Productivity, information management and retrieval

[CreeperMain]

Preface
This new topic is primarily intend to kickstart discussion of doing meaningful things on the computer with intent, purpose. Thus escaping the hedonistic tread mill and entering a 'search, complete, document' loop (yay).

When I have some free time and I spend it on my computer I often ask myself 'What should I do?', 'Where do I put this?'. I ask these questions when I encounter either one of three 'problems':

• I come across new information and struggle where to put it. (such as a cool neovim package)

• I come across some interesting media. (such as a specific variant of a copypasta)

• I decide that I must do something and I struggle to remember it thus causing me to have a bunch of open tabs. (such as a time sensitive task to update a system on a certain date)

These 'problems' are especially evident when dealing with anything software related such as privacy, security, coding as one struggles to catalog all the potential tools let alone reaching mastery with them. I intend to share some solutions I started using and some general workflows that I hope can be implemented in lots of different ecosystems.

Solutions

For the first problem the solution I found most appropriate was a tree-structure with a 'Cache all the things' workflow. The tool used there is called dendron (greek for tree), sadly it's tied to vscode so naturally I started writing a port for emacs. Though I think that the 'Cache all the things' workflow can be implemented in any note-taking app. Also using a tree-structure for anything other than this does not work well it's janky the aforementioned dendron has a tutorial on how to use it for journaling (bonkers). Lastly there are lots of red-herrings when it comes to note-taking so be wary, most techy people do not need a zettelkasten or obsidian.

Second media management this one's a bit trickery as I haven't quite figured it out. The tool I see most often used is a something called hydrus. I find the UI unintuitive, it has a lot of features I probably won't use (it violates the unix philosophy tenfold). So instead I opted to tag my files, using a simple naming scheme original-file-name_tag1-tag2-tag3.png. Then I search for it using typical unixy commands usually piping find into grep. For example

Code: Select all

find ~/media | grep terry | grep dance

This should yield videos of terry dancing. Though I will reiterate that I'm still new to 'media management' and I've seen more elaborate setups where more cli commands are used as well as music being organized like this in addition to memes and videos.

Last but not least managing tasks this one is actually pretty straightforward I use a gtd package. If you've never heard of it before it stands for 'getting things done' there's a book of the same name (by David Allen) where he lays out this method. I'll quickly recap it here as you can implement it with simple unixy tools though you could use a vim or emacs plugin which I do or use the vanilla editors too.

1. Capture, write done something (buy milk)
2. Clarify, revise the previously capture item (buy low fat milk)
3. Organize, is this a habit, a task, a part of a project or do I do this right now?
4. Engage, complete the aforementioned item

Thank you for reading internet wayfarers! I hope that I successfully kicked off discussion and or provided some insights.

PS: I really like how slow paced and 'valve time'y this forum is
PPS: rate my writing 'skills' XDddd, though if you had trouble with the wording please do tell me I haven't written anything in a while (excluding short texting) and I got self-conscious *hugs and kisses* XOXO