I’m a big believer in collecting and storing information: in building a personal knowledge base if you like. I do this, of course, with Org-mode but that’s not the only possibility. Sung Cho has a nice post in which he describes how he built himself a personal knowledge base.

He started out by keeping his notes in Evernote but soon realized that he was spending all his time maintaining and polishing his notes but hardly ever using them. That led him to his first principal: Organizing knowledge should never become the goal. Rather, the goal should be to retain knowledge and help yourself learn. In keeping with this, he built himself a simple command line interface to a YAML database. He limited each note to a single line and didn’t use any tags.

In accordance with his second principal—searching is more efficient than organizing—he retrieved information by simply grepping for it. That was easy because of the third principal that the knowledge base should be local and open source. At this stage it was also plain text so the powerful Unix search tools could easily be applied for searching.

Overtime he has evolved his system to use an SQL database and made it accessible over the Internet. He also arranged for it to email him a digest of his recent entries to help him absorb the material. The whole system is open source and you can download a binary or source code from the dnote repository.

My own system pretty much adheres to Cho’s principals but I do use tags to help me search the data. I don’t obsess over them: I just tag the entries with keywords that I think suggest the data I’m entering.

Ali Abdaal has a similar system but he uses the proprietary Notion application and therefore violates the important rule that you must maintain control of your data and the means to access it. Abdaal has an excellent video on his system. It would be pretty easy to implement almost all of it with Org-mode so the video is worth watching even if you’re not interested in Notion.