[gofreddygo]

This simple idea changed my life:

    yyyymmdd-topic-title

I derived mine directly from a comment [1] on a writer (as in book authors) oriented forum. That one comment is worth a full blown website on its own.

I don't need tags. Willing to come across patronizing and say you don't either (not for personal knowledge management). Pretty soon you need to sort tags, find tags, cluster related tags, create tags of tags and other goofy gunk (see tiddlywiki to scratch this itch)

I keep things organized under 10 topics (so far used just 7). All plain text files. At the moment it lives in simplenote [2] (thats how I found the link above as a demonstration of its utility). I found notational velocity [3] and its alter ego NValt [4] useful when I had a Mac. Did not look for alternatives on windows. I just email myself these days. Look in my comment history for some tip around how I use that.

All of this is good for digital stuff. But for the deep, analog stuff that really matters, nothing, nothing beats the utility of taking notes in a 1 subject college notebook with a Pilot G2 ( i use a .38). I use the right side only (trade off for using cheap books). First page is the index. Each page numbered. I just make clusters of related words on each page. The main topic is circled to draw attention (4-5 per page). Anything related to it gets words around it. Details, references, long thoughts, go on the backside. Stacks well. I take pictures of good stuff. Don't fret if I lose any books (not lost any permanently till now). Do explore this route and see where that leads you. (hey a collge notebook is $00.75 in staples last I checked. What have you got to lose ?)

[1]: https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/large-scale-info-mana...

[2]: https://app.simplenote.com/

[3]: https://notational.net/

[4]: https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/

[jrm4]

I cannot echo enough how absolutely deceptively terrible of an idea "tags" are. They seem right because your brain likes to categorize things, and one word categories, why not?

I struggled with them for years because in the back of my head they felt like a necessity.

And when I actively banished them from my note-taking flow, it was like the skies opened up. I realized that what I should be doing is simple "being verbose enough in the note taking such that searching later is robust against me trying to remember what I tagged things."

As in, it's a minimal marginal amount of effort to write for "future you" as if that person were a stranger, not someone who remembered your tags.

(fyi it's http://zim-wiki.org all day every day for what I do. I've tried most all the others and I keep coming back.)

[gofreddygo]

> absolutely deceptively terrible of an idea "tags" are

They are terrible. Not a single useful catalog of information uses the concept of willy-nilly off-the-fly generated tags. Their degree of terrible-ness is exemplified on any wordpress website. Absolute junk.

Folders are awesome, otherwise. Not in this case. Because you need to "open" a folder to look in. Can't eyeball closed folders. Easy to overdo with too many folders within folders. Easy to underdo putting too many unrelated things into one. Easy to fo wrong with naming the folders. Naming folders and find the "right home" for a file becomes a chore. Moving from one folder to another needs both to be well defined not overlapping.

A list of files is much harder to get wrong. In one extreme case, you have 1 big text file. The other, you have a huge list of text files. Both are not a nightmare to fix (sed+awk+grep is all you need). Works well on all OSes including those from the 70s and the ones on all my phones. Copy and paste friendly. Super easy to backup. Also diffs well. Only issue i have is not being able to use images. Thats why I use email now. Just works. Every-fking-where.

[jrm4]

Yup. Folders are good if "taken seriously" for truly discrete things -- as in they have to be categories of things that ARE something and NOT something else.