Read; Daily Diary/Journal; Favorite Recipes; Vitamin D; etc.). Call the binders 'Notebooks'. Divide each notebook into sections, with labeled tab separators, as many separators as you need to organize the collection logically and usefully. Each section contains contains pages, the pages each with a title to indicate its contents. Oversimplified, that physical organization, transmogrified into a computer program, gets you Microsoft OneNote. Many features to ease the process of building and adding material to the notebooks, and finding the information you've stored in them. When the program is closed, if a thought occurs or an item of information in any electronic form comes up, clicking an icon in the notification tray pops up a small blank note page for writing your thought or cut/pasting whatever information into the note page. It's automatically stored in an "Unfiled Notes" notebook for later transfer to or as a page in the appropriate section of the appropriate notebook. Simple to start getting organized, its depth of features you can pick up as you need more functionality. See http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/. (I'm not associated with Microsoft, just a professor who uses the program).
I use mGSD (formerly known as MonkeyGTD) for my to-do lists. It lets me keep track of tasks and organize them by projects and by action. It even has some support for dependencies. I can keep it on USB and it's portable between systems. It does take just a bit of effort to understand how to get into it, but once you do, it's pretty intuitive.
For organizing notes, I use Tiddlywiki, the platform on which mGSD is built on.
For keeping track of web sites, I mostly rely on Google Reader.
And for the stuff that I want to remember, I blog. Yeah, I know, blogging, especially the personal kind, doesn't get a whole lot of respect anymore, but I've been able to look back into entries five years ago and say, "Whoa, I did that."
I'm still looking for a good solution for keeping track of files and documents.
I upload it to facebook, then sit back as marketers from all companies that facebook sells my information to, organize it, categorize etc. I keep track of what advertisements I am served up as I browse, to see how good a job they are doing,
This is a good place to start in my opinion -- http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7653564598486729089#
One of the best software products I've ever learned is git at http://git-scm.com/
I've been moving all of my non-media information over to a few personal git repositories, which I store for a few bucks a month on rsync.net.
I have a freeform to-do text file on my Mac. I've got it bound to a hotkey in Quicksilver so I can summon it up and start typing pretty easily. This also keeps longer bits of text for Stuff I Might Do Someday. It's more of a "random braindumps" file these days. It's RTF so I can drop in reference imagery now and then.
I also use Astrid on my Android phone as a todo (and shopping) list; I've got it synching with rememberthemilk.com. This is not synched in any way with the aforementioned text file. Sometimes I'll write out some Things To Do in that file, then immediately turn around and cut and paste them into RTM. I keep on meaning to play with some todo programs that could synch with RTM and possibly make this easier, but I haven't bothered.
Long projects tend to end up with a chart quickly scribbled out and taped onto the wall or kept in the appropriate sketchbook (I'm mostly an artist). It helps a lot, halfway through, to look at the pile of checked-off items so I can sit down and draw another one. Said long projects also get directories of their own in my art directory. Well, actually they get directories of their own in the directory for the year I start them, and a link to that in my art directory; I like to file that stuff away by year.
In general I try to keep notes for a project in the same place as the other stuff related to it.
And I try to just not worry about a bunch of stuff. What matters? Keep track of that.
egypt urnash minimal art.
...because I use Lotus Domino/Notes. Creating new databases with specialized forms and views takes, oh, maybe an hour. As owner/operator of two business, one new start-up, plus sitting on both public and private boards of directors, I never thought I'd be this busy. But, I know exactly what I have to do every day with the built-in calendar and eMail. When I send an eMail, it's logged, so I can find it (and the responses).
As one example: I keep a Technology database of hard-won knowledge and acquired information about fixing computers (my own, private Knowledgebase). When (as just the other day) I discover a new solution (the nasty uses by malware authors of the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options registry key, and how to clean it out), I document it, so I have the solution on my notebook wherever I go. When I find new information and add it to the database in the field, it's immediately copied back to the server for others to use when I return to the office.).
I expect many of you to issue the usual gripes and outrageous claims about Lotus Domino/Notes, but unless you really build apps for it in a hour, you don't even understand the power of the product. I've been using it since 1992, and it's STILL the primary tool on every computer in my company.
