Data Organization, For The Data That's You

We often talk about classifying and organizing data in companies and project-related scopes, but when was the last time you thought about organizing the data in your life - the data that essentially sums up to create your world?

If you think about it, there is an abundance of data streaming in and out of your life every single day. Some you retain, some you discard, but almost every bit of it serves its purpose in its own way.

To put that in context, here’s what that much data looks like:

• Watch every episode of Game of Thrones (73 episodes, ~1GB each), or,

• Watch every piece of music ever composed by both Vivaldi (235 hrs) & Mozart (240 hrs) (6.6 hrs/GB), or,

• Read every article on Wikipedia 3.6x over (As of 3/22, the compressed size of all of Wikipedia's articles is about 20.6 GB)

That’s a lot of data to consume on a daily basis and more importantly, remember. Data in our lives is only as good as the ease of availability. In other words, if you forget it or lose it, its almost the same as not having it in the first place.

Especially more so true when it comes to the type of data we are exposed to - a complex mixture of numbers, text, dates, audio, video and so much more.

Number 1 : Your Calendar

Not a surprise here that the most fundamental one we should start with, is your calendar. This determines your entire day and the data that comes along with it.

Now as of today, a number of us already use some sort of a calendar application, which is a great starting point.

However, often we can end up having multiple accounts and therefore multiple calendars.

You can achieve this by integrating your other calendars into your main calendar. This is possible either via exporting your calendar in a suitable format or my personal favourite, adding a subscription for each of your additional calendars.

The way to do this depends on the tool or app you are using for your calendar. For instance, if you’re using Google Calendar, here is some documentation that could be helpful.

Google Calendar Subscriptions

Screenshot below. There are a list of features that greatly enhance your calendar experience. Quick note to add here is that its a paid tool and the pricing details are linked here.

Number 2 : Numeric & Tabular Data

Now this one is probably quite self-explanatory since we are exposed to the same practices at work.

While the former is free (given you have a connected Google account) the latter requires a Microsoft Office 365 subscription, pricing details for which are linked here.

Now there are various resources to discuss the pros and cons of one tool over the other, so I am not going to dive into this, but the only recommendation I would provide here is to be consistent.

My personal preference here is to go with Google Sheets, one, because of the pricing and two, because of the enhanced capabilities to link it to other tools via APIs or web-hooks. In fact, later I also show it can be integrated into a Notion document.

Number 3 : Notes and Documents

At this point, we have covered the events and tasks in your day; then numeric, tabular data that you might be recording or storing. This lends itself to the next aspect that’s a big piece of our life - notes, articles, documents.

I have to mention that this landscape is heavily saturated with an abundance of tools. Here is an graphic depicting the various tools and the different segments they fall in, when it comes to documents.

Now instead of going through each tool and discussing their benefits over the others, I thought its best to just give you a preview of what I use and how that helps me.

There are a range of features that will transform the way you are able to retain all the information you gather at every single point. Some of my favourites are shared below.

• Different “workspaces” that allow you to compartmentalise the different buckets you wish to preserve information for

• Ability to work with “databases” so that you can even store smaller scope tabular data and then have different “views” as needed.

• Finally and my most craved one, the ability to collaborate and share information on a “per document” granularity.

Number 4 : Readwise

Okay, so this is something unique that I would like to share. But before that, allow me to add some context.

An article from the Altantic captures this quite eloquently.

To me, as a data scientist, this is a giant hole in the boat cause all that knowledge and data that you consume from your books, audiobooks, podcasts is slowly leaking out. And as we mentioned, once we forget the data, its almost as if we never learnt it in the first place. So how do we plug that hole?

The answer? An inconspicuous tool called Readwise.

A tool that allows you to highlight sections in your book (either via the Kindle app or if you’ve reading a physical book, by simply taking a photograph as shown below).

Here’s the Kicker

To bring it full circle, remember consistency is key. So having a single source of truth and data is always preferred as opposed to data scattered across multiple platforms.

Here is an example how you can embed your Google drive / Google sheets into Notion.

Finally, all those Readwise highlights that you’ve been storing can also be synced with Notion. Once you do that, you have something like this - all your books, articles, podcasts with the highlights in each of them.