KnowtIt

KnowtIt helps people remember what they have done, what they are doing and what they need to do.

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Inspiration

I wanted to have a place to store things that I wanted to remember. This included diverse things like partial results on projects, insights or experiences. I wanted the place to be extensible enough to store these things for the rest of my life. I wanted to be able to quickly retrieve things that I remembered and retrieve other important things by context. I wanted to be able to do all of this quickly to minimize the overhead of being reflective. I found that when I tried to rely solely on my memory, I lost things that I wanted to remember. Sometimes I could get the information back by investing more time, which was a waste of my time. Sometimes, I could not get the information back or might not even remember that there was something of value that I once knew.

What it does

Each user creates a unique hierarchy of folders. The hierarchy hides complexity and provides guidance for retrieving notes. Users add notes to the folders. A note can be contained in many folders. Storing a note in many folders creates connections between notes that otherwise would not have existed. It also helps people recover memories that are significant while searching for other content.

How I built it

Nights and weeekends. I have been developing software for a while.

Challenges I ran into

I didn't have much web development experience before the project. Tasks take longer than expected.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I use it every day and it has honestly changed my life for the better. I regularly have experiences where I get something back in my life that would have been gone forever without KnowtIt

What I learned

There are many specific applications where KnowtIt is beneficial. Family history research is one of these. My struggle with family history research is that I have many active research projects. While researching one project, I often find something else to research like a previously unknown child that appears in a census. KnowtIt allows me to create research projects in such a way that I know that I can record my current results and know that I can come back when I have more time or more records are available without the risk of forgetting about some person that I have partially found.

What's next for KnowtIt

Hopefully other people will find KnowtIt beneficial to be reflective, or to manage family history research or to manage their actions in context with the rest of their lives or many other applications.

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