Thats right: I manage the complex and ever changing drawings and specs connected to construction-architecture projects and find post-it notes and kanbantool.com (essentialy post it notes for your computer) VERY useful. Kanban is a Japanese based method of quality control, management and "lean manufacturing method which allowed companies like Toyota to outperform their competitors and gain immense growth." I find using actual post-it notes work well and is portable and legibly convenient when placed at the bottom of my computer monitor. I update these frequently and consult the computer version for more long term strategic planning. Switching screens is such a chore and the real post-it balance quite well the visual dynamic of screen info. If kanban was a dashboard app it would be even better.
Good health and a bad memory.
But I've started using MS One-Note. Handles Voice, text, URL's, Vids, Graphics and almost anything else. Nice thing is, you can buy the Home/Teacher edition and be able to install it onto 3 systems at home.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Let's take this up a level of abstraction. What categories of one's life need a formal organizational approach? My list:
- Time. Couldn't live for a week without a calendaring system
- Secured Private Data (credentials, SSN, etc.)
- Personal Notes. Info I want to remember, ideas I need to jot down, interesting websites.
- Useful Files. Things I need to access to in multiple contexts, such as ebooks, tax returns, etc.
I don't keep a To Do list, nor Bookmarks; these things are covered by managing Time and Personal Notes.
As to technology, I try to find things that span all the platforms of mobile, home, and work currently at use. Increasingly, that's becoming cloud-based apps. Services such as Dropbox have become indispensible.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
All you need is a permanent relationship, girlfriend/wife, it don't matter, living together is enough. Eventually, YOUR ENTIRE FUCKING LIFE will be dictated and controlled by...THE BITCH. You won't have to remember a single thing, you'll be reminded thousands of times in advance, then get correction and critiques as you go on.
works better than any stupid computer crapola
The best I've found so far is gqueues. It integrates into Gmail and is simple with drag and drop. Other interesting ones are Thinking Rock (desktop app), php-gtd and gtdify, there is a new one coming out Nirvana. None of them are really what I am looking for though, they all miss something (clean interface, can add attachments, inter-task dependencies, drag and drop between unlimited sub-folders, etc).
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Google is your friend, IF you don't mind putting your stuff into the cloud. I keep my calendars, contacts and files and to-do lists, Having an Android phone makes all that information available on the go, too. Another tool I might recommend is the Personal Brain (www.thebrain.com), which is available as a free download. It is a mind-mapping application that allows you to relate anything you enter to anything else, in a visual format. I find it very useful for keeping track of interrelated tasks with lots of "moving parts" and pieces of information.
I've been working on loggingit.com for close to two years now.
It's really simple to keep track of stuff.
Encrypts too: http://blog.loggingit.com/2010/09/totally-private-blogging-ii-encryption
-- hardly any other similar web app seems to care about that.
Give it a try!
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Gmail: Emails and notes emailed to self then starred (backed up via pop retrieval)
Google Calendar: Appointments, bills due, contracts up, social stuff, todo's
Phone: Synced to google calendar
Home PC: Photos, documents, music, movies (all nightly mirrored to backup drives)
Home File Server: Important stuff (tax documents, photos etc) mirrored nightly to a couple hdd's in raid 1
Thats what i use on a daily basis, I dont use hard copy for anything, I too have a little OCD at times, but as other have said, you have to learn to let go.
I have many boxes of sorted car parts, spares etc in the shed, and sometimes you just have to chuck stuff.
No point keeping a history of every webpage you've looked at, or everything someone has said to you, just keep what is important and close to you, and enjoy life.
As a newbie in the digital frontier in the documented annals of your life, either get highly structured or embrace search. No one tool is going to save you from insanity. Please see Total Recall (the book: http://totalrecallbook.com/ not the movie, even though the movie is cool: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Recall the short story is better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Can_Remember_It_for_You_Wholesale). I do this for my kids- digitize EVERYTHING but save it with metatags so you can find it via search. Begin thinking of storing everything securely in the cloud- indexed first, then stored. Then it becomes searchable and retrievable from any device.
