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Comment by quaintdev | Hacker News Reader

Until Google suspends account for no reason.

This comment was downvoted when I got here, but it's very very relevant. Thank the creator that I've never been locked out of an account, but I've seen it happen enough times to be terrified of putting critical infrastructure on a single provider.

GP should be diligent to download his spreadsheets periodically.

Most work related knowledge should go on work place infrastructure online document store, at the same time its a total waste of time to re invent a clone of stack overflow. Any general knowledge information I'd want to look up, is already available on the internet. Work information, tribal knowledge- should never go on a personal Google Drive.

At the same time my notebook information is a mix of personal things, work things and lots of other notes, scribblings, and free form information(mind maps, doodling, random writing), I need this just because creating a meta-data knowledge graph, list in the brain is just too much work, stressful and its like a offline store for your brain's functions.

Software tools don't work well for this kind of information input and putting it in either GDrive would not be good. Hence the notebook and pen.

Another big thing I've noticed is the personal productivity system is a catalyst that helps you do work, its not your main work itself. There is little incentive in storing what time you went to gym ten years back. Information/Feature pollution is a bug not a feature.

Unfortunately, Org-mode in emacs, like anything in emacs is a full time project in itself, a huge time sink that has little return on time investment. Use a tool to make your life better. Don't spend time wandering in sub goals trying to make the tool, that makes your life better. The former gives results, the latter is just a long play time sink, where you will forever make the tool better, you will never arrive at making your life better.

For anyone wanting a FOSS alternative, cryptpad [0] exists.

[0] https://cryptpad.fr/

Or your lose your laptop with .txt files and your internet sync to your home server was in a no WiFi zone.

Everything can break in weird ways. What you said is equivalent to, well, if the US internet infrastructure was attacked and disabled.

Or until the doc becomes so large and slow that u can't work with it anymore (perhaps around 50 pages if there are images?)

How else would you store images if you did it on a text file? Links to your hard drive?

Notice at some point you are just making a wiki. And of course now you have the added effort budget of maintaining the wiki on top of your regular work.

I have seen random posts on the internet where people were migrating their notes systems to org mode or markdown. If you ask me that's too much meta work to do, in order to do your main work.

The entire idea behind making a knowledge system, or a todo system is to help you do things. If you are doing whole project to set these things up, I wonder what the actual goal of this system even is.

Org mode can display images inline. They’re obviously not stored on the file itself, but I keep everything under a single directory hierarchy and it works ok for my use cases.

I migrated to org from Things some 12 years ago and since I started bare-bones (just todo entries, no special config) and grew as my needs arose, I never felt I had to invest lots of time in my setup.

Agree that some people overdo things and the tools become projects on their own though.

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