Comment by formalsystem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by formalsystem | Hacker News Reader

I've tried more than a couple of times to use a personal knowledge base and haven't been succesful in making it stick.

My process so far has been I keep a daily journal where I write down the most interesting things I learnt or did everyday. If my daily notes are getting unwieldy then I use a Markdown file which I sync on Github. And when I really want to make sure that I've understood something I'll either write a blogpost or stream myself going through a library.

I would definitely appreciate the ability to search my old notes better since they got too long to efficiently parse a long time ago but this process lets me structure the really important concepts I learn without adding too much overhead when I'm just learning random stuff. I also expect my notes to outlast many knowledge base projects and part of the appeal of markdown to me is that it's probably gonna be around for a while.

I'm curious if any writers here have found personal knowledge bases to be worth the initial overhead.

> My process so far has been I keep a daily journal where I write down the most interesting things I learnt or did everyday

Trilium should work great for this, you can press ctrl + alt + p to automatically create a new day note under a calendar tree.

In my case, I also added a custom shortcut/button that brings me to the current day in the calendar tree

Sounds like you have the bulk of a successful routine in place already. The only thing that is missing is a regular moment when you sit down and sift through all your recent notes and connect them to your knowledge base, whatever that is. I suspect that this feels a bit pointless at first but I understand that it soon becomes satisfying and useful. (Beginner here, hence the cautious tone.)

So I'm going through a bunch of these apps/systems and so far, Zettlr looks like it might be suited to what you're already doing. It's fairly minimalistic out of the box, the markdown files are automatically named by the date you write them (your daily notes), there's autocompletion for your links, there's tags, and that's it. There are maybe a few other things, but that's it.

I'm trying out Trilium right now because I was interested in its visual mapping (I'm more of a visual thinker So I've been using Freeplane, a mindmap software, but it's too restrictive with the hierarchies) and while it has nice features, there seems to be too much going on, which I suspect won't stick with me personally.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com