The power of the personal wiki

In the last few days, I've been implementing a bit of the Getting Things Done process (or workflow) in order to be a bit more in control of everything that is going on in my life.

One of the things I've done is to create a personal wiki to use as a digital reference system and I've found that I'm adding so much information that I keep looking on the internet over and over again. The benefit is that I don't need to rely on google anymore and I can organize the information in whatever way I want.

Why is this important? Many times I've spent something between a few hours and a couple of days researching something (eg how to install certain software on the DLink DNS323), just to forget everything about that a few weeks later. This is not really a problem, until a few months later, whatever I did stops working and I need to remember (aka google furiously) what I did in order to revert it or fix it.

Here's where the personal wiki pays off as lots of the notes, links and sample scripts can be there as a reminder of what we've learned.

Of course there are lower tech solutions to this (eg use google docs or plain text files), but I like the wiki approach as it also allows to easily link, relate and search content.