Personal information management
Several weeks ago, I began using personal wiki software Zim Wiki (free and cross-platform for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X with a slightly more bothersome installation) to record all of my notes-to-self. I've found it to be a nice software tool for implementing some of the effectiveness advice I've read on Less Wrong. This post is a fairly personal overview of my usage.
I looked at a lot of personal information managers before choosing Zim. Here are the features that caused me to choose it over the other software I looked at:
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Probably the most important feature: Jump-to-note capability with autocomplete. Pressing Control-J gives a text box. Start typing in the text box and it autocompletes with the names of any of the notes in my notebook (or allows me to create a new note). This is the proverbial 10% of the feature set that provides 90% of the benefit over scattered text files, in my experience. Opening a specific note to add another thought or idea to it is a very common operation for me and this feature makes it very quick. Only a few tools I've found seem to have comparable functionality: WikidPad (with Control-O), and the Notational Velocity family of information managers kind of have it.
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Pressing Control-D, then pressing return inserts a timestamp at the position of my cursor. This has been useful for a variety of logging-type applications.
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Zim is a desktop application. This has a couple advantages:
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I configured a keyboard shortcut to open it, or bring it to the front if it was already open, using a modified version of the Linux shell script in this forum thread.
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All my notes are stored as plain text files on my hard drive. I keep them under version control, which lets me do things like answer the question "what new ideas for becoming more effective have I had over the past week?" (I didn't use the built-in version control plugin because I found its UI glitchy.)
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There's inter-note linking capability, also with an autocompletion dialogue. (Press Control-L to create a link.)
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Moving through note browsing history can be done with Alt-Left and Alt-Right.
- It starts fast.
- Notes are saved automatically, hierarchical note organization is possible, backlinks are tracked, incremental keyword search within a note is possible, and there appear to be a variety of other features I haven't yet had a chance to abuse.
Using Zim has meant a really low level of friction for writing new stuff and retrieving/reading/adding to stuff I wrote. I've been using it about a month and I've got ~46K words in it, which seems to be around the length of a short novel. RescueTime says I use it 4-8 hours per week. Some stuff I'm using it for:
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Strategizing. There's something kind of calming about writing my thoughts out when I'm choosing between several options or trying to figure out what to do. I suspect that as soon as the amount of information related to a decision exceeds the capacity of my working memory, I benefit from writing stuff down.
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Recording business ideas, self-experimentation ideas, essay ideas, etc.
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Making plans and filing away notes related to future circumstances.
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Taking notes related to software I'm developing.
Admittedly, it's hard to measure how much benefit I'm getting out of all this, and it might be a good idea to try to cut back. I'm inclined to agree with Paul Graham:
...actually there is something druglike about [the notebook and pen], in the sense that their main purpose is to make me feel better. I hardly ever go back and read stuff I write down in notebooks. It's just that if I can't write things down, worrying about remembering one idea gets in the way of having the next. Pen and paper wick ideas.
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Comments (24)
Anyone using org-mode here? It's free, cross-platform, and also has links (to arbitary files!), outlines (actually, the whole thing is mostly about hierarchical headings), you can use it using mostly the keyboard only, and there are also some Android / iPhone apps (however, I haven't tried them yet).
It has the added benefit that headings have nice colors (especially with a white on black color theme), so if you put it on full screen everyone gets the impression that you're doing something complicated and useful thing. (Even if you're just churning out notes about how to improve your time management as a quite nice & recursive way of procrastination.)
(And yes, it's an emacs mode, actually this is the reason I ended up using emacs for all kinds of other things...)
Additional note: linking to all kinds of files can be an awesome tool when building maps of big and ugly software systems.
I have probably sunk something like 300 hours in org-mode and ultimately abandoned it in favor of a system incorporating Evernote and Nozbe. Org-mode has been a source of much frustration for me. It seems so great, it seems to have all the features one could ever want, but every time I've tried to implement it (three separate attempts, each time starting from scratch and thinking I knew "what I was doing wrong last time,") the system has grown huge and unweildly, leaky and unreliable, and missing key features that I needed.
On the plus side I learned how to use emacs really well.
edited to add: The iPhone app is pretty bad, for the following reasons: It is ugly and navigation is unintuitive, and the text-wrapping is essentially broken. Furthermore, you have to manually synchronize every little thing you do both pushing and pulling to your central repository or you'll quickly end up with inconsistencies which are a disproportionately huge pain to correct.
I actually still use org-mode if I'm simply going to be outlining a complicated project, but I've given up on using it as a task manager. I really wanted to like org-mode.
I tried the Android app just after I read your comment (it's a thing I've been putting off for a long time), well... it really doesn't include the "creating nested outlines easily" part I like org-mode for, and the synchronization part also seems to be kind of... strange. Just as you said.
What I really like about it is the minimum effort that it needs to, for example, create a todo item (compared with web-based solutions). Too bad that these todo items usually end up really unorganized. Would be indeed nice to have some interface between, e.g. Nozbe and org-mode, and use each of them for the task it is better suited for.