I've been in unix/linux administration and network engineering roles for years and keeping things easy and habit/routine is the way to go. Everytime someone has a technology idea for recording group/org/dept. information I first wonder how easy/habit forming it will be. If that element is missing then people will not take it up or resent it.
For multiple businesses and personal life technology........Google Apps...
Docs for Notes and general small file/archive backup.
Gmail for intereacting primarily with "businesses": web purchases, online billing. I star all the bills for easy referencing. Generally I don't use this email address for personal communications, but its there.
Voice again primarily for communicating with businesses/gov't, but I may check into using it more heavily via a WiFi connected Android phone.
Chrome as my default browser.
My next phone will be an Android for excellent interoperability with the above.
I'm also thinking about checking into Googles Picasa Web Albums for online photo management.
Have thought about using their Web site services in the past and will look into it again.
I'm also a student, and Zotero is possibly the best tool you can have for writing papers, it makes citing sources a snap, it's also a half decent replacement for OneNote. Also, Zotero is only a Firefox plugin, so it's cross platform, and it integrates into Word or OpenOffice, which is great, because I'm a Linux user. Zotero also has some cloud syncing abilities, but I like my research to stay where it is, in my encrypted home directory. On a random side note, I don't use Ubuntu, I use Arch Linux, but my home directory is encrypted using the same ecryptfs system.
For Personal stuff I use my WordPress blog, I have the "Press this" button in my favourites bar, I just save the links as drafts and revisit them later; I renamed the button to "Send to Blog". I use Blogilo (usually doesn't work right) and ScribeFire to post my entries, I like ScribeFire better because it's a Firefox plugin, so I don't even need to leave my browser.
Geeks don't grock information, they grep it.
Lots and lots of spreadsheets... and yes, even a spreadsheet to keep track of spreadsheets...
I think I need an intervention.
I'm not sure why everybody "don't worry about it." If you have things archived digitally it doesn't interfere with your life. And frequently proper documentation can be the difference between success and failure in a dispute with a company or organization or even a lawsuit. It's also often interesting to see how you were thinking or what you were doing in the past.
Personally, I store as much as my information in PDFs, JPGs, and select documents that I change often in MS Office formats (worse case scenario if MS goes out of business I can print them as PDFs too). The frequently-changed documents are the ones with the notes about miscellaneous projects I have. Most projects have their own documents. I organize these in a simple directory structure with folders such as Finances and Photos. I make sure to separate things I rarely or never access with subdirectories so they don't clutter things up. It's not as fancy as having everything on Evernote or the cloud but it works and is in your control.
For passwords: Roboforms
For family history, births, deaths dates of trips: Wiki (the whole extended family can maintain it)
For photographs: Adobe Lightroom (has wonderful database so you can actually find the pictures you are looking for)
For taxes: Turbo Tax
I use a personal wiki for stuff I don't mind sharing, and usually plain text files in ~/ideas or ~/notes or ~/journal for stuff I don't want to share (backed up occasionally to another system of course). Very rarely I need to use inkscape or dia or gimp to make an illustration of something, although I plan on doing a bit more of that now that I got a Cintiq (it was cheap at a computer swap meet, couldn't resist). It's far from ideal, but we don't have good enough software for that yet... at least, not software which I consider will have a long enough lifetime to be worth using (MS OneNote doesn't count because I don't run Windows often, and can't control what will happen to OneNote or any data that I might store in it. But the UI is slick.) Also I have been using toodledo on the iphone for really terse notes about random ideas that come up while I'm out and about (when I go hiking and get the endorphins going I come up with the most far-out ideas), and also for shopping lists. Again, not ideal, but at least it syncs to their site... I have been planning to write a better tool for that eventually, so I can control where the data is stored.
It's pretty much what they were made for.
That which is important, I remember. That which is not, I forget.
That is all.
With lifeforce.com ... your own customisable on-demand LRM (Life Relationship Manager) in the cloud. Build it Today!
Track GFROI e.g how many BJ's have you received in the past Fiscal Year compared to how much you have spent on your girlfriend in that FY. .....
