Information consumption and Management

I started my morning creating my calendar for the weeks ahead this year. I used to avoid calendars, but they’ve been helping me keep my focus lately. I always had this fear of managing two calendars since I also use one for work that contains mainly work-related stuff. I can put personal events on the work calendar, but I want to give having separate ones a shot. It shouldn’t be that draining to manage two calendars, and this personal one connects to my phone so I’ll get reminders before any task occurs. This year I’m giving calendar notifications a real try to see how useful they can be for me.

Here’s how I plan to consume and manage information this year. I have a now.txt.md file which is what I’m currently using to write this. Its main usefulness is basically capturing what I just worked on or what I’m currently working on… anything happening or that happened in the moment. In short, it’s like work daily journals but I don’t want to call it daily journal since it can end up being really long sometimes and sometimes contains code snippets for my debugging process when I don’t want to create new notes for debugging.

I do have a daily journal but I mainly use this for work. I write basically everything going on at work, my todos and other things. Later I’ll write about how I organize my daily journal for work and how I use it.

I also have a now-work.txt.md file. Don’t mind the name… it’s just a way to trick my brain to just write whatever right now. I use this just like my personal now.txt.md. I write whatever is going on at the moment at work. You might be wondering why I don’t just write it in my work journal. I did try that, but I always want to make sure my work journal is short and detailed so I can easily read up on it when I have stand-ups. I want to make sure it doesn’t contain unnecessary information that should be in the now-work.txt.md like my debugging process, plans for work-related projects, workflows, code snippets and more. All these go into the now-work.txt.md.

You might be thinking that’s too much, but it’s really not once you get used to it. I realized that work-related stuff can sometimes conflict with personal things and I needed a better way to create that separation, especially when you’re keeping work and personal notes on the same laptop. Having two different laptops for writing moments of your day is just draining.

In general, here’s the breakdown. Now.txt for personal stuff, now-work.txt for work stuff, and a daily journal specifically for work.

Now.txt is a really powerful technique to trick your brain into writing a lot more and keep your thoughts flowing. You don’t have to keep creating new notes and folders each time you get an idea or want to quickly jot down something. Once you get used to it, your brain knows that for everything, it should remind you to use now.txt. Then later when you have time, you can separate them into new notes.

Now.txt is also useful when you want to know what you did the previous day or the day before or maybe weeks before. You don’t have to worry about opening a lot of folders and finding the exact notes. Just open your now.txt and navigate to the date. I’ll write later on how I organize my now.txt, which I think is the best way since it helps a lot with information retrieval.

So yeah, that’s still my plan for consuming and managing information this year.