[aasasd]

I got quite a lot of use out of metadata over the years, such that now I'll probably get a nervous itch and tremors all over my body if I attempt to use just plain text. Specifically, the creation and modification times for each addition to my notes are rather valuable, especially with the work-from-home lifestyle aka ‘day fades into night into day’—with which more people are gonna be familiarized in these years.

Thankfully I'm using Org-mode these days, which is reasonably ‘plain text’ under practical definitions—but I make dozens new headings every week, and each of them is stamped with the creation time. But boy do I miss having modification times too—should probably finally set up automatic commits to Git. Also need to mess with Orgzly so that it marks notes that are created on the phone.

[gilleain]

Indeed, digital archives use (I understand) various metadata standards such as:

https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/dublin-core/dcmi-t...

or 'Dublin core' which is RDF.

[selfhoster11]

I supplement my workflow with some judicious use of text-expander macros. I can type a total of three characters for the current date-stamp, or four for a date + timestamp. This makes it easy to reflexively date literally anything systemwide: from archive filenames, to code comments, to config file tweaks, to actual notes.

[dv35z]

Can you touch on your org-mode journey, setup & current flow? I am just starting the journey - looking to have a fairly coherent notes/todo/planning/contacts/kb system, and have (portions of) it published out to a static website. Emacs is... something else.

[aasasd]

Eeeh, I already see from your description that your needs are different from mine, and Emacs and Org-mode tend to be customized by everyone to their smallest wants. You won't find a shortage of articles about Org, including here on HN.

[ParetoOptimal]

What are some things you use modification times for?

[aasasd]

When I used Evernote and my notes were larger in scale, I mostly used the modification time to figure out how long a particular note was lying around without updates—so abandoned-forgotten projects and such stuff, basically tracking how much I actually use the notes.

(Evernote went to shit over the years, so don't take this as an endorsement.)

Sometimes it's also useful to figure out what I was doing when writing a note, by placing the time among my other activities. This gives some context for the thoughts.

Now that I migrated to outlines and the notes are much more granular, plus I started making more of them—they can often serve as a timestamped log of my day. When did I eat the breakfast—so I can put the dinner in the stomach before it begins an acid-fest? Well, I logged watching an episode of the series during the breakfast, so the creation time tells me the answer.

I'm scatterbrained, okay. Or rather, the notes are part of my ‘brain’ now.

In fact, I do miss granular times in other logs of my activity—ironically, in regard to privacy. I watched a video on a particular topic around last summer, and would like to find it now—but YT's ‘watch history’ is crude and just leafing through all of it is infeasible. (Actually, perhaps I should look into the ‘takeout’ dumps of activity for the timestamps, and make a list of the vids in a better format.)