Personal Knowledge Management

This is the most important one. You want to access your notes as fast as possible. Also you want to search for content in notes as fast as possible. From your desktop to the note system with a single hotkey or shortcut.

For several selected files, I have dedicated shortcuts set up:

• Agenda (inbox of everything)
• Todo (tasks in categories)
• Date (appointments)
• Contacts (list of persons)
• Shopping (things to buy)

It's no use if you can only work on your notes on your computer at home. You need to access it via mobile phone, or at least the most important files. Look for the app you need. I personally use Orgzly Revived, but I am sure there are a lot of choices.

Likely you want your notes integrated in your calendar, in the case that you want to store appointments or anything with dates. How to do it depends on your specific notes system or application. You want it to appear in your mobile phone's calendar app, and notifications/reminders working. Place the calendar widget on your home view.

Just use git and set up a script to add/commit/push daily. You will get all the cool diffs, and as long as your git server is backed up, all your git repositories are backed up. You might still want to self host that git server, otherwise you will need to entrust an external service provider with all of your important data. Hosting a Forgejo instance is not hard, but you still need a server (with backups). If you don't want to do that, you can still periodically copy the git repository to your favorite USB drive and keep the diffs.

You can very well store your passwords in your notes, but they need to be encrypted. You want to sync with other devices, automatically back up the notes, you'll be leaking the passwords everywhere if they are in plain-text. Some tools like org-mode in Emacs can automatically encrypt content for you, like encrypting with GPG/Yubikey. Also in case you run into malware, you do not want it to scan for your plain text passwords in your notes (you should be scared to run npm non-sandboxes based on the rate of incidents these days). So you should best figure out how to solve this in your system, or just stick to using an external password manager.

You do not want to make your own Wikipedia. If the information is easily accessible in the internet, you probably do not want to write it down. You don't need to give most topics a description. Only write something down, if you think it could be useful in the future. Focus on personal things instead. An exception might be topics you are learning about, where you create notes in order to memorize and explore things.

The first thing when creating some account is to add a note for it, where I add all the details I have used within the account creation. User, E-Mail, phone number, you name it. When for example moving to a new phone number, you can just search in all of your note files for the number, and see which accounts you need to update.

Many people these days seem to save links to videos (favorites, or to watch) on YouTube. The things they want to buy in their Amazon account. The games they want to play in their Steam wishlist. I get that its integrated into the respective service, but it also limits you to that service, and you won't get that instant hotkey access from your notes system.

It is useful to keep notes for each content type (video, article, tutorial, game, anime, topic, bookmark, comic, book, …) in a separate note. You can maintain categorized lists, mark them as TODO or DONE, schedule them, add notes. I call these types of notes "watchlists", even though many are not specifically about watching something. The possibilities are basically only limited by your note taking system and its plugins.

Did you ever forget and had to ask someone about their address again when you wanted to visit them again after a long time? You could have added a note representing the person and written the address down. Or you want to know to what person you lent that DVD? In general it is very useful to keep track of things that way. Surely there are contact book apps, but usually it is not so easy to append additional information or link it with something else.

Some note taking systems allow for daily notes. I currently do not make use of them often, but I think they can help a lot if you want to know what you did throughout the week, or if you don't know or care about where to write down something. It does not need to be perfect, as you can find most things with a word search anyways.

Periodically I look at the nodes visualization and see if there are any stray files, that are not connected to anything else. In that case, I lay down more structures and empty topic nodes, just so that I can link them together. Added a "Windows 11" note to save the workaround for the last blue-screen? Maybe add an "Operating Systems" note, that links "Windows 11" together with your previous "Gentoo Linux" installation log. I think creating these structures and linking files together based on topics and categories leads to easier integration of new notes. It also helps you exploring your notes later on.