I’m not a natural organizer, but I’m starting to appreciate things that help me organize as I get older.
Have any of you run into some sort of widget or gadget or box or even app that you almost brushed off, but then started using it and now it’s the neatest thing ever?
I guess I’m looking for things you almost wrote off as boring-as-shit before you used it and were converted.
I bought two pieces of the new Milwaukee Packout tool box/organizer shit. Super expensive. Was a bit turned off at the price but I wanted something that stacked. After a series of mistakes the entire thing flew out my trailer and landed in the interstate going 70+ mph. Mother fucker didn’t dint or come open or anything. Barely a scratch. It didn’t even unstack. I spent $300 dollars on a few more pieces and it’s been wonderful.
https://www.milwaukeetool.com/Products/Storage-Solutions/PACKOUT
I mean, boxes in general are my organising style. I keep a lot of aquariums so I bought 8 shoebox sized boxes, one for substrate, one for decor, one for water testing, etc.
In my bathroom I used to have a lot of stuff so I bought a few wicker baskets, hair stuff, skin care, and make up, then a tall cupboard with fabric boxes for cleaning products, toothcare, hair dyes, bath bombs, you know. I have boxes everywhere.
I’ve been recently introduced to Logseq, a journal/notes/knowledge management app that is based on networked knowledge (links,references and tags), instead of hierarchical (folder structure) knowledge management type, and it has been a gamechanger.
It has a pretty basic TODO features, but the way linking and references work is really smooth to work with. You get a dated journal page for each day, and can just randomly add blocks of notes that reference pages, topics or tags, and it gets automatically linked to the page you referenced. So if I open the page for a project, it contains content of every block that mentioned it, along with context, so you quickly get an overview.
The best feature is that you can also write queries, that fill the block with data you want, so I can for example create a block for a meeting, tag it with project, and write a query that lists notes from every other meeting tagged with the same project. Or I can have a query for every TODO item tagged with a project, to see them at one place.
The node graph feature is also nice, which visualises links between pages, so you can get an overview about related things, and it also has a Whiteboards and Flashcard features, just as it can do basic time trackings for blocks tagged as TODO.
It’s pretty intuitive to use, and so far it’s one of the first note-taking and knowledge management app that has managed to stick with me for longer than a week.
And a quick tip - if you decide to use it, check out how to setup an automatic git syncing, so you can sync your notes between devices without paying for the cloud sync feature.
Tiddlywiki. Simple in theory one you get your head around it. I live on a boat, and use it for inventory. Every item is entered, along with quantity and location so I can search and find where things are. Depending on the thing, additional information is stored as well. For food stuffs, nutrition info, brand, place I bought it, and price (useful going between countries). Recipes link to ingredients, so I can filter on what I have or what I need. For tech items, serial number, manuals, warranty information, and the like. And for certain items, checklists, or maintenance tasks, I link to the inventory item of my tools, so I know what I need and where to get it before starting a job.
For example, I have an entry for the outboard motor. I know that if I’m filling it with fuel, I need 2 stroke oil, gasoline, fuel filter. If I have to adjust the turning resistance, I know I’ll need a 10mm wrench. If I have to change the lower unit oil, I need a pump for oil, container for old oil, flathead screw driver for the plug, etc.
Because of browser security I think TiddlyWiki has gotten a bit hard to use. 10 yrs ago I could write and update files without any security popups or cli flags or admin permissions.
Only in single file mode (meaning opening the HTML as a file:// URL, making changes, and saving it again). Hosting it on a server, desktop, or raspberry pi with node is ridiculously simple these days. It’s completely backwards compatible, but TW5 changed the architecture quite a bit. You can drop that 10 year old file into a blank node instance, and it comes out perfectly.
Gridfinity.
I’m new to 3D printing but Gridfinity is a game changer. Make your own storage, but this is made to fit into a standard grid, incredibly flexible and useful.
I agree to a certain extent, the idea behind it is pretty awesome. I printed a bunch of grids and organizing pieces a few weeks after the original video dropped, and was pretty impressed by how well most of it worked. The rub comes in with the model sites being fraught with “bad” models that people have tweaked to suit their printers or the hardware they want to use so not everything can be used right away. That kinda thing is hard to measure on screen, in a mesh, so makes a lot of wasted plastic/time.
