Each day I (and I assume most knowledge workers, devs, creatives) read many articles, papers, code snippets, AI responses, discord messages etc.
At the end of the day some of this information is most likely lodged in your brain and the digital version can be discarded. However some of it should be retained manually in some system - or at least I feel it should.
What approaches do people use to consolidate and store this information to allow all tabs etc to be closed for the next work day?
Be honest with yourself: other than the occasional search, when is the last time you referred to notes you took X years ago? And for the search-cases, how outdated was that information? Is the sequence of commands you painstakingly saved a decade ago for how to rebuild an array in megaraid really relevant anymore? Could you not have just, ya know, just googled it next time you needed it? Is your written-out explanation for how heat pumps work from that time you were re-doing your home heating system really useful.. when you can just have a conversation with Gemini about it now?
Less is more.
Yes, this is hoarding, but, as opposed to the physical kind, where it goes from some neatly displayed trinkets, to inaccessible rooms and biological hazards, computer files allow us almost infinite room, and almost infinite structure.
While it is probably not healthy to entertain the idea, I believe most hoarders, given sufficient physical space (infinite, really, is sufficient cannot be determined before they're dead and no longer amassing objects), their collections, their order, would look somewhat neater (although not any less pathological).
Whereas physical objects are a burden both in weight and volume, a few hundred terabytes of data does not take up significantly more room in the physical realm.. A file server, and its backup, is really all it takes..
So I don't think they're comparible.. At least, it depends, also, how it affects you, is it a source of stress and negativity, or simply a peace of mind, or a mad obsession..
I don't delete stuff, but I don't fuss over it either, it's not a big deal, once in a while, I move everything out of sight, it's a very small effort, and, so far, 30 years later, current me is grateful for past me for leaving those little breadcrumbs to spark my memories, and so, I will continue this tradition, in honor of future me.
I imagine attaching files in-line is one of these things, but maybe there's other stuff you can't do without?
Very lightweight bullet-points. That's it.
One thing to remember: most stuff can be forgotten safely. There are very few things you’ll actually want to look up a few months from now on…
Obsidian is a not-very-organized mess unfortunately; I still haven't figured this out but it's good enough for me to usually find things I remember. Confluence is organized as such https://docs.divio.com/documentation-system/. This works great.I always know where to put something and where to find it again later.
I also don't keep tabs open, I write things on a Todo list in Obsidian. Then at the beginning and end of the day I organize it; finishing small things like "record this", prioritizing, and moving project specific tasks to a page just for that project.
No file structure is ever gonna beat a good searchbar, adjust your own notes accordingly. I completely hid the file explorer. If I need to cluster things together, I use very specific key words at the top of the file (think: #Parent/Child), they're far more flexible than a file system.
I generally think you're right though so I am moving away from folders. Especially when the notes are raw text (markdown) and can be searched by anything effectively.
I am also interested in graph searching but I haven't used it yet.
Mostly it's just bullets. If a bullet is critical I'll prepend it with !!!. If it's a task, I'll use * instead of - for the bullet marker (then move the task to my separate task tracker later - notes doc isn't good for long-term task management)
If I want to tag the note explicitly with a "tag", I'll add one in brackets - but honestly these aren't that helpful.
Ctrl-F will generally find what I need. Aside from that, what's mostly been helpful is the dates - I often remember roughly when I learned a bit of information, so if I can't find it with Ctrl-F, I'll scroll back to that "era" and look around.
Pay a lot of attention to yourself when you're looking for historical information: what do you search for? Are there key things you often look up over and over? If so, what search terms did you use when trying to find them? Add those explicitly to the entry, so next time you'll find it easier.
Ctrl-F.
KIS
Ctrl-Effing-F
Any other trendy nonsense is time-wasting trifling foolishness.
I have specific updates notes for each project. I add a weekly header (via a template) in reverse chronological order. Pull the key updates into that (I also have a todo for each project that pulls in tasks from all files in that project subfolder - so picks up meeting actions)
I also put them all in a canvas so when I doing updates about projects they’re all in one place.
I do the same for people I manage so I can keep track of updates and todos when I’m meeting with them.
My go to start point is a daily not where I throw in new tasks (tagged to projects or people) and those get pulled into the corresponding project/person file.
Because it’s markdown with lots of plugins it helps me do things like diagrams (mermaid diagrams) etc and excalidraw/canvas for architecting/mind map style ideation.
With your larger question, though, if there's specific information that I feel the need to keep locally, I add that to a wiki that I run. If information is in a non-online form (books, etc.), all I need to do is remember that it's in there. I don't need to remember the information itself because I can look it up at will. For everything else, I don't worry about it at all. If I found it online once, I can find it online again should I need it again.
But do you not believe there is some value in trying to store some of what you found / learnt each day, to allow you to make some new connections in the brain the following days?
Sure, but I retain some of that without having to do anything special. I have no need to remember everything. My brain seems to know better than I do what is worth remembering and what isn't anyway. I trust it.
Retention is even more likely to happen if it's information that I actually used that day, and if it's really valuable information, then I probably have used it immediately.
Here's an idea: We should be able to record the full experience stream (or just the laptop screen, let's say) for a person -- digitize it suitably (eg. pull out all the text, or tokenize it with a VLM, etc), attach some metadata, and have the whole database ready for a person to query / play with, using powerful LLMs.
To the extent that you can store everything and perform effective recall/search, it obviates the need to carefully "pre-process" bits by noting them down in the right file, tagging them appropriately, adding metadata, etc. All of which should make for a much nicer UX.
Given the Jevons' paradox though -- I wouldn't be surprised if our experience stream becomes so dense/rich that storing everything and querying from it eventually becomes prohibitively expensive. We would then have to construct pre-processing rules to prune the stream, and amortize the cost of certain deductions by performing them at data ingestion time instead of repeating it for each query. It's all just the basic principles of system design at the end of the day, and how systems need to be rearranged as various component capabilities (and user needs) scale.
What you suggest is a nice UC for sure, but not sure it will make any of us smarter in the long run.
I keep it in a flat text file. It's maybe three or four screens long.
Now, for that to work, I obviously don't store "the knowledge gained in a day".
Some things I learned I'm going to use all the time. I don't worry about them; I'll use them often enough that I remember.
Some things I learned are interesting in a "huh, interesting" kind of way - mild surprise, and then move on. I don't bother with them, either, because who cares? They aren't worth remembering.
Some things change who I am. I don't bother writing those down, either. They are recorded in who I am; I don't need a file of notes. (They might be interesting to someone else, but so far the world is not beating a path to my door to read such a file.)
Some I can just Google. I can search Google as fast as I can search my notes file - faster, because I have Google on more machines.
The only ones I bother to write down were ones that took some digging to find out, and that I'm probably going to want to know how to do again, but only rarely. That is a small number of things.