Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by DailyHN 2350 days ago
Yes, filing the notecards is essential.

Something I try to do is keep my physical notecard files small. Besides the inbox file, urgent and important notecards are the only ones I keep in a physical file.

It's surprising how fast you can go through a thousand notecards. So effective filing is a must. And for me, that means maintaining digital archives. Something that, on its own, is a whole topic for discussion. Once again, I recommend GTD by David Allen if you'd like to dive deeper and avoid reinventing the wheel.
1 comments
kd5bjo 2350 days ago
GTD's a wonderful system for keeping track of things you should be doing, but I find his filing system for everything else to be a bit lacking. I've supplemented it with ideas from The Card Index System¹, traditional library card catalogs, and Umberto Eco's recommendations in How to Write a Thesis. At the moment, my card index fills most of my center desk drawer. It may outgrow that soon, but I have no intention of culling it down; it's quite literally an index into my own memories, to help me remember things.

¹ https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.216804/page/n7

link
DailyHN 2350 days ago
Yes, I agree that GTD isn't a one-size-fits-all solution.

David Allen, in GTD, recommends an alphabetized system. Something that I don't do because all of my reference material is digitized and easily searchable.

Search-ability is the primary reason I avoid keeping a large physical file system.

I take inspiration from multiple books written about productivity and organization. Other books that have been highly influential in my systems are:

- Principles (Dalio)

- The ONE Thing (Keller)

- Organize Tomorrow Today (Selk, Bartow)

- Productivity Planner (more of a journal than a book)

link
kd5bjo 2350 days ago
Interestingly, it's the lack of searchability that made me gravitate towards a physical system. It forces me to think about the situations I may find myself in when I'll want a piece of information, in order to file it in the correct place.

This has the odd effect that I'm more successful at finding things in my paper system than I ever was with an electronic one, though it's probably of little use to anyone else. I also find that flipping through the notecards to file or look up something serves as a pretty good idea-generation engine.

link