Remember Karl Voit from the Sacha Chua chat that I wrote about previously? Voit collects data on just about every aspect of his life and stores it in an Org file. If you haven’t watched the chat yet, be sure to take a look. You’ll be amazed.
The other half of collecting all that data is being able to search it. Voit has lots of homegrown tools for that but he also makes use of the built-in Org tools:
Advanced searching in #Orgmode http://t.co/etyXQEvx1u is *very* important to know for users of #Emacs. #PIM
— n0v0id (@n0v0id) February 6, 2015
His tweet points to this excellent Worg tutorial that describes how to extract data from Org files. The methods are surprisingly flexible, and although the syntax can be daunting they’re well worth learning if you collect any data at all into Org files. It’s worth reading through the tutorial if only to see what’s available. You can always check back for the exact details when yo need them.
Voit is an expert on data collection and retrieval and it’s worth studying his methods and software. You’ll be a lot more proficient with data if you do.