FemmeAndroid

I am always intrigued to read about how individuals construct, organize, maintain, and expand their personal knowledge bases. There's a wide range of tools at our disposal, including Obsidian, Notion, Markdown and plaintext, Zotero, Evernote, among others. Likewise, organizational structures are just as diverse - anyone here a fan of Zettelkasten?

Despite a couple of serious attempts, committing to the process for a few months each time, I've rarely found myself referring back to the stored information. More importantly, the process of adding to and maintaining the knowledge base felt more burdensome than beneficial. I've tried adjusting the content and format of what I'm storing in an attempt to make the experience more manageable, but to no avail.

My main motivation for exploring this further is my growing concern about my recollection ability as I age, and I'd like to fully exploit the available tools to counteract this.

So, for those of you who do have a functioning system that you use regularly - regardless of its simplicity or complexity - how do you employ it to retrieve information or enhance your understanding of topics? Insights into how your system operates would be useful, but are secondary for me at this point. I feel like I've read about all the possible configurations a system could have, yet I'm skeptical about the tangible benefits they can provide. I would be delighted to be proven wrong.

I’ve delved into initial RFCs for a variety of open standards, finding particular joy in perusing originals like SMTP from 1982.

However, I’m keen to gain a deeper understanding of the stages preceding the RFC publication. Are there resources documenting these early periods? I’m interested in the process of ideating solutions and understanding the technology’s state at that time. Taking SMTP as an example, what protocols, if any, were in use for data sharing? I’m aware that FTP was around, but I lack insight into what was practically implemented.

Furthermore, I’m curious about the decision-making process behind these proposals.

I welcome any and all sources that could shed light on these areas of interest. Thank you!