Ask HN: What do you use to manage your knowledge base?

5 points by donebizkit 13 years ago | 3 comments

I am curious about what software you use but more importantly what's your strategy for managing your overall knowledge base, TODO lists, notes that needs to revisited asap, notes that need to be revisited after x amount of time, short format notes, long format notes, articles, snippets, etc.

For me, I use evernote mostly for web clipping but I rarely revisit them. For short format notes, I end up having dozens of sticky notes on my desktop. Some stay there for many months until I have what I need to take action on them. As far as knowledge base, I tried many software with no success. I always feel that I am spending more time inputting data than consuming it.

subsection1h 13 years ago |

I have a personal wiki that's powered by Org mode.[1] My wiki contains around 1,000 documents, including all my notes and personal task lists.

I've stopped using bookmarks, other than smart keyword bookmarks[2] in Firefox. I previously had thousands of bookmarks. I now use my wiki for long-term storage of URLs, and I use a feature-rich Firefox extension named Session Manager[3] for short-term storage of unprocessed URLs that relate to topics I plan to study in the future.

Before I started using a personal wiki, my notes were stored in files of various formats, and the files weren't linked in any way, which in retrospect is crazy because many of the subjects I've studied are very closely related.

I can't imagine not having a personal wiki at this point, and almost immediately after I created one, I strongly regretted not doing so sooner.

At some point, I plan to convert my notes from Org files to HTML so I can publish them to the web. I plan to use Middleman[4] to create the site template because I like Haml and Sass. I just need to find the time to identity all the sensitive information in my notes so I can filter it out before publishing the documents.

EDIT: I use a small paper notepad and pen for notetaking when I don't have access to Emacs. I process the notes on my notepad daily.

[1] http://orgmode.org/

[2] http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address-...

[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-manag...

[4] http://middlemanapp.com/

jbl 13 years ago |

I've started putting together a toolkit based around Evernote and Asana:

- All notes go into Evernote, no matter how small

- I drive my tasks (including responding to e-mail) from Asana

- I've written some Applescripts to pipe flagged mail (and eventually meetings) from Outlook to Asana

- I'm working on some Chrome extensions to help me track time on Asana tasks and also keep me on top of what's "in flight" or what I was working on when I got interrupted. The idea is to eventually build out some reporting so that I'll be able to look back on the week and see what I've accomplished and how long I've spent on various topics

donebizkit 13 years ago | |

Cool. I'll check Asana out.