(I also agree with your point about learning emacs really well... or in my case, at a relatively acceptable level :))
As much as I like org-mode (and I like it so much that I don't see myself changing systems unless someone comes along and refines the hell out of org-mode under a new name), I've wished for more from it. Perhaps I ought to just get to work learning more emacs, but some trivial inconveniences and vague desires I've encountered so far:
Oh, yes. I do Dropbox syncing, too (this is the other good thing about org-mode: plain text files). And there might be some truth in the statement that while org-mode is excellent for a single file, things start to be less seamless when it comes to more of them... inter-file links don't seem to be that reliable, for example. Is this the reason for your One Big Org File?
For white on black, it's just (setq default-frame-alist '((background-color . "black") (foreground-color . "white"))) in your .emacs.
Actually, it's kind of typical lesswrong that I started off with a comment popularizing org-mode, but ended up changing my mind about it (well... kind of), the newest experiments include Notational Velocity (they seem to be good at the global search stuff org-mode is lacking, but not so nice indented lists locally), and also this system:
http://www.speakeasy.org/~lion/nb/book.pdf
which includes paper notebooks, maps of your thoughts and similar fancy stuff, but I haven't yet finished reading it (it's long and not exactly the most organized stuff I've ever read... but it has good ideas.)
I don't use zim wiki, but I do have page just like that: notes and thoughts
Currently, it contains ideas like: fear incubation, legoization, serendipitous incentive as well essay like "A Healthcare Ancedote in America", "Self-Quantification", and "Why Choose Prosthesis". They have lot of grammar mistakes and other type of writing bugs as well. I need to get better at learning grammar.
A page like that helps me remember lot of ideas and solidify them into essays, hacks, and other products. So far, it only help me learn information and write essay, but that's because I don't have any solid hardware skill yet. Before, I thought I couldn't write essays, but that's because my ideas and citations are not gathered and remembered.
"Brain support"? Sensationalist title.
improving the efficiency of the exobrain tools we use seems to be vastly underrated.
I'm not so sure of that - there's also a risk of spending too much time and attention on tools rather than on actually getting stuff done - what's called "Productivity Porn".
A bit like if an online community spent all it's energy on talking about how to have quality discussions, instead of actually having quality discussions.
I agree but it seems like a niche problem. How many people have a good note taking system and understand how to use search engines to full effectiveness?
Zim doesn't represent any improvement in the efficiency of taking computer notes. Evernote beats it on most features.
Is "thought support" OK?
You still don't give any arguments to support such a claim (to wit, "Zim Wiki provides thought support"), so no.
I suggest "Zim Wiki made me feel more productive" or "Zim Wiki is pretty cool, give it a try"
I default to interpreting it as "keeping a brain alive with machinery."
I use Catch (catch.com). It's through the web, and on android. It has an open API, https://catch.com/developer/ so if you wanted to wrap your own SRS system around it, you could.
That sounds pretty great. I happened to get a free copy of OneNote 2010 a little over two years ago, and it's played a similar role for me. It has everything you mention above, including the autocomplete search/jump which I agree is killer. I think linking and timestamp don't come with keyboard shortcuts, but you can add shortcuts for any command [edit: see pjeby's reply -- thanks!]. A couple other features I appreciate: constant autosave, and a keyboard shortcut for taking screen clippings when OneNote's running in the background. There's even good math support, although I still use LaTeX for math/physics notes.
The downsides: It's not free, open-source, or cross-platform. There are Android and iOS apps, although I'd need Android 2.3+, so I can't yet comment on that. My least favorite aspect is that it doesn't store things in plaintext, although you can get plaintext out with a little bit of work. (Probably easiest to save a notebook as html and go from there.) Maybe part of the reason is that there's lots you can do that isn't text (more flexible formatting than e.g. Word, recording and inserting video/audio notes, drawing, tags, integration with Outlook tasks) but much of that could at least be formatted sanely, and I don't use it anyway. Zim Wiki sounds like a good choice if I ever get frustrated with the lock-in.
Keyboard shortcuts for OneNote:
[[double brackets]]makes a wiki-style link, creating a new page with the enclosed title (or linking to an existing one) in the same section.Also, any page or paragraph can be a link target, with its own onenote:// URL that can be launched from other programs that allow links to be embedded.
Yeah, if you happen to be on Windows and have OneNote 2010, it can be pretty sweet for this sort of thing.
I used to run a wiki (instiki) on my local machine to do something like this, but I eventually gave up reinstalling it on new machines after running into problems with data compatibility (unlike Zip, it isn't stored in plain text files).
Now I just use a plain text file for my todo list, and either google docs or drafts in gmail for my various personal notes; I'm not extremely satisfied with it either - Google docs is convenient for access from anywhere, and it's nice to be able to use spreadsheets, but I miss the ability to easily create many small interlinked pages.
Do you use Zim on several machines, synching the text files from one to another with source control?
No, I just use it on one machine.
What percentage of the written text do you re-read, or update regularly?
I'm guessing that roughly 15% of my notebook is relatively "high-traffic" stuff that I actually review/rewrite on a semiregular basis (once every few weeks at least).
I might use something like this, except I find it extremely useful to be able to note things down on my smartphone wherever I am when I have a sudden thought, and have that synced with my other devices.
So I just use Evernote. Wish it had source-control-ish features, though.
Just started using it, haven't done anything beyond the basic note writing so far. Is there a better source of instructions than the main page? Its somewhat confusing.
I mainly figured stuff out by poking around in the menus, I think. If you have specific questions, I ought to be able to answer them.