Personal Knowbase Stay-at-Home Project Ideas

Many of us are finding unstructured time on our hands while on lockdown, quarantine, or shelter in place. Our last post outlined general productivity tips to help cope during "Shelter in Place".

If you decide to use your self-isolation time to start a project (or make progress on a previously languishing project), create a Personal Knowbase data file for it and collect all its notes in one place. Personal Knowbase's freeform note management system can help with organizing the related notes, research, and records. Use it to keep track of related website accounts and online resources. Attach related files to the corresponding PK articles.

Seven Tips for Coping During "Shelter in Place"

Many of us are currently self-isolating, under orders to shelter in place, or under quarantine. Even if you're still working from home, you probably have time on your hands when you would have been commuting, socializing, or running errands. Those not used to having a lot of unstructured time, trapped with only immediate family members, or even completely alone, can rapidly succumb to cabin fever.

You might feel like you've lost control of your life. Constant stress and loss of focus can lead to ennui.

It's tempting to just sit in front of the TV. But I've found that getting something constructive accomplished helps me feel more in control of an uncontrollable situation.

Using Personal Knowbase to Organize Recipes

Whether you're an ardent chef, you're gathering together all your extended family's recipes, you're studying mixology, or you just bake occasionally for holidays, Personal Knowbase provides a natural and flexible way to organize your recipes. Collect all your recipes in one place where you can access them on your computer, print them, or export them to text files.

Here are some ideas for setting up a PK data file for your recipes.

Productivity Tips: 5 Tips for Beating Procrastination

Stuck? The first step in beating procrastination is to understand why you're procrastinating. Analyze the reasons for procrastination and find a solution. Here are some tips for getting unstuck:

PK Tip: Avoiding Changing a Data File

When browsing a Personal Knowbase data file — opening and closing articles while checking or looking for something — you can easily make changes accidentally.

If you realize you've made a change to an article that you didn't want to change, you can immediately return the article to its last saved state. While the article window is still open, select the Undo Article Changes command from the Edit menu.

But if you know that you don't want to make changes to a file before you open it, it's safer to open the file in Read-Only mode to start with. In Read-Only mode, you have no risk of making unwanted changes. You will not be able to modify existing articles or create new ones.

Cleaning off Your Desk with Personal Knowbase

Today is National Clean Off Your Desk Day, which falls on the second Monday of January every year. Personal Knowbase can't help you get rid of old pens, half-used batteries, and that broken coffee mug. But it can help you tidy up all those scattered bits of paper.

As part of your efforts, try this:

PK Tip: Typing in the Index Column

In Personal Knowbase, normally we locate keywords in the Index column by clicking them with the mouse. But we can also locate keywords using the keyboard. Typing to locate keywords can save you from constant scrolling in long lists of keywords.

When the highlighted cursor focus (when the highlight has a dotted outline) is in the Index column, you can type the first few letters of a keyword to move the highlight to that keyword in the list. So, for example, if you type "sm", the highlight will move to the first keyword starting with "sm".

Computer Basics: 3 Tips for Effective Backups

Disaster can strike at any time, whether it's computer failure, fire, or human error. For anyone doing computer work that involves creating new data — whether your work is writing, business and finance, or programming — backing up your files is critical. Even losing a day's worth of writing or artwork can be devastating.

Keeping safe backups of all of your original data is important.

Running PK Reader from a CD

Personal Knowbase Reader is a read-only viewer for files which are created using the Personal Knowbase note management software. You can set up PK Reader to run from a write-once removable disk, such as a CD-R, so that it automatically loads a Knowbase data file.

PK Tips for Portable Mode Installation

If you need to carry your notes between computers, you can use Personal Knowbase's portability feature to install the software on a USB thumb drive or other removable media. If you're having trouble getting PK to install in portable mode, here are a couple things to check.