Obsidian has been really positive for me. It has paid dividends for years — I look up notes I made years ago pretty regularly. I highly recommend it. I used Anki on and of with benefits but without enough discipline. Good thing with Obsidian is that you can write and forget about it - your obscure notes about http2 multiplexing will still be there.
One thing to remember: most stuff can be forgotten safely. There are very few things you’ll actually want to look up a few months from now on…
I use a combination of Obsidian notes and Confluence.
Obsidian is a not-very-organized mess unfortunately; I still haven't figured this out but it's good enough for me to usually find things I remember. Confluence is organized as such https://docs.divio.com/documentation-system/. This works great.I always know where to put something and where to find it again later.
I also don't keep tabs open, I write things on a Todo list in Obsidian. Then at the beginning and end of the day I organize it; finishing small things like "record this", prioritizing, and moving project specific tasks to a page just for that project.
I’ve been using obsidian for this for the past couple of years. I have lots of folders and notes for work projects along with notes for learning topics. I keep track of tasks and to do lists for me and people in my team (using #people/name tags).
I have specific updates notes for each project. I add a weekly header (via a template) in reverse chronological order. Pull the key updates into that (I also have a todo for each project that pulls in tasks from all files in that project subfolder - so picks up meeting actions)
I also put them all in a canvas so when I doing updates about projects they’re all in one place.
I do the same for people I manage so I can keep track of updates and todos when I’m meeting with them.
My go to start point is a daily not where I throw in new tasks (tagged to projects or people) and those get pulled into the corresponding project/person file.
Because it’s markdown with lots of plugins it helps me do things like diagrams (mermaid diagrams) etc and excalidraw/canvas for architecting/mind map style ideation.
I use a flat text file called "notes" on my desktop, and I leave it open in Sublime Text in a corner of my second screen. Periodically I throw a datestamp in there as a reference point. For generic "stuff that should be retained manually" it works well - easy to add to, easily searchable.
I'm also liking obsidian a lot, especially that the data lives on the filesystem and in markdown so it's not walled in by obsidian. I made my obsidian project folder a git repository and have a script that runs a few times a day to check for changes, if there are any, it creates a backup commit, and pushes the changes to a remote machine. What initially drew me to obsidian was the graph showing connection between documents, and while most are connected, it's not what made me stay.. What made me stay was the familiar-ish interface (reminds me of vscode, which reminds me of "ultra edit") and the way it does not impose too much structure on me.
I don't accumulate tabs (I rarely have more than two open at a time), so I don't have to do anything to allow them to be closed. I just close the browser.
With your larger question, though, if there's specific information that I feel the need to keep locally, I add that to a wiki that I run. If information is in a non-online form (books, etc.), all I need to do is remember that it's in there. I don't need to remember the information itself because I can look it up at will. For everything else, I don't worry about it at all. If I found it online once, I can find it online again should I need it again.
Currently I use Obsidian to make note of a few key things, but what I'm more excited about is that the way tech is evolving is going to allow us much more expansive solutions for personal knowledge-bases. Eg: See what Perkeep tried to do.
Here's an idea: We should be able to record the full experience stream (or just the laptop screen, let's say) for a person -- digitize it suitably (eg. pull out all the text, or tokenize it with a VLM, etc), attach some metadata, and have the whole database ready for a person to query / play with, using powerful LLMs.
To the extent that you can store everything and perform effective recall/search, it obviates the need to carefully "pre-process" bits by noting them down in the right file, tagging them appropriately, adding metadata, etc. All of which should make for a much nicer UX.
Given the Jevons' paradox though -- I wouldn't be surprised if our experience stream becomes so dense/rich that storing everything and querying from it eventually becomes prohibitively expensive. We would then have to construct pre-processing rules to prune the stream, and amortize the cost of certain deductions by performing them at data ingestion time instead of repeating it for each query. It's all just the basic principles of system design at the end of the day, and how systems need to be rearranged as various component capabilities (and user needs) scale.
I use browser bookmarks organized into folders like /dev/blog /dev/tools etc. so that I can browse by category later when I think “what was that tool again?” A flat list of bookmarks drives me insane, all I want to do is delete it.
