I too am searching for improved workflow around this. This is what I have learned so far. Please share your thoughts and Ideas.
The importance of documentation and notes - Wiki
I have found my self in situations where I know I have solved a particular problem, but am unable to recall how I did it. This is infuriating and the reason why I began taking notes in wiki a few years back. This has served me well in my personal and professional life.
I most often take notes with notepad++ and end up cleaning them up (or not) and adding them to the wiki. Some times I might take photos of a whiteboard or something else useful. The photos are uploaded to my Nextcloud and are available to be added to the wiki together with the notes.
Key features of a wiki
I chose Dokuwiki because it is a simple platform that has many plugins available. Yes it looks and sometimes feels clunky but it is very functional.
What I like about it:
- Support for pasting images and dragging files directly in the edit window
- Strong emphasis on document structure
- built in version control and change visualization
- contextual editing - The ability to edit the text under a heading or subheading instead of the whole document - I did not know I needed this and now cannot live without
- Good search functionality
- Section templates - Ability to add a template document for a specific section in the tree navigation that will serve as a base for all future docs under that tree
- Based on files, easy to back up
*Themable pdf export to export some content with company letterhead for clients in my professional life
What I dislike
- It is and feels old
- Some of the modules are hard to understand
- the learning curve is steeper than some other alternatives - I feel it was worth it
- Updates are very infrequent
*Not possible to paste in html with images (from webpages as rich text)
Task management and ingest - Clickup
A wiki by itself is not enough since there are many things that require my attention and they need to be prioritized. In the past I have used Trello to deal with this but found it was missing some features I needed. Trello is an easy and modern tool to get started.
I ended up choosing Clickup for managing tasks, projects and incoming tasks. It has a rich feature set and the people behind are improving it rapidly.
What I like about it:
- The ability to create sub tasks - This is key in my process because it enables me to group related tasks into projects
- Custom fields and attributes
- board, list and other ways to view tasks
- Calendar integration and good due dates
- custom views of tasks with filtering support with many parameters
What I dislike
- Not self hosted - Can live with this
- slow UI, specially when there are hundreds of tasks
- Sometimes there are bugs and issues - They do fix these
- Sometimes it is complicated to use, since there are so many features - Learning curve
Bringing it all together
So I have a wiki and some task management, now what…?
In my experience this is not enough since the mind works much faster than these tools and I find this combo to be lacking in speed and ease of use. I often find my self having quick ideas and thoughts that require some further processing. I find that if I do not do it immediately, the ideas tend to evaporate back to the ether they came from.
Ingest workflow - Slack + Clickup = Wiki
In the past I have saved quick ideas as IM messages to myself and it has been a somewhat working solution.
Since I have my phone with me at all times I want to use it as the main ingest tool for quick ideas, notes and tasks. The process needs to be as quick and stress free as possible.
The plan
I am planning of including the Slack IM tool into this process since it is a tool that I use all the time to communicate with different teams and colleagues. I will build a Slack API integration that will enable me to build an ingest workflow for my thoughts, ideas and tasks.
The idea is to have a Slack integration that would enable to add Clickup tasks directly from slack. Yes I know there is a Clickup integration already but this is not fast enough for me since it requires the user to make multiple selections and choices when adding the task.
I will set it up so that in slack there will be preset commands that add the text after the command as a task in Clickup on a preset ingest list.
/idea quick description of the idea before i forget it
would create a task on the idea-list with the header of ‘quick description of the idea before i forget it’
I am planning of having multiple commands for around 5-10 different ingest lists like: Movies, work related tasks for A,B and C, home related tasks, books, etc.
I think that this will work quickly and easily enough that I will be able to capture my incoming ideas and tasks effectively.
No ingest without outgest
Now that there is a place to collect ideas and tasks quickly, there needs to be work done around the tasks to make it useful.
I am planning on working, enriching and organizing the tasks in Clickup. Some of the tasks will rot away and eventually end up deleted. Some will be enriched with further information and moved to other Clickup lists. Some will be enriched and moved to the wiki. Some will stay in the ingest list and be completed there.
I hope this will spark some thoughts and ideas as @wendell did in me with this topic.