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Comment by lardissone | Hacker News Reader

I tried many organization systems, including Johnny Decimal like PARA. And none of them worked for me. As an ADHD person, I've found the best way for me is not put effort in organizing at all. For that reason I've found tools like Logseq/Tana/Reflect does a great job. I just write in the journal and tag items accordingly if required, then if I need to write some long form document, I create specific pages for it. Then search and backlinks are everything I need. My brain works better searching than browsing.

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After years of searching for an organizational solution myself, switching between countless applications, numerous applications, and a concoufany of feedback, insights and ideas from xyz influencer, this is exactly the same path i've settled on, despite not being diagnosed with ADHD myself -- though, the signs are all there.

A structure loosely connected to past notes via a weekly 'cleaning/review' process in my "PKS", where I'll /search/ for tags, filenames, file contents and loosely link things together.

It's saved me countless hours, but more importantly its drastically reduced analysis paralysis and kept me focused on the most important thing -- writing.

> concoufany

cacophany?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cacophony

Exactly. Intricate systems are pure noise for me, a simple MD file opened in a texteditor like Sublime is enough, or as you say just a simple taggable system or really just a bunch of files in folder - as long as you have great search you'll find stuff in no time and forget most as you should.

I personnaly just have a huge file with various notes, text, todos or whatever for each year divided into days, then i can just scroll up through days, or search to find out what i did and what day - some days have nothing, some have lots. Some topics / projects get their own file.

> As an ADHD person, I've found the best way for me is not put effort in organizing at all

Agreed - I looked at the website for a hot second, got overwhelmed and immediately closed it

Consistency is key for a good organization system. Unfortunately, consistency in such manners of life isnt our forte

I don’t have ADHD (that I know of) and still love Logseq. For me, it’s the perfect mix of notetaking, journaling, outlining, task tracking, and lightweight hierarchy/linking.

I find that if I have to organize or categorize entries in a system, entries just don’t get logged at all.

I'm trying a lot of tools, but I end up using Logseq. It's amazing.

Only bad thing is their mobile app, it's so bad.

I've tried a number of KMS's and repeatly bounce off and wind up back in Google Keep. Annoying mobile apps is usually the #1 reason.

I would love it if one of these KMS companies would give up trying to create a mobile app w/ feature parity, and expend energy making something way simpler. All I really want is a solid UX for:

1. Quickly capturing multi-modal thoughts 2. Easily surfacing specofic KMS items

Thinking of my experience with Obsidian mobile... I don't want markdown, I don't want finicky two-way sync that randomly deletes directories, I don't want an entire file tree to tediously navigate.

I just want to be able to hatily jam a thought into the system, and to find specific items in the system, both as quickly as humanly possible.

If the mobile app could handle PDF reading/highlighting like the desktop app can, and especially if it could reflow PDFs like KOreader can, I would never use another tool for information management.

I have loads of epub books that I want to read on my Android eInk reader (Boox Note 2 Color). I can convert them to PDF no problem, if that's the only option, but man I wish I could read them right in Logseq on Android. I've tried various syncing solutions to export KOreader highlights, and it's just not nearly as good. Even tried buying a ChromeOS tablet so I could run Linux Logseq on it, but the form factor sucks compared to the Boox.

most stuff don't work, and don't stand the test of time.

anyway, here is what's has been working for me:

for physical stuff (documents, printouts etc): a dumb file organizer box, one of those where you can hang those hanging manila folders. and of course a few such folders. I bought fifty such folders some years ago, have used about half so far?

for digital stuff: a simple mediawiki installation. it's hosted at home and it's not accessible from the public internet. the visual editor makes it low-friction to edit, the categories system works well enough, a page can belong to more than one category and there's always a search function that works well enough.

the nice thing about mediawiki is that you can upload and embed images, you can link to other systems (like files in nextcloud) and you can upload whole files and link to them from various pages.

This is why I love Capacities. It's object oriented with properties and tags. No folders.

What is?

capacities.io

This product looks awesome and the mobile app looks exceptional. But if it’s not self-hosted and in some kind of standard format,you’re SOL when the company shuts down. Even though you can export your data, where are you supposed import it to?

Here are some possible alternatives: https://selfh.st/alternatives/notion/

Trust me, I do understand all that. My personal set of trade-offs is such that I really can't be bothered with self-hosting.

Capacities has one-click export of all of your objects (notes/pages) with a sensible folder structure that produces markdown with frontmatter and includes all media attachments. That's good enough for me.

They must be overcome by the HN hug of death or something, because their isEmailVerified endpoint is 429-ing, preventing signups. With that level of execution, who could trust them with your most intimate knowledge?

> We believe that everybody should have access to tools for building knowledge. Therefore, the core product of Capacities is and will remain free. Read our promise

Wow, I'm sold.

I just tried it, looks good. But TBH, I miss outlining. I would like they offer a way to have an outlining mode (with collapsing ability). Thanks for the recommendation.

https://capacities.io/tutorials/outliner-mode

Tried that, but I would like outliner mode to be the default. Instead of writing a `-` at the beginning of the line.

Anyway, I'll give a better try. Thanks.

ok, it's been a few days now using it, and I'm starting to love it. Specially their API access, so I can send my voice note transcriptions to my daily note.

The custom object types is great, I missed that feature from Anytype in other tools.

The only drawback is that they didn't implemented an import from other platforms tool. And I have all my history and notes on Logseq now.

You might want to take a look athttps://www.limitless.ai/#pendant

We've received great feedback from ADHD users about how it has helped them throughout their lives

I'm still waiting for shipping to my country. Pre-ordered on Oct/23 :(

That's a very compelling pitch. I don't have the budget yet but it's something I'll be keeping my eye on as yall launch and reviews start coming out!

And if I don't want my conversation recorded? How do I know if I am being recorded?

Preach brother

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