We all have collections of random tips, console commands and bulleted lists we keep around — some with a better organisational system than others to keep them.

For several years, I didn’t really know where to store these small tokens of knowledge in a way that I could easily find them. They ended up in weird documents on Evernote without any structure, or written somewhere on a notebook, or maybe even on another note taking system, like Notion or Simplenote.

However, I think I cracked it — at least I’ve found a system that seems to work for me. Inspired by the idea of O’Reilly’s cookbooks, I’ve started compiling my own set:

Whenever I run into a useful Git command, or want to keep around a handy VS Code keyboard shortcut, I put them into their respective cookbooks. They don’t even have to be techy; I’ve found this structure easy to organise and easy to search with any kind of topic. Keeping a flat structure (no folders, only files) and relying on Evernote search seems to do the trick.

I’m quite bad at remembering things I don’t do often — not sure if I’ve always been like this or if I got worse after reading Getting Things Done. One of the tenets of the book is to get things out of your head into some kind of storage (physical or digital). This system has been working for me, at least for utilities like one-line commands that you need to run occasionally, or lists of steps on how to do something.

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash