My reference data management approach with org and emacs

[Marcelo de Moraes Serpa <celoserpa@gmail.com>]

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Hello list,

I would like to share how I'm keeping my reference data. This includes
articles I write, blog post drafts, braintorms and anything else that we
could fit in the reference category (gtd-wide).

I don't like categories too much. Actually, I find them too strict and
limited. Putting things into folders just makes you loose ]time thinking
about structure. I'm adept of tags, though. I love them. So, my basic idea
was to have a folder (which I right now call wiki/) with a compendium of all
my reference data.

Whenever I need to create a new entry, I press s-r and it triggers dired
with this directory as context. So, I can just type something .org and press
<enter> to create it. Then, at the bottom, I create a * tags item. I tag it
with relevant tags and save. *I don't add it to the agenda list* -- I have a
custom rgrep function to seach over wiki/, which is binded to s-o. When I
want to find something from my reference data, I just press s-o and type a
string, and rgrep does the rest.

It's pretty simple, and, as you could note, doesn't use much of org's
functionalities. Using agenda would be overkill, as I have dozens of files
in the directory, and it would be probably overkill for org-agenda.

Anyways, just thought I'd share. It works great, is very organic, flexible
and simple. The goal was to have a simple storage system which was easy to
search and that wouldn't get on my way, but be easy to access/use when I
needed it.

As a knowledge worker, I find that it works quite well to quickly
brainstorm, draft blog posts or anything else that I want to keep as
reference.

How do you manage reference information? It'd be nice to know :)

Cheers,

Marcelo.

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