I tried Obsidian for a while but I’m too prone to bike shedding with it, so I gave up. I DM myself in Slack with bits of info to keep around for the near term, because it’s already a simple feed ordered by time.
For me information tends to fall into one of the following categories:
Information that I need right now, but won't need once the task I'm working on is complete (e.g. A standard algorithm that I'm adapting to a specific use case). This information is normally in the form of a web page and will live in a tab in my browser. At the end of the day I close my browser, if I haven't finished the task I'm working on then I can pull that tab out of my browser's history the next day.
Information that my team needs (e.g. "this is how we run our Ansible playbooks"). This written up in a form targeting our environment and goes in our team's documentation (which is just a git repository full of markdown files).
Information that I will need access to regularly (e.g. Configuration options for one of the systems that we look after). This is also usually in the form of a web page and I'll simply add it as a bookmark to my browser (sometimes this also gets added as a link to our team documentation)
Information that I don't currently need but I'm trying to gain an understanding of (e.g. the contents of a book that I'm reading to expand my knowledge on an area). For this sort of information I like to have it in a form that I know will be around so that I can go back to it when needed - I'm usually pretty good at remembering the bigger picture from a book, which is enough for me to know where I need to go to look for the fine details.
Org mode versioned with git.
Every issue at work becomes an item in this org, and all information relevant to the issue goes there: emails, chats, code snippets, documentation paragraphs, etc...
It's amazing how clearer things become, and how quickly you can get back in action if the issue resurfaces a few years later.
I use Obsidian for kanban (with urgent tasks) and for drafting longer writing, while using Remnote for tracking most other general information. Both work really well for me, for different purposes. I use Obsidian more as a visual information processing medium.
I will say, it's really helpful to open up excalidraw through Obsidian and create a quick flow chart or drawing with my team.
If it's interesting enough, and/or "big, will read later" then I save a local copy (pdf, html, plain text or even an image).
Mostly organised in logical-to-me directory structure.
Local storage beats online-only in many ways, imho. Online content rots away over time. Whereas backing up local files is easy.
Beside that: browser bookmarks, simple note-taking app, and (last but not least) pen & paper.
I have a discord bot and a bunch of channels for projects and a new thread is started weekly for that weeks notes. The bot reads and responds to messages posted there and saves them to the appropriate location and organizes them for me
Consolidate? All in a single place? Information comes from a lot of sources, in a lot of ways to be accessed, and a lot of ways to be shared and with who.
A lot are notes or links collections in obsidian. Others may be canvas on slack channels or conversations, some cloud note taking apps depending on with who I am sharing or collaborating on them, bookmarks in browser or RSS reader, even chats with ChatGTP.
In general it depends on where I got that piece of information or knowledge, what I plan to do with it, who I want to share it with and so on. There is no central consolidation process for all the diverse kinds of information, as there are "right" places to have them depending on it.
> However some of it should be retained manually in some system - or at least I feel it should.
I question this premise. If the content you read on any given day did not the result in some change to your work product, it is really important enough to save it? Do you really need to remember all the messages, chats, articles that didn't give you any actionable answers? Or do you just keep the results that you created based on such things?
I keep none of it. I do, however, keep all my old code. Every throwaway line I've ever written is saved somewhere, even if it is just in git history on old throwaway projects. So when I do need to do something again, I don't need to re-do research or figure it out from scratch... I have my working solutions already stored.
I tried several "information management" and "knowlege management" programs over the years, but none of them worked the way I wanted.
My original method was a directory full of plain text files arranged by subject, that I brought up with my text editor.
Over the years I wrote a specification for a system tailored for my needs, that could manage different forms of media, notes, saved web pages, ebooks, and so forth. The spec grew until I set the project aside as more trouble than it was worth. In retrospect I wish I had kept going.
At the moment I'm using plain old hand-written subset of HTML linked to subdirectories arranged by subject. As time permits I will finish the (simplistic) custom browser, which will also let me annotate pages and edit files.
