I’m an inveterate data collector and recorder. I keep records of everything to the point that my wife was making fun of me last week when I used my phone to recall a piece of obscure information that I’d stored away. If you’re like me, there are two problems to solve: capturing and retrieval.
First you have to have an efficient way of capturing information. For me, that’s mostly Org-mode although I do use the Apple Notes app too. I have keyboard shortcuts on my computer that take me directly to an Org-mode capture buffer so I can capture events or ideas as frictionlessly as possible even if I’m not in Emacs when I want to capture the data.
My searching strategies are not particularly sophisticated. I mainly search by tags or by using counsel-rg, an Ivy/Counsel interface to ripgrep. Using them, I can retrieve almost any piece of my information quickly and easily. Some folks, however, are more demanding.
Over at beepb00p, Karlicoss has a long and interesting post on how he searches his personal data. Like me, he uses tag searches and ripgrep but his system is much more comprehensive and he has several scripts that extract data from things like reddit, his twitter feed, and basically anywhere he comments or adds data. The extracted data is usually imported into Org for easy handling but he has other strategies as well.
If you’re interested in collecting, storing, and retrieving data, Karlicoss has a bunch of good ideas in his post. It’s a long post with lots of links but definitely worth spending a bit of time on.