
Don’t Take My Folders Away: Organizing Personal Info to Get Things Done (2005) - mpweiher
https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/handle/1773/2031
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jen729w
I do this _rigorously_ with tremendous success. I can find anything,
instantly. Yes, it takes a little work up front. For me, the payback is
obvious and extreme.

I have to get round to finishing my site so please excuse its current
incompletion, but hey, if you're interested:
[http://johnnydecimal.com](http://johnnydecimal.com)

I use this system at work and I have otherwise very competent Project Managers
stare at me like I'm some sort of wizard when I navigate to the right folder,
the first time, every time, and find exactly what I'm looking for. Email, our
shared drive, SharePoint - I use it everywhere. I would be a mess without it.

~~~
mxuribe
I just read the stuff on johhnydecimal.com and am near-instantly hooked! I've
signed up for your mailing list, and am really pumped up to see when this is
finished, and when more stuff gets added...and I appreciate that i can start
implementing your recommendations immediately. Well done and kudos, I must
say!

~~~
jen729w
Thank you thank you thank you so much. Glad I posted this here - now I have a
real incentive to finish the thing.

~~~
fabiandesimone
Thank you! This is phenomenal.

I already started implementing this + Hazel. Love it!

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noonespecial
If you think about it, folders are really like limited tags where the only
relationship you are allowed is "and then".

It would be nice to see a system that would present a tag set in the
appearance of folders for all "and then" relationships but then let you mix in
things like "and also", "or", and "but not".

~~~
NobleLie
Hi. My brother and I are working on a note taking system; one of the focuses
being increased utility of tags.

Of note relating to tags:

\- tags are hierarchically organized and inherit their parents. (Systems like
gmail and evernote dont do this?! o_O)

\- NOT and AND blocks

\- Option for seeing full lineage of tag

\- "Tag Clusters" which are basically a named group of tags that are commonly
used and can be bulk applied to an item

On the way: Full AST (abstract syntax tree) tag/user/text querying (the UI
isnt the easiest to nail down for OR / parenthetical groups)

Laddice.com (desktop app only right now)

Feel free to check it out, make an account and email me with thoughts,
opinions and/or requests (email's in my profile.)

Would love to talk more about this with you!

~~~
kijin
+1 for hierarchical tags. I've been organizing all my bookmarks (about 12K
going back more than a decade) with Usenet-style tags like comp.lang.python
and sci.bio.paleontology for several years now. It works great, especially
since Pinboard lets me autocomplete by tag prefix.

One of the things that I think most services like Gmail missed when they tried
to replace folders with tags is that although the same item can belong to
multiple categories, the categories themselves usually don't have a completely
flat relationship to one another. An article can relate to both Python and
paleontology, but that doesn't change the fact that Python is a programming
language and paleontology is a subfield of the biological sciences. This will
be very useful later when I'm trying to remember something that uses some
programming language to analyze data in some subfield of the biological
sciences, for example.

Tags look cute on a screenshot when you have a few hundred items. But when you
have tens of thousands of items, you need a bit of hierarchy to protect your
sanity.

~~~
icebraining
But Gmail tags do have hierarchy...

~~~
kijin
Nested labels were only introduced in 2010 or 2011. Can't remember exactly
when, but they certainly weren't available when I first started and then
stopped using Gmail. Something as basic as how to organize your email should
not have been an afterthought.

~~~
RileyKyeden
It was probably a concession, not an afterthought. Google's whole thing with
Gmail was "keep all your email, don't bother organizing, search will solve
all."

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brchr
Looks like this is a 2005 study from William Jones, et al.

If folks are interested in this line of research, Jones has a 2007 book called
Keeping Found Things Found that takes a more comprehensive look at personal
information management.

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nhebb
The ability to organize email into folders is one of the main reasons I prefer
Outlook over GMail. But as the paper mentions, "Folders can obscure as well as
organize", which is where tags come in handy. What I would really like - for
both email and files - is the ability to create both folders and tags quickly.

~~~
hodgesrm
I agree with you on documents, which tend to be small in number so you can
index them manually using folders. But what about the case where you get
hundreds of messages a day? If you get 300 messages a day you'll accumulate
over 100K messages annually. Manual indexing seems like madness. I don't even
try rule based tagging at that point.

In this latter case the gmail model is great. I leave everything in the inbox
and depend on gmail (a) never to lose it and (b) to find it easily through
search. In fact you can use gmail as a doc store--if there's something I
really value I make it an email attachment and depend on gmail to dig it up if
necessary.

~~~
nhebb
I think of search as a default functionality (although it was actually pretty
bad in older versions of Outlook). But from a usability standpoint, software
shouldn't pigeonhole users into one method or another. Since everyone's work
flow is different, it's all about providing users flexibility.

~~~
zokier
> But from a usability standpoint, software shouldn't pigeonhole users into
> one method or another. Since everyone's work flow is different, it's all
> about providing users flexibility.

I'm not sure if I agree. I think it might be better to software to excel in
one specific workflow rather than attempt to cater everyone. Of course this
requires the market to provide different options for different workflows.

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ronaldvalente
A good folder hierarchy is key to my OCD sanity. I never truly trust search
alone. Tagging is not reliable as it depends on your state of mind being 100%
consistent every time you add a tag to a file. Reliably defining scope and
organizing by category within scope is much more consistent. Nice Post!

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aytekin
"... to Get Things Done"

If the goal is to organize things for easy future browsing, the folder
approach works well. But, if the goal is to clearly see what the next actions
are and make progress on them, it is not a good approach since the latest and
important items are buried somewhere deep inside all the folders.

~~~
ORioN63
What's your opinion there?

Any suggestions, for someone building a personal db.

~~~
peppersmith
[http://www.zim-wiki.org/](http://www.zim-wiki.org/) is a personal database I
use to organise notes, projects and scripts. Simple cross-note linking and
automatic TODO list generation are particularly useful features I use
frequently. The 'database' is stored markdown-formatted files that can be
easily version controlled and edited from the command line.

~~~
wolfgang42
I've done some Zim evangelism on HN before ([1], [2]), so I'll merely link
those here and mention that I'd love to answer any questions about how I use
it.

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13232861](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13232861)

[2]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13134401](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13134401)

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nileshtrivedi
I haven't yet got around to use it but TagSpaces seems interesting:
[https://www.tagspaces.org/](https://www.tagspaces.org/)

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potato122
I'm on a MacBook. Is there some type of virtual folder type that I can use
that behaves like any other folder? Something where the files and folders
within don't actually 'live' there.

I don't like tags because they're not tangible. If they could live somewhere
on the desktop where I could click them, or be nestable, I would use them.

~~~
zokier
Symlinks? Lots and lots of symlinks?

~~~
coldtea
Smart (query based) Folders and Tags?

Both of which macOS offers...