Track Pipeline e.g job offers / chicks that dig you manage the status of these pending deals in the simple opportunity management console.
Track Favours asked of you by others
Track employment, facebook, foursquare, linked in, twitter
Track it all.
9.99 p/m
That's basically it. No "smart phone", no iWhatever gadgets, no portable electronics. I prefer my machines to sit in one place so I can walk away from them.
I use a mix of freemind , calendar and task tiger. to collect, sort and organise my todo list and other reminders.
Hah...the more I own the more I owe.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
Tiddlywiki is quietly mind-blowing. An entire wiki that lives in a web page that's just a single HTML file (which you can archive or commit in git or whatever). That makes it a great note-taker that runs in your browser, that hyperlinks to itself and the rest of the web, but it's a local "app" that doesn't require a connection.
Even better for some, mGSD "is a Getting Things Done® system powered by TiddlyWiki and [some add-ons]" It's also just an HTML file. I know nothing about GTD, but I keep my To Do items in various areas it and with a double-click I'm editing their notes as wiki text.
Load either in a tab, use Firefox 4's "Pin as App Tab", and smile.
I'd still like something that unobtrusively makes sense of what I've done for when it's important. My computer's got my e-mails and browsing history, it should magically hand me what's relevant. How do I rate the book I ordered from Amazon? Which is the best picture of my friend out of my e-mails? Give me the e-mail confirmations and web pages related to an upcoming trip. I can use tagging in e-mail and the browser's bookmarking, but that's helping me do the work instead of doing the work for me.
=S
I have a paper agenda.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
For the most part I use Microsoft OneNote. I have separate folders for personal life, hobbies, software I've written and clients. With lots of sections and tabs. Works very, very well for me.
I'm surprised at the quick dominance of brick-layers with children justifying a laissez faire attitude towards information attrition. I'm less surprised that some people have latched onto the question as a support group for media squirrels. I concur. In the long run, investing cathexis in trinkets disappoints.
What interests me is capturing the random lateral associations of an overstimulated mind. It's easy to recover the main grooves, harder to recover unexpected connections. Some authors do this for a living. I think some science fiction succeeds precisely because the author is attuned to noticing (and remembering) these strangely persistent stray associations.
For myself, I settled on a three-tier system depending on my current state of overstimulation. When I'm on a tear I keyboard so vigorously that people sometimes ask "what's that noise in the other room?" It's blurs into a staccato rattle. But then I have days where my not even my hyperactive fingers can keep up with the bubbles of free association. On these days I fire up the iPod as a voice recorder. When I'm finished, I use an audio program to remove background noise, zap silence, and accelerate. An hour or two on the couch turns into a forty minute recording (but you have to learn to shut up until you have fully formed sentences). It took a while not to find the sound of my own voice revolting. I've sometimes listened to previous rants while doing kitchen work. It's a way to reprime the pump when the internal lava lamp ceases to roil. The narcissism of the project makes me gag, but sometimes you have to suck up your pride to do your best work. My GP sends me back for a thyroid exam every second visit. He thinks I talk too fast in normal life. My post-processed verbal diatribes are quite brisk.
If the idea storm slows down a bit, but still too much to wiki with declarative sentences, I fall back on a mind manager. I've been using XMIND within Eclipse, which is not without its frustrations.
The ideal is when ideas flow at roughly the maximum rate I can enter the ideas into my personal wiki. There have been idea floods where I've created 100 new pages in the space of three or four hours, usually forming at least a weakly connected graph with plenty of spider wires burring in previously existing pages to stumble upon in future traversals. I've micro-managed mass battles in AoE with less ferver. After ten of thousands of edits, I've developed some favorite mouse paths. Let's just say Glipper is my friend, tab management is a way of life, and working memory is the Gift of the Magi. Well, not quite that dire, but there is a tension involved in optimizing wiki efficiency with also remembering the content you're trying to record, along with attitudes about how you're filtering that content while you record it. Inspiration is a meta bomb.