I have looked into some of the indexing programs that look inside files and index their contents in a searchable fashion. They all take a vast amount of storage space, probably because over the decades I have amassed a vast amount of data. After experimentation I decided to pass on the indexers as well. I have always managed things in a rigid hierachical arrangement, and it's pretty easy to find what I'm looking for. On the other hand, I know what's there and where I put it, which makes it easy for me. It would be much less useful for someone else.
Never underestimate the usefulness of a plain text file. It can be written, read, searched, and indexed by almost anything, should you wish to do so. Some of mine date back to the mid-1980s and MS-DOS 2.1, to OS/2 and Windows (briefly), Linux, and even Haiku. Every platform has subdirectories and some kind of editor; that's real portability. And if you ever have to deal with ancient machines that don't speak ASCII, much less UTF, there's probably some kind of conversion utility to let you move your files to IBM EBCDIC or DEC Sixbit.
If you're running emacs, the "org mode" add-in uses lightly-formatted text files organize data, which is then available within the editor. It's worth looking at if you're an emacs user, assuming you're not using org mode already.
For things online, I just bookmark web pages in a folder called "Other". For written materials/books, I write notes in the margins or write free-hand notes on a piece of paper and insert it in the book somewhere. Then when I'm bored, instead of infinite-scrolling some stupid app, I try to pick out of the "Other" folder or read a book off the shelf. At least, that's what I aspire to do most of the time...
I also decided that if something's worth remembering, I'll remember it. If it's not worth remembering, then I'm also not gonna both re-reading notes about it, no matter what note-taking tool or method I use...
This is why I write stuff in reMarkable.
At some point, I have to type it in so that I can share with others. This transfers short term memory into long term.
I know there are a billion notes systems that have heaps of features. Nothing beats writing for me.
I wish I had something like this earlier in my career. I've forgotten so much useful info that only comes back when the right external triggers are fired. It's annoying.
Zettlekasten with git and https://github.com/foambubble/foam - if I'm mobile I use WorkingCopy to paste links into an inbox file that I organize later.
Supermemo 18 and the 20 rules of knowledge formulation.
I primarily use Logseq because I've found that outliners best align with my mental model. I mainly take notes within my daily journal. When I encounter something worth saving, I simply create a new entry. A typical day looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/wAiYgSY.png
To categorize the information, I simply link the entry to a specific page. For example, if I discover an interesting React library, I create a new entry like this: https://i.imgur.com/dDlStkZ.png
A great feature is that Logseq understands page hierarchies, so if I click on [[Dev/JS]], it presents a clear hierarchical overview: https://i.imgur.com/z9hGmmh.png
Using this approach, I've stopped bookmarking sites in my browser altogether. In Logseq, I can connect useful things to each other, add entire notes, and more, as shown here: https://i.imgur.com/Krld2cS.png
If I want to remember something, I just add a #card tag to the block, and it automatically syncs with Anki via a plugin.
usually you don't, but writing mini-essays helped me with complex topics
I just note the solution for something if it’s likely I need it again and the solution took a while to find.
Org mode.
I don't worry too much about the structure. So long as it's written down and backed up, it is searchable, and that's enough.
I have one massive text file (well, actually an Apple Note) where I paste anything I need to reference throughout the day. Reverse chronological, newest stuff on top. If I need something later, it'll be in there. If the information is sufficiently important, it'll eventually move into another more focused document.
I use the knowledge organizer I wrote at https://onemodel.org [AGPL], and write things wherever they fit in the deeply nested, searchable outline. Maybe it's like my own, efficient, highly-interlinked zettlekasten.
A git repo with text files (markdown) with names as tags separated by underscores (foo_bar_baz.md). Edit those with emacs. Periodically commit to be able to browse it by date.
Search by file tags:
ls *tag*
rg topiceveryday i create a file if ~/self directory with name %dd-%mm-%Y.txt i put there everything, literally: code snippets, thought, todos, contacts, stack traces, links. i am in emacs, but i do not use org and git - have no idea why i should. searching is just a grep
TIP: When asking for advice in relation to knowledge management, note-taking, etc., be sure to ask for precise details regarding commenters' solutions. There are many people who participate in these discussions who don't seem to take a lot of notes (e.g., one file or paper notepad for all of their notes!).
