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Comment by tunesmith | Hacker News Reader

Still figuring this out - I have DevonThink to collect/catalog but I find that I don't often get in there to search, so that information basically rots. Same with my web bookmarks, many are several years old. As time goes on I find that information is basically useless unless I either internalize or act on it. So I tend to use information to adjust either my anki decks or my goal maps, and then I try to deliberately not save the rest... although that is still difficult since some of it is still just so tempting to flag by saying "gosh I will really want to refer this later after I do x, y, and z"...

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I never used DevonThink, can you tell me what are the your personal biggest pros and cons of this program? Also, what do you think is the biggest problem of this/similar systems?

I can sympathize with bookmarks problems, not only they rot, but after few years there is a lot of 404 (pinboard provides archiving bookmarks but that is a paid service).

Do you have a lot of Anki decks of just a single "random things from the bookmarks"? Do you use Anki every day or rather infrequently?

I use DevonThink as mostly just a clipping/storage app, but it has tons of utility beyond that - seems a lot of grad students use it for managing resources they later write papers from. I chose it over Evernote because it does more. The main downside of it is that it doesn't yet have a good mobile syncing solution, even though they've been working on it for years now. But it has a ton of UI customizability for searching and browsing, and search works well too.

The main problems with all these systems are just that we use them to attempt to augment our own intelligence/utility based off of some concept of who we are aiming to be in the future, and then as things change for us personally, our aborted plans lead to a lot of rot that doesn't clear itself away automatically. So only some small percentage of what we collect ends up relevant.

I have a lot of individual Anki decks, which isn't recommended. But I create a filter deck that rebuilds from the other decks every day and properly randomizes the cards, and only study from that. I do it every day except when I forget and then I catch up later. My cards are mostly along the lines of music, logic, math, stats, programming, and rational thinking.

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