[alexpetralia]

I use a system of personal knowledge management (PKM), which I've posted about before:

1. Capture: every interesting idea that I think up or read is immediately stored in Google Keep (on mobile or laptop). It can be very rough at this point, the goal is simply to not forget.

2. Transcribe & Organize: every weekend, I go through the notes I accumulated during the week. It tends to be between 10 and 30 notes. Sometimes the note is "read this article" or "catch up on all newsletters", so understanding a single note can take over an hour. On some tough weekends the process takes an entire day, but that is invariably a day where I feel like I learned a ton. Once the note is cleaned up (transcribed), I feel like I understand it. At this point I rarely forget it - it has been absorbed into my brain. The final step here is "categorizing" the note. I classify it using OneNote with tabs like "Clinical psychology" (nested under "Psychology") or "Investment management" (nested under "Finance") or "Math" or "Physics". This way, in the future, I don't have a million notes scattered around, but one clear place I know where to look. On average, this process takes 2-4 hours per weekend. I never accumulate bookmarks, Google Keep notes or unread emails more than a week to prevent existential dread.

3. Revisit: generally, people recommend you revisit your notes from time to time. I almost never do this. But if I ever am thinking about "Marketing" or "Sociology", I have an immense, high SNR repository of everything I've ever found valuable on the topic. I've done this for software interviews and it's been incredibly helpful.

Overall, I attribute this system to making me much smarter. It has been an invaluable investment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25302365

[bluewalt]

The thing is, your system requires a lot of discipline. If I had discipline, I would almost not need a tool :/

[eigenvalue]

A very low effort way to do something like this is the following:

1) for any article, I save to read later. I used to use Pocket for many years, but recently switched to the new readwise reader. This makes it easy to search later.

2) if it’s a website or service/repo I want to be able to find later, I often screenshot it on the iPhone, and that’s it. The only downside is that you end up with a lot of screenshots in your camera roll. But now it’s quite easy to search for any text and the new iPhone automated OCR works incredibly well. I also sync all these images to google photos, which also lets you search for text in the images.

[marniewebb]

My system is very much like this. I capture most things to Drafts app with a “to process” or “to read” tag. And then review and handle at least once a week.

If it’s a resource that I want to refer back to (like how to do something or a tool I found interesting) I keep it in Drafts in a resource workspace appropriately tagged. If it’s a resource I keep and share a lot, I move it into Obsidian and write text around it to make sharing easy.

If it’s a longer item — say a paper that’s building my knowledge in a subject area — I move it into DEVONThink and annotate.

I do need to recall and reuse things and I find having different tools and workflows for different kinds of information helps me.

[ebiester]

For those interested in PKM, that's also how I manage mine but I follow something closer to Tiago Forte's "Building a second brain" method.

I use Logseq, and I have a sandbox for the particular day. Using Tagging, I can have a #inbox #interest - or any sort of sorting, and then create queries for pages where I process that reading when it's tied to a project. A lot of them never end up being read, and as they go further down the list, they become less important to me.

[dylanzhangdev]

Our solution is so close that I put it into the github repository. I don't like to depend on any software, vscode is good enough for me. The key problem is this: there isn't that much valuable information worth recording each week. Just saving doesn't solve the problem, it requires understanding and thinking, as well as regular review.