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

Minimalist approach

[Bender0x7D1]

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.

Omni Outliner Pro

[fyngyrz]

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.

Re:Remember to forget

[clickclickdrone]

Totally. This is so much my experience. When I was younger I used to diligently catalog my video tapes, LPs, books etc. I had all sorts of card file systems for recording all sorts of, well, crap but at the time it seemed vitally important. Then when I got into computers, I started to keep multiple backups of everything, later on CDRs got duplicated, emails got archived etc. etc. Then suddenly I found myself married, with family and suddenly found 99% of that stuff mattered not a jot.
Best of all, apart from massively less stress and time spent keeping on top of it all, actually letting it go has been cathartic. Going through hundreds of VHS tapes I kept 'just in case this was the last copy anywhere' turned into 'can I be arsed to stick this on a DVDR? No'. All those HDs on the shelf and CD/DVD backups that I never look at from one year to the next have been heaved out.
I remember reading once an interview with someone who'd lost everything in a fire. They said it was a disaster, they thought they'd never cope with the loss and then suddenly they felt the weight of years of worrying about losing all their crap, lifting off their shoulders. From then on they lived life lean and much happier.