Ask HN: Maintaining a searchable work diary/agenda | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Maintaining a searchable work diary/agenda

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Suggestions for maintaining a work-related agenda/diary? In the old days I used a Filofax (remember those!). New days, the equivalent would be I guess a bullet journal notebook sort of thing. What about an electronic version? I am mainly on MacOS. Day One app? Agenda app? emacs orgmode? Just plain text files in my own directory structure? I don't need a system/app that allows multiple users or collaboration, this would be just for my own benefit. Would be interested in hearing from people who actually have something going.

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Why not go back to a Filofax?

I mean search only has to be good enough and maybe a Filofax is good enough or you can make it good enough through progressive change to the way you use it.

This is premised on the fact that you have experience with the tool and have had many years to better learn what works for you since you have used it.

To put it another way, a Filofax might be the simplest thing that might work for you because you can pick up where you left off.

And if nothing else, using a Filofax again will give you a clearer idea of what you don't want (learning from failure)...it might be the case that you like the idea of being a person who maintains a diary/agenda more than the fruits/labor of maintaining one (not maintaining a dairy/agenda currently would be consistent with that).

Anyway, software wise, you could do worse than OneNote (and quite likely better) with the caveat that I am the type of person who likes the idea of being the type of person who is organized on paper more than I like the fruits/labor of being organized on paper.

Good luck.

I just have orgmode files. One for day job, one for hobby projects, and one personal. Fun fact: I have been playing with querying it with a local LLM, and it’s quite usable, although I can also find information via fuzzy search/grep too.

I'm using orgmode as well on my emacs install under macOS. By using a simple org capture template bound to SPC-o-j (space, org, journal) a time stamped entry into my journal.org file is relatively painless. Really loving using emacs on macOS too, once I figured out the home-brew installation and configuration.

Would you be willing to share the elisp config in your .emacs file that enables your org capture template?

Zim wiki or just text files in a folder. Nothing special. Don't get special with it. Waste of time.

I use zim-wiki for simple searchable lists. I also journal, but hand-write everything. Keep a few pages blank in the back for an index. Then when I fill a journal, I go back and read it, and write out an index on those last few pages. Keeps things as searchable as is possible for a dead-tree diary, at least the important bits and keywords.

Creating an index like this forces you to revisit, evaluate things. Forces you to think through what's important, what to take away from what you've written. You may take away very little (and that's okay).

I guess what do you need? I use Obsidian with the daily notes plugin. They sit with my other notes. I have a day planner on paper just because I've found paper to be useful for disposable things like tracking what I spent my time doing in minutia, but electronic notes good for things I'll want to reference later like questions, to-dos, deliverables I was working on, road blocks I ran into, etc. I might transfer my paper notes into my electronic one sometimes if it happens to be relevant.

Obsidian daily notes are so... Simple. It works exactly as it should. No fluff.

Will these notes be readable decades from now, in your lifetime?

Not the person you are replying to but I have the same general setup.

Digital: Almost certainly. I back the notes up.

Physical: Almost certainly not. My day to day minutia notes are essentially ephemeral. They aren't about committing a practice to long-term but 'monkey-barring' between days or the week. If it is something I want long-term, I write it into my digital notes. I also desire digitizing them but for the reason of extracting what I did that day and do analysis / using it to keep a digital TODO list up to date. No interest in having them be searchable.

I’m not familiar with the format used by Obsidian. It’s probably not text files to be opened by any editor.

Got curious as well (I use Roam which exports in Markdown and JSON).

The files locally are in Markdown but that may be a consequence of importing it from Roam. Obsidian doesn't seem to have a native exporter as far as I can tell so you have to use a community plugin exporter.

As you have hinted at, yes, the exports from Roam and Obsidian generally lose your graph so you only get the plain-text.

It's just markdown files. I use obsidian with vimwiki for quick notes in hierarchical markdow file structure, using git for sync.

Obsidian works on locally stored markdown files in any directories structure you use, so you can bring them into anything from VS code, to Joplin, to typora.

It's one of the main reasons that I swapped from Evernote - zero vendor lock-in and plain text format.

Big plug for logseq here. After trying Evernote, Apple Notes, Roam Research, Obsidian, and Logseq, I'm finally happy.

Obsidian has got strangely popular... but for me Logseq wins because of the block-based way of working (which Roam also has) is much more flexible. Instead of just making monolithic notes, you can measure data points, reproduce blocks, query data, etc. You are crafting from much more flexible clay.

I can interlink all around my knowledge base. I can, in my daily journey, add points under tags or headings, that I can then query in reverse. I can make pages from blocks on other pages. I can keep track of meeting types, specific meetings, individuals at them, topics, etc. It is flexible enough to be very powerful but also doesn't need me to make upfront decisions. I can just build things out day by day.

Has logseq changed recently? When I tried it, I really disliked the very rigidly based list style / bullet point architecture for notes. It works great for todo lists, but for longform journalism and notetaking was deeply unsatisfying.

I don't think obsidian popularity is very strange. It's got a very clean look to it, the search is very fast, it's very easy to interlink all of your notes together, it's got a graph builder, and it's trivial to write plug-ins in JavaScript and extend its capability.

I do wish it was open source – that's the only drawback to it for me.

By the sound of it, you'll still dislike it. It uses the bullet outlining, so definitely won't be good for longform journalism. Organising notes and research around that journalism yes, but not for the output.

Guess differences in approach make the world richer :)

I've been using GitHub Projects lately

1 classic project for my check lists. The cards are open and I use check boxes to check them off as I perform them.

1 non-classic project for my tasks. I create a title only card and added a 'status 2' type (25%, 50%, 75%, complete, waiting, staged) and another field for the type of work (Paperwork, maintenance, project a, project b)

I'm also using Microsoft Sticky Notes to track pending work.

(I haven't found anything I like yet)

I use obsidian / vscode as an editor for markdown files, but keep the files as basically pure text.

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