In the long run, data is not terribly meaningful. Attitudes about the data, however, are impossible to fully recover if you don't take notes. It's really all a giant record of what I care about and why I care about it. Attitude interests me. Working code also interests me, because I have complex attitudes about skirting debasement. At the end of the day, I mostly program so I can write about it. Berlioz was a first rate musician who had a touch of the same disease.
In an artist's life one thunderclap sometimes follows swiftly on another ... I had just had the successive revelations of Shakespeare and Weber. Now at another point on the horizon I saw the giant form of Beethoven rear up. The shock was almost as great as that of Shakespeare had been. Beethoven opened before me a new world of music, as Shakespeare had revealed a new universe of poetry.
Of course, it's his response to these thunderclaps that pours out in his music. The central ideas in my life have been gestating for twenty years now, and only through my wiki have I finally measured their circumference.
The final cog in my strategy is to vent i
Yep, Big Bang, sorry ;-)
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I don't even know what I did today...but it was cool. I don't have much, but I've traveled the world a few times. Lots of girls. I don't do drugs.
In my experience, it's a bit of a balance. Some random advice:
* learn to throw out stuff. YAGNI works in life as well as in programming. Perform regular purges of historic data.
* use Flickr/photobucket/whatever to store your pics
* keepass is your friend
* separate data between secret and non-secret. For non-secret stuff, create a git repo on github. Use it as a brain dump and store your projects and information in some heirarchical form. Don't get over-fancy with heirarchical depth.
* Create a "website" for storing technical information . You don't have to host it if you don't want to, just store it in your repo and link to the index.htm file on Firefox.
My girlfriend is the boss with information and no matter what, if I seemed to have forgotten something she will make sure I remember until I forget about it again. "who's that girl posting on your facebook?" someone posted on my facebook? sweet!
Althought this won't sit well on Slashdot...
1) Microsoft OneNote - best note gathering tool, also online coordination/sync if you want/trust. (Thus viewable on my phone as well)
2) Smartphone - Android
3) Windows7 and the built in Search indexing system, it keeps track of everything I have done for the past 20 years. With selective online Syncing of current documents and projects available to any PC I sign into with Live Essentials, or via a browser. (Millions and Millions of documents, notes, meeting recordings, ink drawings, development projects, etc. - all available instantly, something that made OS X choke when trying to index even a small portion of the TBs of data.) Add in 'previous versions' and the backup system and you have a very mature system of tracking the data of your life, and even seeing it at various time points.
OneNote and Vista/Win7's Search features are something that has keep me off of Linux as a primary desktop for a few years now. Gone are the days of 'find' and cobbled indexing solutions.
It is just too handy to type a partial line of code and get the project, or a few words from an email back in 1992 and have it at my finger tips.
For everything that doesn't need to be on your own machine, find web equivalents that let you download regular backups: Bookmarks on Delicious, photos on Picasa, blog on WordPress, books on LibraryThing, development projects on GitHub, feeds on Google Reader, and CAD drawings on Thingiverse.
The ultimate tool at home has gone from CVS via Subversion to Git. The learning curve is steep, but it's liberating at the end to know that all the data, in all its versions, are on all my machines and will not get lost bar some really serious happenings. This is for the personal documents, application settings (useful to have the same everywhere) and of course development projects. If you want to forget old stuff, a git rebase --interactive is just the thing. To handle multiple projects which mostly just need to be pulled from a different machine, I've developed fgit, a simple script to run a git command on all repositories below the specified directory (or the current one, by default). Thus, to update everything when moving to a new machine, it's simply fgit pull -- ~.
when we only parse the day/year/life's inf. that's truthful, &/or useful, there's little/no confusion, or phony 'overload'.
I have a lot of trouble with it. I have thousands of pages of school papers useful for portfolios, I have homework assignments for this semester and the previous one (in case I need to dispute grades), hundreds of pictures, tons of music, a lot of junk, and a lot of things that aren't junk. Every few months I manage to go through some of it and organize it somewhat, but it is still a major problem. I throw out garbage bags full of junk during these cleanings, yet I still have pictures, music, stuff that I want to keep that gets too much to organize simply. Not hoarding much, just too many files to view at once or search at once comfortably. The same with bills and reciepts, I need to keep them all for college, tax write offs, ect., as I am one of those poor saps that was convinced to go into debt to get an education (only way I could, poor).
