HN Explorer

Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

5 points by 0xCMP ↗ HN
I'm starting a blog that is going to focus on one of my biggest hobbies: organizing my information.

I believe that the better I can organize what I know and what I'm still figuring out that I'll be able to create better, more creative ideas and that I can stand on the shoulders of my previous self along with all the other information out there I find.

I want to know: What do you do to manage the knowledge and ideas you create/find/discover? How do you like to organize it? How do you use it to help your self understand topics better or create connections between different subjects? Are there any tools out there you recommend?

Some tools I'm aware of (and that I'd still love to hear about how you use): OrgMode, ZimWiki, MediaWiki, DEVONthink, Markdown + Sync service (e.g. Dropbox or iCloud), nvAlt, Workflowy, Dynalist.io, Evernote, OneNote, and Standard Note

8 comments

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davidcarrington
nvAlt and its cousins sufficed for quite sometime.

More recently, I use Quiver on macOS/iOS (syncing over DropBox). As always, export capabilities are equally as important as import.

http://happenapps.com

howscrewedami
I've got a folder. With .txt files in it. Sometimes, I create subfolders and put .txt files in them as well.
azeirah
I don't use this, but I think you might find this very interesting because you were talking about starting a blog on organizing information

http://zettelkasten.de/book/de

(click around to whatever you might find interesting, most of the site is in English.)

It's basically exactly that, a blog on organizing information.

Also make sure to check out the garden and the stream

https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-te...

0xCMP
Oh wow, I really liked that Garden and the Stream idea. I only just skimmed it, but I can see my self doing a very deep dive on that and getting a lot of clarity on some of the ideas I'm having.
bryanph_
Can you give a link to your blog? Would love to read about your take on knowledge management. I'm currently working on trying to create a personal knowledge base using a graph-based approach. I wrote a prototype a while back which is running here: https://www.geist.fyi/ with an accompanying blog post https://hackernoon.com/building-a-open-source-personal-knowl.... I'm currently working on making this into a full product and am doing a complete overhaul. I'll write more about personal knowledge management in the future.
0xCMP
Well I don't have very much, but funny you mention graphs cause it's called Discovering the Graph.

https://discoveringthegraph.com

I have only written the first post and about page (which probably still need more editing), but I found it pretty awesome that we're probably not too far off in ideas of how to organize things.