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Comment by itsmemattchung | Hacker News Reader

I envy individuals who organize their digital information in this way. Yes, I can practice discipline. Yes, it is possible. And it has always been (and continues to be) an uphill battle to keep my information tidy in this way, when my is scattered at best.

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I'm slowly coming to the idea that the solution of this problem is to refine and reduce intake. I am a naturally curious person, as I assume many other people on hacker news also are. Unfortunately, this leads to what I've started calling "information hamster" behavior. I consume information almost habitually, without pausing to consider if I should consume it in the first place, or how it fits within a growing sphere of research and knowledge. Considering where something belongs, as a first step, before consuming it has been a tremendous help in staying organized. Obviously, as you consume the proper place for your notes might change, but essentially every system today can handle this flexibly. The key is making organization, filtering, and order a key part of the consumption process.

I'd also state that it's not always necessary to be super organized. Some people get by just fine living in a chaotic sea of notes. There's a reason that the stereotypical image of the professor involves a desk that looks like a tornado struck the office.

Couldn't agree more. Information hoarding is one of the main pitfalls of Knowledge Management. One must select the right sources, and curate relevant information (unless if it's all for fun).

It’s best to lean into that. Even though it looks pretty, I (and I assume you) don’t need to be as organized because the organization wouldn’t help us surface the knowledge later anyway because we wouldn’t follow all the tags and links around systematically. Different systems work for different brains. For me, I’ve found just taking flat chronological notes with a good search engine is best, and there’s no point fighting that.

Very much agree.

No snark, "I Use Obsidian": Open Obsidian, click daily note, type note(s) adding #tags as needed.

Excellent. This is also my flow. Tags and search are good enough for me to find anything I need to find.

This is me, except I don't even bother with #tags.

I find top-down organizational systems like Johnny Decimal difficult to maintain over time. There is an overhead in having to think about which folder something belongs in. And a similar cost to recall.

My own Obsidian vault is bottom-up. I assume I'm going to be in a hurry, or too lazy to organize. Instead I try to write wiki style with lots of [[Links]] to reference people/places/things, and the structure emerges from those links. This is the only approach that has stuck for me.

See https://stephango.com/vault

Johnny Decimal is fine (same with PARA, or the combination of both) as long as you have automation in place to avoid worrying about what should go where.

In my own system, JD + PARA + Templates + Automated filing works like a charm and saves me a ton of time.

I also like delaying "organization" to later points in time. I do this by using daily notes as the single entry point (bullet points), and rely on weekly/monthly reviews to extract whatever makes sense to extract into separate notes

Organizing notes like this is a challenge for me too. Instead, I keep most notes in one file, and split off that file when it becomes too big. I use ripgrep to search my notes and back them up in a Git repo

I think the important ideas for me are to keep notes, keep notes in plain text for portability and easy searching, and to keep notes backed up.

If I ever find the "perfect" organization for my notes, I feel confident I can write some crazy shell script to move stuff into the right places and ask an LLM to add the right tags.

Until then, I've got a searchable history of my work for my coworkers and future me to enjoy.

This is something that Obsidian, Tana, Roam, LogSeq, and a few others actually excel at. I try to keep my organization minimal or at least static, and backlinks (plus templates, or in Tana supertags) + good search (of all that I've used, Obsidian has the best) help to take organization off your plate and make it more fluid. I've also built a pretty rudimentary RAG MVP to make finding information even easier, but don't use it too much right now.

My isn’t search working for you? I’m genuinely curious. I try to use the correct keywords so I can find it again and then I use search, that’s it. Folders are so inflexible, it doesn’t work for me.

same which is why i only note take, write my todos in one file with specific type of formatting

Yeah, I always go into note taking or a new machine thinking this time, THIS time it will be different. It will be organised, neat.

Then it goes to hell within a month.

yep. a part of me wants to take advantage of all that org-mode in emacs has to offer. but it's just not critical enough for me to keep it up. maybe if i was a manager...

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