I do admit it would be a lot easier if I could afford a smartphone and the plan for one. right now people can only really reliably reach me by e-mail.
Where is the mod rating for "scary"? Also,
Photographs go one two different hard drives, with backups to dvd. I would like to turn that hobby into a real job, so I am more meticulous there than about anything else. Still, no schedule about it. Pictures go on the pc when I get home from shooting, stay on the CF card until I get the raws backed up in a second location. Lots of cards and few excursions help that work. My books are catalogued by sitting on a set of bookshelves, roughly separated by style and then by author. If I know I am going shopping for old books, and know that I am missing the middle book of a trilogy I found two books of for a nickel, I will write stuff down on a note card or just memorize it for the time. Programing project XYZ may have several pages of paper notes about how it was written and what insights made each piece work. Those insights go into the documentation and comments, diagrams too if they are needed, then the paper notes go away. There isn't a backup scheme for those. If they are in use some place, then the code is where it needs to be. If it was a personal project that isn't in use, then it's not in use and was just for learning how some aspect of something worked.
As for the rest: throw it out. Seriously, those notes I took while learning a new language, no one will need those. The differential equations workbook, who cares. That note card that said "was looking for book 2 of space trilogy by Author McX", it really just needs to be thrown away. If, and it's a big if there, something needs to be saved for some reason, I have a 8 inch space of hanging folders for sorting and storing paper stuff. A couple of complete midterm and final exams are there, in case my younger friends had wanted them to study by. A few sparse pages of notes on a specific programing project that someone else had made while we collaborated, since their insights would be harder for me to just recreate. For other stuff I carry around a small notebook; unlined, decent paper, stuff that can be drawn on as well as written. Write down what comes to mind, a set-up for how a photo was taken, a crochet pattern, recipe, bad poems, photos i want to take, or short story ideas. Write it down, and look at it later. If it is worth saving, it can go in a folder. If it is worth sharing, I can put it on a blog or sell it. And the most important part of that, if it is utter crap I can throw it out. Note book gets full, I move on to a new notebook. Only the stuff worth saving or that might be improved on gets to stay, the rest of the old notebook gets recycled or used as charcoal starter.
There is a problem with information hording these days. The answer to the box of note from college that is taking up too much space is not to digitize all of them just in case someone needs them one day; the answer is to toss them out. Seriously, my world will not collapse if I lose my bookmark collection. I remember enough about the sites I visit often to find them again, and the ones that I bookmarked on a whim in case I needed something are of no use if I never returned to them. That same mantra applies to lines of code and everything else. Except email, academia has bitten me in the ass over emails from more than a year back, so those go in the same backup scheme as the photos.
One file per year
Once I realized I could not keep up (and it's basically like trying to empty the Pacific Ocean with a teaspoon), I chucked most of it aside, grabbed a ukulele and a beer, and now I just enjoy the ruination of western civilization from the sidelines. Secondly, I learned to accept and take glee in the fact I am getting dumber by the second (we all are since we cannot absorb the staggering amount of information produced each moment). Oh, I read a blog or two in the morning (like /.), but I pretty much stick to the funny responses. It's amazing how the quality of my life got better when I gave up on the "techie" lifestyle and opted for a simpler approach. I guess all the reading and studying I did of the Tia Te Ching is coming back.
My only real hope is for a massive EMP to cover the planet about once a week for the next ten years.
A combination of text files that are stored on google.docs, which enables you to roam. Using the CL interface you can edit docs like they're on your local machine:
$ google docs edit "todos"
http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/
I use this (in a modified version) and live happy :-) A 'must'
http://www.speakeasy.org/~lion/nb/
I have a file system that allows me to create directories that I can give meaningful names.
People email me about stuff, and I used to put those into meaningfully named folders, but now I rely more on search. I email myself about stuff I want to be able to recover through search.
Years ago I wrote a simple web based calendar program that runs on my local computer. That's my home page.
That's about it. Pretty simple.
Loose lips lose spit.
