On 2020-12-08 12:40 p.m., o1bigtenor via talk wrote:
Has anyone found a 'reasonable' system that would effect this less than simple 'idea'?
"Reasonable" is quite subjective. What's reasonable for me might be downright paltry for other people. Things I've found out: * indexing written notes is hard: you have to manually add metadata to find it again. The same goes for scanned photos. Digital photos are a little better, as at least they have a capture date. * distributing your ability to "find stuff" across several computers/devices is hard. It will require work to upload it to one central repository. This will have to become part of your routine if you need to rely on it * online tools don't necessarily stick. I used WorkFlowy (an online outliner) for a while, and I still have a useful project database there, but I keep forgetting about it. MindMup was quite cool too, until you really needed to start paying for it to access basic features. * for me - an untidy person - what works is -- file dates ("I worked on this in September") -- side associations ("I listened to the album by The ___ when I worked on this, so it must've been around …") -- saved shell histories (I'm not quite at the stage of aliasing cd to a command that appends to a local history file, but I'm close - the number of projects I've reconstructed through saved history is beyond countable) -- the desktop's indexer (like Tracker, Spotlight, Windows Search). I can't live without this. A system without this isn't one I'd choose to use. Yes, they chew CPU and storage but they remember! everything! for! you! Maybe my findings aren't worth much, though. I recently found two independent reimplementations of exactly the same project roughly two years apart on my system … as I was about to implement precisely the same thing for the third time. Stewart