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.

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

[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.

Re:txt file

[icebraining]

Org-Mode gives you pretty interface for plain text. All the features of your setup, with a good interface on top.