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Comment by hadjian | Hacker News Reader

I use org-mode, just FYI. I was wondering however: everyone shares how they store things, but how often or even how do you query your knowledge base?

There are often tips for creating habit to write down things „at the end of the day“ or such. But can anyone describe some habits when to consume this stuff? I‘d be interested. Thx.

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I'll bite. My answer to the "Million dollar question": How to make useful notes?

- Notes are not "write-only": progressively summarize and tree-shake your notes each time you iterate them. You'll leverage your excitement instead of forcing discipline.

- Ideally, notes are organized by project, not by category. It can be a catalyst for action and reviews.

- Only store things that surprise you, not stuff you already know.

Some things you "know" today may surprise you "tomorrow". I have a massive collection of notes. I am constantly surprised by what I used to know and how much I have forgotten. Such is life I guess.

You need to pick a directory/file structure that works for you. Some people (including myself in the past) use a massive single append only markdown file, so querying is as easy as CMD + F.

I realized I was almost never editing/updating old notes within the massive append-only file, so now I have a at-most-one-folder-deep directory with somewhat descriptive file names. I still have some append-only type files, mainly in the form of logs. If I can't think of a name for the file, I just name it with today's date and try to put it into the "best" folder. Sometimes it's ambiguous where the best place is, so I usually put these files in the root directory until they make sense to put somewhere else.

I've also been a plain emacs then org-mode note taker for a number of years. I keep a log.org file with dated items containing notes from meetings and major project actions of the day. I generally have my laptop open during meetings making notes in realtime. After a meeting, or whenever, I'll tag things and note any follow ups, TODOs or things to remember.

I have a terrible memory for proper nouns but I can generally remember enough context so that a quick backward search in my notes buffer can get me back to the name of the person, team, customer, project, action item etc that I'm looking for. (EG it probably has this tag, or it came up during my meeting with Riley, or last Monday, or during the sprint planning meeting etc). I'm now fast enough at this that I can often start talking and do a search in time to mention the 'thing' by the time I need to refer to it.

I see this model as somewhat different than the more reflective, bi-directional link driven, PKM tools being discussed here. Its a great feeder into such a system (IMO) where more active curation can take place. Plus even if there's never any curation I still have all my todo's, calendaring etc accessible to org's agenda features!

Thanks for the answers. I think I realize that there is a difference between a todo list (have to do it) and a knowledge base (let’s organize what I’ve learned).

The former I also do with org-mode and then use the archiving feature for things I put to DONE.

I oftentimes do the latter, but don’t actually use it that often. In college, I used to summarize text-books, which helped me memorize my learnings. After finishing the book, by chapter summary served as a shorter version of the book. Was quite effective.

Haven’t been successful in replicating this for work, though.

I'm using PouchDB to query the small stuff that comes at me during the day like tasks, links, reminders, etc. One simple html file plus a little Javascript (even I can write that) is all it takes. I've tried more elaborate approaches, but they never lasted.

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