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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?"
I have a brain.
Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
I don't
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.
With my Mac.
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 . . .
For passwords I use a combination of Dropbox and Keepass. With that I can access my passwords from any computer that I have internet access to, and you could keep it on a flash drive as well, you would just need to update your password database file manually.
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
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
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.
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.
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.
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
organization gives your brain time for other things!
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Right basic idea, but not CVS or SVN. Use a distributed version control system like git. Create subdirectories for everything. Put every file that's important to you in there. Make the directory tree the organizational structure. Move stuff around as you see fit if the structure isn't working for you.
That's how I've gotten every important bit of information I've ever collected in my life all in one place. And every copy I check out, on every computer I own, is yet another backup. I'd never trust a single centralized repo for this job. Also, a distributed VCS means that you can work and commit changes on any system, with some hope of merging change conflicts. One system should be the nominal "master" you synchronize every other around, but if it's lost no big deal; just promote another copy to that role, and let switch other systems to checking out from it instead.
The other trick I've adopted to is to write all text file notes in ReST markup. It makes for a structure that tends to be more readable anyway, and I need to turn one of them into something more formal, or print a nice looking copy, the work to do so is trivial.
Same here. Organized text files. There is nothing more portable and easier to back up.
For example, on my file server I have a folder called Projects. Within it is a text file with potential ideas, as well as folders for each project I'm working on or have worked on, each of those containing their own text file. I use a good tabbed editor (notepad++ or kate) so I don't have to constantly re-open all the active documents on each reboot.
The only disadvantage I've found is that if you want a nice pretty interface for organizing it, you're SOL. That doesn't bother me because I value portability and speed above all else when it comes to my insanely important stuff. Besides, entering a new thought is as simple as pressing enter twice to start a new paragraph. Searching is as simple as "grep -ir" or ^F.
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
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'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
Org-Mode gives you pretty interface for plain text. All the features of your setup, with a good interface on top.
Dilbert RSS feed
Me too. Pictures were hard at first, but I got good at ASCII art.
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
I use a single very large password, which gets concatenated to the site's domain and passed to a SHA-1 algorithm.
This way, I never have to worry about syncing stuff, I can recreate all passwords from memory with a sha1 filter.
I keep a few original passwords for some specific sites (eg. bank), which I can keep in memory, even though it's weak.
Dilbert RSS feed
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.
If evernote goes down I'll just go open the app on my Mac and see everything stored there. It copies and syncs with the cloud, but all my data is stored locally too.
Yes, org-mode is definetly the best solution for organizing information that I have found. It's extremely simple and flexible. It makes it possible for me to do almost everything in Emacs. I use vm for email, ledger for accounting, I write most of my documents in org-mode and export to pdf through latex.
Of course org-mode and the other text and emacs related solutions doesn't take care of all my information processing needs, but almost. For photos, videos and music I use the old fashioned descriptive file name in a good directory strycture method. My hand written notes, however, are more difficult to take care of. I have a drawer (physical one) for them, but I wouldn't call that coping with the information.
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..
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'd add Access or Open Office Base. Both have handy wizards that make it butt simple to make a database for anything you could possibly want, from names to ideas to photos to whatever. I've helped local churches use OO.o Base to set up databases for all kinds of lists and records, and once they see how it is sooo easy I always end up coming back a few months later and finding they have little databases for all kinds of stuff. so if all he is wanting is a way to keep track of stuff I'd say a simple database should fit the requirements nicely, and if he already has access or an Internet connection to download Open office it won't cost him a penny.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
Reduce the categories to an orthogonal basis set and reorganize everything!
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.
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.
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: