I like the author’s enthusiasm for organizing personal information. That was me from about 15 years ago to about 3 years ago.

I stopped spending time and effort when I realized how little I used my organized notes. Specifically, I used Evernote and had my personal information wonderfully organized, but rarely used it. Now I use something simpler:

For work: about 20 Emacs org-mode files for various topics. I use grep to find stuff.

For personal: at different times I have used Apple Notes or Google Keep to maintain todo lists, shopping lists, notes on present and future writing projects, planning travel, etc. Both support search. I spend very little time writing these notes and they are useful. A few times a year, I spend a few minutes deleting notes I don’t need anymore.

Anyway, thinking about cost/benefits, not spending much time organizing my own information makes sense to me.

The turning point was spending months of part time hacking writing my own Evernote’s clone in Clojure in the backend, a Firefox plugin, and a web app. It was a fun project, but mire fun writing it than using it.

For me the notes app is almost like a workspace - I need to figure something out, I write it down, start to break it down, describe, analyse - this process helps me to understand the problem. The fact that the artifacts of this process will not disappear is a nice bonus. A lot of the time I don't ever read them again, but I got the main benefit (understanding) already anyway.

It's a bit similar to writing a journal - just the act of writing it down has big therapeutic and introspective effects.

For me, the act of organizing the information actually does not take too much time but that might be caused by the fact that I typically don't obsess over correct categorization or do this "refactoring" when I'm bored. Main tool to find notes of interest is search anyway, categorization for me serves as a way to find related notes.

> The turning point was spending months of part time hacking writing my own Evernote’s clone in Clojure in the backend, a Firefox plugin, and a web app. It was a fun project, but mire fun writing it than using it.

Lol, sounds like me, except it's been almost 3 years since I started (https://github.com/zadam/trilium if anybody's interested)