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What OSS tools do you use for personal knowledge & task management? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 months ago by makeasnek@lemmy.ml to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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I've been looking into all sorts of them recently: logseq, appflowy, vikunja, etc. What tools do you use? Why? What problems did you run into with the previous set of tools you used for this job?

Right now I'm primarily interested in finding a "zero-knowledge" (cloud provider doesn't have access to my data) system for task management. Needs to be able to have recurring tasks and tasks organized in some interesting/useful ways (by projects/labels/something, maybe a kanban and table view). Deadlines and time tracking/planning interesting but not required.

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[-] clothes@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago

I keep failing to make Zettelkasten and org-roam work for me. Do you use a single knowledge base for your whole life, with millions of tags and pages? Or should I be making separate directories for each project? Is the "daily journal" the best place to put everything, with well tagged entries?

You don't have to answer all of those!

[-] finestnothing@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

Honestly, whatever works for you.

My preferred system is two big directories, one for your daily notes (dailies, journal, etc), and another for literally everything else.

This is how logseq is implemented, and can easily setup emacs org-roam to do it too. It's very nice because you don't need to worry about where to put something, throw it in your daily journals and get all the info down there, and link densely. If it's about a specific topic, link to it and when you go to that topic you'll see the info in the back links below (logseq does it automatically, emacs take a bit of config). You can then transcribe the important/summary/etc info from all of your aggregated back links into a single well thought out and planned document, or at least a single trimmed down one. Or, just leave all the info in the back links, whatever works best for you

[-] clothes@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

This is really helpful, thanks!

I think I need more practice with knowing when to create a node. In the past, every single entry would look like this:

I went to [Alice] birthday party and met [Bob]. We talked about [clouds].

And that got very cumbersome. I like your suggestion of using back links to create a better summary document.

[-] finestnothing@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

Biggest piece of advice, you don't need to document everything you do in your life. If it's info you might use in the future, a significant interaction or event, fun tidbit etc, add it in. If it's just a casual conversation with someone that you don't learn anything significant or it's something that you'll never link to or use again, just keep it as a memory.

I did a lot of over-capturing early on and got a lot of fatigue from it. Now my note making is as I run across things I'll want to reference in the future (plans that were made, ideas to learn more about later, important phone calls/interactions, notes on articles, updates on projects, etc), with refinement to those ideas coming when I access them again later (or if I'm bored and have time). It's no longer a drain to grow my PKM, it's slower but much more meaningful info

[-] clothes@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

This makes a lot of sense! I'm going to give it another shot with these insights in mind. I think if I frame it as a future-facing tool like you describe I'll avoid a lot of my previous mistakes.

Thanks for explaining :)

[-] sem@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 months ago

No, I have two different things:

org-mode files with schedule, diary, tasks, etc.
knowledge base, org-roam (orgnote). I have a single base but it contains graphs about topics and these graphs are not connected

I like that approach, because I use orgzly-reviwed on Android with a notifications. And because it is simpler to maintain knowledge base.