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?"

Comments

Re: How do you manage the information in your life

[iamapizza]

I have a brain.

easy...

[Goldsmith]

I don't

Folders

[Anonymous Coward]

yep that's it I'm OCD about putting things in well named folders.

May be Flamebait, but it's true.

[gblackwo]

With my Mac.

Phone & Notes

[rkohutek]

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

OrgMode

[patro]

http://orgmode.org/

It's very powerful once you get the concept.

Find what's important

[failedlogic]

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.

You don't, in the end

[sznupi]

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.

Re:Pseudoproblem.

[mabhatter654]

organization gives your brain time for other things!

Have you tryed...

[CrAlt]

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.

So how do I do it?

[lbalbalba]

Well, I don't, actually. I just drown in information overload, really. It's kinda sad when you think about it.

Adding to the saying...

[stimpleton]

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.

I just remember it all.

[John Hasler]

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.

Remember to forget

[spectrokid]

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.

Re:Remember to forget

[Anonymous Coward]

Keeping old electricity bills saved me from being taken to court once. (They wanted me to pay for electricity used after I'd moved out and closed the account. Thankfully I could prove I'd paid the final bill in full.)

Re:Remember to forget

[mccrew]

Sounds similar to one of my favorite sayings:

"The more you own, the more you are owned."

Re:Remember to forget

[Anonymous Coward]

Then suddenly I found myself married, with family and suddenly found 99% of that stuff mattered not a jot.

You could replace this statement with 'I found jesus' and it would have the same meaning. Just because you have a family now doesn't mean you're in bliss, and it doesn't mean that others would be too. The only thing you did was replace one burden with another.

Re:Remember to forget

[CohibaVancouver]

You could replace this statement with 'I found jesus' and it would have the same meaning. Just because you have a family now doesn't mean you're in bliss, and it doesn't mean that others would be too. The only thing you did was replace one burden with another.

Do you have a spouse? Kids? Because the grandparent is exactly right - You don't replace a burden with another burden. You remove a burden by realizing that other stuff is more important. Stuff like pushing your kid on the swing or having a glass of wine with your wife after you've read the kids bedtime stories and tucked them in. So your OCD database of your comic book collection is out of date, and your DVDs aren't alphabetical. So what? If you choose to have a family you'll discover that stuff was just a waste of your life... Just ask your parents or your grandparents...

Re:Remember to forget

[datadefender]

I am 55 - and have gone thru a divorce - yet I do not share your advice. Archives and things are only a burden if the later steal your time or are used against you.
Since 1980 I have a digital diary (originally on a CP/M system) and since 1994 I have archived all my emails. In 1999 I switched to digital fotos and also took fotos of all my important documents. Every year has its own folder to organize my data. My entire digital archive is about 200GB and exists on 3 disks - one off-site. Storage cost is trivial and of course they are all encrypted (Truecrypt).
They is no burden at all to keep that archive - but here and there it has helped my to lookup something from my past.
Information - if well organized and protected - is an asset.
Would I post it on facebook etc. ? No way !!! This is my life and I will not trust it to anyone outside. When I pass away some day, my kids will inherit the USB disks (yes they they the password).

Re:Remember to forget

[Grismar]

• Someone keeping notes of all their ideas in a structured fashion may one day write an epic book
• Someone cataloguing their collection of whatever may develop this into a true job or expertise
• Someone keeping all their doodles may find it gives them the motivation to grow into a graphic artist

etc. Their work may not be world-changing or Great Art, but it will be important to them.

Of course, alternatively, you can create one or a couple of kids and add to the next generation of billions upon billions of people. But don't go around telling people whatever they are doing is pointless, just because some of your glands got to work and turned you into this all new, happy parent-person. It's great, how evolution has resulted in us feeling awesome when we produce kids. And of course, part of that awesomeness includes the need to tell everyone how great it is and how they should go about producing offspring as well. But keep some perspective. Your kids probably won't be president or win a Nobel Prize, but you'll love them.

For the record, I don't agree with the GP, you didn't 'replace one burden with another', I think that's just a downright depressing look at life. But you're at the other opposite, supposing some things just are better than all others, simply because they happen to be what you're doing - that's where the comparison with 'finding Jesus' is spot on. It's great that you're happy and what you're doing needs to be done by quite a few people for us to continue civilization, so we''re happy for you. But ultimately, people should free to do whatever the hell they like, as long as it doesn't get in the way of the rest of them, without having people tell them they are wasting their life.

Don't trust MS search to find anything

[careysb]

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.

Re:OneNote

[froggymana]

I find that there really aren't a lot of good linux equivalents for some microsoft products, mostly their office suite. Office is really a lot easier to use than OpenOffice and has more functionality. Sure OO will do your basics for you, but it is in no way superior to Office. As a result I proudly run Microsoft Office under Wine (with some help from wine-tricks) and love using it on my stable Linux base.