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Ask HN: How do you remember hacks about yourself?
4 points by caprock on July 18, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments
Over time, I've learned a lot about myself. Some examples might be:

* What actions help me emerge from negative moods

* How I can best navigate specific scenarios at work

* What happens if I don't get sunshine a handful of days a week

I'm being general above, but I have some pretty specific personal hacks for navigating life.

The problem is how to remember and access them at the time of need! Sometimes I can be pro-active, but many times it's a reactive scenario where I need to recall that mindset X is often a result of Y and I can fix it by doing Z.

Do you have lists of personal hacks like this? How do you remember them when you need them? Are you more pro-active or re-active? Do you have a literal list in a document? Do you use reminders of some kind?



I journal a lot. I recommend finding a system that supports backlinking. That way you can link to some related topic (for example, link to "stress" for a note on how you handled stress successfully), and then use the backlinks to that topic to find what you're looking for.

Since I use GNU Emacs, Org Roam[0] was a natural choice for me. Other options include: Logseq, Obsidian, and Notion

[0] https://www.orgroam.com/


Oh, I see. I've thought about shifting to a zettelkasten style for my own notes, but I didn't think about that personal reminder side effect. Thank you for sharing!


I have a ton of these I keep in the spaced repetition software Anki. I use spaced repetition to remember a lot of stuff but I have a specific "life lessons" section to record things I learn about myself and other little life hacks that help me navigate the world. Everything from the embarrassing to the mundane to the profound, if it's something I think will be useful in the future I take a moment to type it in.


That's a cool idea and crossover that I'd not considered. Maybe I should dust off my Anki account. Thanks!


As another poster mentioned, I've used Anki for this in the past. But I found that since I almost always recall the information correctly, the reviews become too infrequent for me. Plus, it requires me to actively use something, whereas I'd like these kinds of things to just be surfaced automatically, without needing intervention from me.

To supplement this, I built a simple reminder system. Each morning, a cron picks a random reminder and sends me a push notification via Pushover.net. Then when I wake up, I just read the full reminder.

I've been using this system for over 4 years now and love it.


Those are not hacks.




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