For simply recorded information: http://treeline.bellz.org/ (Before TreeLine, was ecco. If only ecco were still around . . . . )
Photos require work or they become useless. I rename them all by date and time (using a perl script that invokes jhead) as a start.
OK, Gawker Media has a whole site dedicated to exactly this kind of thing, surprised no one mentioned it yet: http://lifehacker.com/
Worth perusing to find interesting ways to simplify things.
For myself, I've found:
Treepad is quite flexible tool for Getting Things Done. http://treepad.com/
- Categorize your info type (e.g. Office or Home - make a tree of info using freemind, organize yours folders). - Keep your pointers handy (Like delicious, blogs, facebook, orkut, twitter). - Keep your mind space free for getting inputs and then transfer them to your fav storage place. - Lastly just remember the things that are required at that time (applicable for every phase of life).
I remember life before the Internet... information was much slower to gain, we had time to digest and to think. Today, information is everywhere and I just don't think our brains were meant this much stimuli. Despite neat programs like Yojimbo, etc, much of the time I use Postit Notes and some notebooks or notepads to keep information. More often than not, I will simply jot down a note or two in my IMAP account and save it in the DRAFTS folder, which I can later refer to.
I also think how one manage's data and information depends highly on your own individual circumstances, your upbringing and education. Some of us are more disciplined than others. Some of us (intellectuals) think laterally, while others (artistic) think more spatially. Though, I remember a show several years ago by a popular home-decor personality who revealed that even she has "piles" on her desk. Maybe it's just human nature?
http://livebinders.com/
I keep a flat text file. I access it in vi because the search is simple and effective. My notes file goes back to 1999 and has 600k+ lines. I paste in anything I might ever need to remember with logical search terms.
Since the advent of gmail I've also been emailing notes to myself. I can't be bothered to categorize stuff into folders, so I just search through the inbox and it's all still there. This includes large media files which can be uploaded to google docs.
The key is an effective search. It's not scaleable beyond one user, but it works for me.
These methods are super low maintenance. Geeks and generally intelligent people love to solve problems which too often leads to over-engineering. It's all fun and games until you build a site like amazon, and then god help you.
I might also recommend Lucene. It's a java based library built for doing searches on text based documents. As long as you define the fields for it in an application specific way for each document you want, it will index, analyze, and provide options for you to query pretty much anything. Also, if you can find a way to get textual information from non-textual files (videos, pics, etc) by knowing how they are encoded, then you can also define a way to index these as fields and then search them as well. I highly recommend getting the book Lucene in Action as I don't really find the docs for the project very useful if you aren't a veteran at this sort of thing, and especially if you're a young programmer like me fresh out of college.
I use a hierarchy of folders and let the file system manage everything. Built in tools (ls, locate, cp, mv etc) not to mention ownership protection. I have bits i have been saving that way since early 80's (first PC hard drives...)
I agree with others who say that OCD asset management of literally everything (inventories etc) is overkill, but there are still a lot of important things that end up lost if you don't have a way of not only storing them, but also accessing them when/where you need them. While it's easy to discount the author's overwhelmed status, it's important to keep context that we're living in an age that's overcrowded by information like never before. Learning what's not important is the beginning but sadly, people seem to continue to expect of us we're somehow still tracking with most of it.
My wife and I have struggled with keeping our family organized and while this was primarily an issue with keeping track of things, we've found the Cloud to save us on most (but not all) levels. The fact that we're also Apple users I'm sure causes our approach to not necessarily be right for all of you
For names & dates (things I am worst at remembering), we use Addressbook and iCal along with our iPhones to synch with our MobileMe account. I'm sure there's nerdier/cheaper alternatives but it works for us to keep a common addressbook and calendar that can be updated from anywhere via phone or from desktop/laptops at work & home.
For notes & tasks (something Apple seems to largely ignore), I've dabbled with the GTD app Things, but that falls apart in a multi-user situation. Instead, we've turned to a free 1-project account with Basecamp (37signals.com) and created a project called "Life". We then use the slick ruby-on-rails web interface along with the iPhone app Headquarters to manage & schedule our tasks for each other. We even use it to manage our grocery list by posting a task for that and adding comments as things come to mind.