I have a personal knowledge base that currently includes almost 7,000 files in which I store my notes. I take notes on everything. Every technology. Every project. Every meeting. Every product I evaluate. EVERYTHING.
My notes are stored in Org files that I edit with Emacs and Org mode[1]. Org files are written using a feature-rich lightweight markup language[2] that is much more powerful than Markdown (which is used by other note-taking tools like Obsidian). For example, Org supports plain text spreadsheets[3], a feature I love.
People tend to disqualify Org and say, "I don't use Emacs," while assuming that Emacs users choose Org because we already use Emacs. But I started using Emacs specifically for Org, not programming.
Regardless of which tool you end up using, consider organizing your note files using hierarchical tagging. I started using hierarchical tagging for my notes right after Wikipedia launched and I saw how effectively hierarchical tagging was being used there. Each Wikipedia article can belong to multiple categories, and each category can belong to multiple categories. This is hierarchical tagging, and it's worked great for my notes. At the bottom of every one of my Org files, there is a list named "Parent topics", and each parent file has its own "Parent topics" list (excluding the "main topics" files, which have no parents).
I think it's impossible to retain the amount of information we consume.
I've personally given up and if I remember, that's great, if I don't, oh well. There is always more to learn tomorrow.
I created my personnal search engine to index and retrieve content I like. I like the idea of keeping track of content you like without too much effort.
https://github.com/raphaelsty/knowledge
I did not find yet a solution that suit me for knowledge which is not an online webpage / pdf.
Confluence for work. Personal space has a TIL and Personal notes on what I am working on. I leave them fully shared for Rovo and other staff to discover.
Every thing else is Confluence in team spaces. And Jira. Slack too.
Things can be harder to find in Slack so that is more a second resort after Confluence.
Workflowy. This "list of lists" approach just works for me.
If it’s a link I find interesting, I take an excerpt of it and the link and post it on my personal blog. It’s not really even for public consumption as it is for both a public link blog for myself and where I post longer “thought pieces” that may later get copied to LinkedIn after I edit them a few times.
If I find an interesting link on HN, I’ll favorite it and post the link to the article and the HN discussion.
You have every right to throw up a little bit about the performative nature of LinkedIn. But in my niche, it’s the nature of the beast.
I do keep a copy of my career document where I note any major accomplishments and the details in STAR format for future projects, review times, 1x1’s and interviews in now a private Notion page.
DevonThink. Been using it for more than 10 years, tried other tools and none come close.
I have vscode open and a directory structure for organisation
The first folder - TODO is more like “Working memory” - unsorted interesting learnings, my actual todo list, notes and thoughts for the next few days
Then different sections for larger relevant parts of my life and memory
People Robots Company Code Reading ZanySchemes Family …etc
Whenever working memory is getting full I’ll take the time (30 seconds) to organise - either move or delete.
The key parts are - 1) Organise when it makes sense to, don’t try and design it all up front and don’t be scared of refactoring memories - the directory structure will anneal to something stable
2) have some damn discipline - tidy your notes, tidy your mind, and put the time and effort in, most people give up on note taking because they are too undisciplined to keep their virtual mind tidy, if you keep your notes tidy then up-keep is negligible, just like keeping your house tidy, maintain a high standard and then upkeep is easy
I don’t bother.
You’ll almost certainly never look at 99.9% of it again so just move on.
I am currently leveraging scammers, doxxers and all sorts of scumbags to do that for me, for free. Better than AI.
I advised them to avoid it because it would be shameful for them to be used like a marionettes, but I guess if they stopped it would be even more shameful. There's something about their pride of being covert that makes it easy to use for this.
Sometimes it stores stuff that I don't care about, but that's fine.
I also do handwritten notes sometimes.
You don't, because information hoarding is only slightly less bad than real-life hoarding.
Be honest with yourself: other than the occasional search, when is the last time you referred to notes you took X years ago? And for the search-cases, how outdated was that information? Is the sequence of commands you painstakingly saved a decade ago for how to rebuild an array in megaraid really relevant anymore? Could you not have just, ya know, just googled it next time you needed it? Is your written-out explanation for how heat pumps work from that time you were re-doing your home heating system really useful.. when you can just have a conversation with Gemini about it now?
Less is more.