Personal information management

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.

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:

• I've not been able to get the Android app working. Ever. Maybe if I go back and put 40 more minutes into getting it to work.
• I'd love to work with a high-contrast, white-on-black background. I've still not learned how to do this, even with a fair bit of looking
• If I could switch to a full-screen (not just maximized, but distraction-free, maximum visibility full-screen) that would be fantastic.
• I sync my org-file (yeah, I only use one, and it's huge) with Dropbox. Don't have to worry about losing it if anything goes dead. But I really just wish that Evernote did all the same stuff. Because Evernote has a slick look, and a pretty great Android app. And I'd be willing to pay money for such a slick implementation of my huge org-file.
• I use Astrid as a todo-manager. It's not a bad system (even though I've had some obnoxious database corruption issues every month or so), but what I'd really like is a similar system (and there are so many todo managers out there that have the same features, and they're always adding more) that could just read the TODOs out of my org-file and append the appropriate tags, etc. I could see myself someday knowing enough emacs lisp to figure this out on the org-mode end, but right now I don't plan on learning enough programming to work this out as a supplementary app, and it looks far, far simpler to just offer a bounty on this kind of thing that someone else can program.

Yes, and mostly love it. Just not happy with the structure of my information management strategies, at least for daily work documentation. Put "X" under the specific project I'm doing it for? Or what if the learning seems more general... should i start a new tree for longer-term reference knowledge? Or summarize the specific knowledge more generally and keep a copy of both in separate areas? Or write only one and link to it in the other?

Stuff like that.

Other benefits I've really appreciated:

• embedded/executable code blocks. This is my favorite, favorite feature, and I will never go back (if I can help it) to running analysis code (I do a lot of data analysis/viz with R/ggplot2), generating plots, and then having to insert them into a .doc or .ppt.
• on that note, being able to export in general is a fantastic feature of Org. HTML, PDF, markdown, whatever. I love not having to futz with image placement manually. Get something you like with some #+attr_html/latex arguments, and then insert a bunch of images really easily by just linking to their location on disk.
• org is the only, or one of the only, applications that lets you mix and match notes and todos. I used to use TiddlyWiki for all of my work notes and really liked it. But I had to manage todos in something else. But why? Todos often come about in the context of notes, say in a meeting, or for some home project. I really like being able to keep the todos in Org right with whatever prompted the need for action (then view just the actions you need to complete with agenda views).
• Clocking/time tracking is another aspect that seems awesome, but I haven't started using. I'd love to get to the point where I record what I work on, and especially an estimate + logged hours. Not sure what I'd do with the data, but having it vs. not at least makes post-analysis a possibility.

Still, my various attempts at org file structure seem to end up cluttered and with things structured really oddly. I'll kick off a project with my estimate of what "categories or knowledge" it will require, and as the months or years go on, I'll be in a rush and just resort to keeping a date tree and stuffing the stuff in there like a journal instead. Now I have project-specific info scattered around through monthly journal trees. Harder to archive/find, and end up unfolding a bunch of headlines to find stuff.

Anyway, neat to find other users, so I thought I'd comment even though I'm really late to do so!

Catch.com is shutting down 2013-08-31. You can download a zip file of your notes.

I think linking and timestamp don't come with keyboard shortcuts, but you can add shortcuts for any command.

Keyboard shortcuts for OneNote:

• Alt-Shift-T inserts time
• Alt-Shift-D inserts date
• Alt-Shift-F inserts date+time
• Ctrl-K opens a link-creation dialog (or converts existing text into a link)
• Surrounding text in [[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.

No, I just use it on one machine.

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.

I switched my OS to Mac OS X and started using http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/ However, there are features I miss from Zim Wiki. I would definitely recommend it on Linux.

(BTW if anyone is ever making the same Zim -> nvALT migration get in touch with me... I wrote some scripts to make it easier.)

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).

improving the efficiency of the exobrain tools we use seems to be vastly underrated.

Is "thought support" OK?

I default to interpreting it as "keeping a brain alive with machinery."