For other random web links, photos, etc, we post stuff to Facebook when we want it to be public. Facebook blows as an archiving tool (and as a private place) though, so it's definitely wise to have a desktop-based photo manager that lets you organize things and back them up (we use iPhoto but Picasa seems good as well).
Nifty tip for organizing yourself financially: Mint.com has a great secure finance aggregator to give you a central dashboard for all your various loans/accounts/investments/budgets.
digital artist, 3D animator, web designer, and otherwise technological creative type....
I'd think you'd prefer to use Lucifer.
max
['Although that could be... painful.']
Anyone knows where I can get memtest for my brain?
I forgot, I think ... or did I?
As tech workers, the quantity of info we need to know is overwhelming, no doubt. Organization is the key. For programming projects, windows explorer is useless (esp w/win7). I use xplorer2 which allows you to view in custom sorted groups AND has Folder Groups; 2 features I cannot survive without. This way all file locations for any particular project are under one Folder Group. It takes 500 milliseconds to go from project A's 30 folders to project B's 12 folders; all with pertinent info. Custom sorting puts sln files up top, cs files in the middle, data files elsewhere etc... (freeware ver avail but useless). WARNING: NO UNDO, think before use!!!
For rapid access to any specific file I cant find, I use Filelocator Pro; invaluable (freeware ver avail)
Colin Smith above mentioned TiddlyWiki. THANK YOU Colin. I plan on implementing tiddlywiki at the base dir of each project to point to pertinent files & dirs along with project notes.
One other tool I rely on heavily for the past 5 years is the virtual desktop manager dexpot www.dexpot.de It does for windows what Firefox did for browsers. You have 15 windows open for project A and get a call about project B? Need to open 7 more apps? No problem, switch to a clean, uncluttered desktop, open up a new xplorer2 session with all pertinent folders (no more looking), and you're good to go.
For time management, whoever is in my office gets top priority. Everything else is by Outlook calendar. Simply hit the snooze button every week to get rid of all them reminders you really don't want to do anyway.
I've recently been playing around with Org-Mode for Emacs, and it's wonderful. Of course, I like Emacs, YMMV. As for syncing and keeping history, Git is amazing. Automated merges make life so easy, plus the default distributed mode means I just pull from wherever I was working last and I have everything up-to-date; I actually use Org-Mode and Git on both my Debian Laptop and Nokia N900 (running Maemo).
Something to keep in mind, though, is that you probably don't want to keep track of *everything* (or if you do, you probably want to reduce/distill it to more usable formats). One solution to this is Pre-Deleting Cruft. Try asking yourself, what is important in life? What are the Big Rocks? Once you've identified the big and medium rocks, identify what you can automate so you don't even have to think about it.
Nathan's blog
works great for me. Don't have to be too organized anymore!
Do you also index file contents? I like W7 but I do not like the search (4.0) features. I foolishly tried to index (contents+properties) several hundred GBs of PDFs, DOCs, source code files etc and I find the search performance to be quite disappointing. The indexing is relatively clever and it gets scheduled during idle CPU time but the search itself isn't quite powerful IMO. I had a much more pleasant experience performance wise with Google desktop search.
Word document with notes, todo list on my ipod and starring my email. Pretty simple but works for me.
I have field notes on plants, animals, weather etc from 55 years ago. I don't have to rely on my memory if I want to cogitate on climate change or any number of other questions that might puzzle me. So remembering to forget as a philosophy has its limitations in my opinion. I use several tools such as Advanced Diary, Linkman, etc. http://www.csoftlab.com/Diary.html The one most useful to me though is ZuluPadPro, a real simple wiki notepad. Raw format is Readable in ASCII for safety. My index page has about 30 - 40 categories and as it is searchable I don't lose anything for long. My dailyshit file is renewed yearly to keep the size managable, but all years are a click away. And yes I backup...... http://www.gersic.com/zulupad/ douglas (___) {O,O} /)__)
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Althought a little offtopic, the Getting Things Done method may help you coping with all those informations.
I have The Brain: www.thebrain.com