Original in Spanish: Dónde guardas las cosas que has aprendido
2020-05-01
Hello hive mind, today I come looking for your experience.
Where/how do you keep the things you’ve learned?
Neil Gaiman says he has his “compost heap”, a notebook where he jots down quotes, ideas… whatever. But that’s not meant as a reference archive; it’s mostly something to glance through when hunting for inspiration from which projects will later “grow”.
I mean more like how you store the things you already know so you don’t forget them completely. I have a terrible memory, I depend a lot on this. I need a hard disk to function, and often what fails me is knowing where things are.
I have a mess that has grown senselessly without any design. Between Evernote, Dropbox, hard drives and assorted notebooks, in the end I can’t find anything I stored more than a year ago and don’t remember where it is…
A few days ago Á. told me about Roam Research and Zettelkasten, which I had never heard of in my life. It made me realize I’m doing it all wrong, I could be much more systematic and not lose things, but at the same time I want to simplify my life and all that seems very complicated.
(editing to put my system in the comments, otherwise this post was unreadable)
2020-05-01
Taking this out of the post and into the comments because nobody has the attention span to read this. What verbal diarrhea XDD
I have a mess that has grown without ever being designed, which includes:
-
Evernote: where I keep the things from the interwebs that catch my fancy, untagged, unsorted, nothing. Raw. I love it because later it shows them to me next to any related Google search, and I often discover I had already been researching the thing I’m currently looking into, or I find a connection that hadn’t occurred to me.
-
Pocket: there I put whatever makes me think “I’ll read it later”, and then I’ll never read it, but at least I’ve cleared it out of my way without throwing it in the bin.
-
Dropbox: there I keep bigger files I use more or less regularly, in a rather particular order that makes sense in my head and in nobody else’s. There are directories for current project info, for learning-related things, for “maintenance” things like utility bills or tax returns… I’d need a whole post just to explain it and it doesn’t make much sense. Basically things I access more or less often.
-
Drive: files mostly written by me, also in their particular order that no one but me will ever understand. There are excels, google sheets, notes from online courses (taking notes electronically is very comfortable for me). I wish I could easily search INSIDE the files and not just by name.
-
A physical notebook that acts as a bullet journal with GTD tints and assorted nonsense. Destined to be burned when finished because it won’t be worth the space it takes if I’m not using it, but if it disappears while I’m using it I won’t even know my own name. Everything in there that matters goes somewhere else; information is only passing through.
-
A similar physical notebook but long-term, not destined to be burned. There, yes, there’s info I’ll want to come back to at some point, but it will always be a struggle to know where the heck it is.
-
A billion other notebooks and folders by topic, by where I was when I started it, by which course it was from… I don’t know, it makes no bloody sense. Also a billion lists, I love lists, I live on lists.
Related: Neil Gaiman, How to Take Smart Notes, Tenéis algún commonplace book
(Facebook, 2020-05-01)