Comment by Beestie
1 day ago
Its a beautiful system but where my head explodes (and has been exploding for 4 decades) is over the following scenario.
So in Johnny's system, I assign 21 to automobiles. My VW van gets 21.1, my Citron is 21.2, etc. and the insurance for each car gets a .8 so 21.1.8, 21.2.8, etc.
And I assign 13 to Money. Insurance belongs under money so 13.5 is insurance and life insurance gets 13.5.1, E&O insurance gets 13.5.2, etc.
I also need a top folder for Medical for doc visits, vaxes, ER visits, Surgeries, the kids' allergies and stuff.
So where all this is going is two months later, where is the health insurance policy? Is it under medical or under money? Is the car insurance under Automobiles or Insurance under Money?
Back to my head exploding - this is my issue - I can never remember which branch of the tree to find a specific leaf? Does my annual car tax belong with the Money or with the Auto branch? If I want to see the tax for all the cars at the same time, I put it under Money - Taxes - Auto but when I need to know the last time I paid the tax on the VW, I will assume its filed under Auto-VW-Car Tax.
This is why I can never find anything. All due respect to Johnny but I'm too retarded to use it properly.
You’ve hit the nail on its head here. Almost every piece of information I save has more than one type of contextual relevance, this is not handled by any hierarchical organization system no matter how clever the addressing is. At a certain scale and complexity, I simply cannot remember the magic incantation URL for whatever it is I need. Even search falls apart frequently, because I saved some reference using an abbreviation or synonym to what I think I need.
It doesnt take so much “scale” if one has deficient short term memory/recall/adhd or is (as youve elegantly put it) “too retarded”. (hey - samesies)
Tags/content classifiers/ontologies are I think the solution here, but require continuously grooming your data to ensure it’s classified correctly - a time investment.
My opinion is that modern ML classifiers are helping,l - Ive found some help with tools that recently added auto-tagging - and I think the real magic bullet will be augmenting this capability with relevant personal/activity context. An algorithm can infer much of the contextual relevances that are missing from the current tools if it can match some incoming information to any or all of the areas/topics/projects/horizons/decimal-things that users of organizational tools have decided are important to them.
Johnny here. This is the canonical example, and I quote it myself: is it `Insurance > Car` or `Car > Insurance`?
In reality you just decide. One feels better to your brain. And you tend to remember that.
It helps of course if you remain consistent. In the systems we design we’ve realised that most people want the insurance close to the thing being insured.
So in our life admin system we have health, pet, home, motor, and travel insurance as IDs alongside your records for those things. Seems to suit most people.
And don’t forget you’ve got your index as a fallback. I don’t remember most of these numbers but I just launched Bear, typed `insurance` in the search field, and there they are. Now in three clicks I can get to my home insurance which, turns out, is at `12.12`.
https://share.icloud.com/photos/0afQRa-furBCpa9rOIc3r3Q7g
> And you tend to remember that.
Haha, nope. Different brains work differently. One day I genuinely prefer one, a week later another.
This! i prefer tags over folders for this reason. All notes go into single folder , no sub directories . Because a note can have multiple classifications a tree structure is not natural way to organize them. Add tags , if you have note taking program will show you all possible existing tags you it makes this easier.
I love tags until I actually use them, I always wind up using them inconsistently, or not at all for a specific file, and them bam, I can't find anything at all.
The benefit of file structures is that things have to have a place, you can't not put something in a folder, so for car insurance, it might be in "insurance" or "cars" but it's definitely one or the other. With tags, it could be "insurance", "finance", "cars", "automobiles", "vehicles", "veihcles", etc.
Any tips of how to funnel some strictness into tags so that they're actually usable?
Sometimes autocomplete works for me, so I avoid the "auto" vs "automobile" but it falls apart as soon as I realize I have "autombile" suggested and now I wonder what to do to re-tag files.
Additionally, tags naturally form hierarchies in the form of trees (or ADGs), so any possible taxonomy should support that.
This is why I like Obsidian (or some other linked-documents wiki type of system), because it makes linking things easy, so you can take multiple routes to find a thing. I have a health note and a finances note. Which one does health insurance go under? I pick whichever one seems to make the most sense at the time. Then, in the future, if I'm looking for health insurance and look in the wrong place first, I can easily make a link there to the "health insurance" note/section. Now, I will find health insurance whether I look under health or finances.
The "Obsidian way" that many people recommend is notes that are as small as possible to maximize this kind of effect, but that's not how I like to do it. I prefer bigger notes with lots of headings (that can be nested up to 6 levels), and lots of links within a note and between notes to specific headings. I find this to be a nice blend of hierarchical navigation and link navigation.
Non-text files (like receipts or pictures) get linked from the relevant note or section, and many types of media can be viewed inline in the WYSIWYG editor.
I've had this problem for a long time. My solution was to keep my organization as flat as possible. This means everything insurance-related would go to 13.
A flat structure seems less organized, since you are “mixing” stuff, but as long as there isn't too much stuff inside, going through stuff one-by-one is faster than you think. If I do have a lot of stuff in a section, I either split into several sections in the top structure (so 13 is life insurance, 14 is other...), or go one level deeper (not preferred, but I do it when it's very clear and there is too much stuff, like photos, which btw sorting chronologically works best for me).
It is really not much of an issue having 50 top sections. It makes the organization transparent, and indexing, sorting and going one-by-one remains easy.
I had exactly this issue before, an I blame overthinking things. Trying to put in place a system where none is needed.
I ended up with a box, in the box there are large plastic envelopes, and each envelope is labelled.
I have:
- "assets" (cars, warrantees, service records, purchase invoices etc)
- "health" (all medical related things)
- "insurance" (everything insurance related)
- "guns" (I like guns... so licenses, legal paperwork, etc etc)
The best thing is, this is a box. So worst case, even if I misfiled something, all I need to do is rifle through a box. The box is portable and universal, and if my wife needs something, I can easily guide her to where to find it.
What you need is a tree where the items can be in multiple places.
Bear does this really well with its hierarchical tags.
Most filesystems can do this with hardlinks (but the UX mostly sucks).
omigosh - genius idea - I need a Schrödinger's file system! WooHoo! The dumb insurance policy is wherever I look for it! :-)
symlinks or hardlinks might help with that, depending on your needs. With hardlinks you will see the same file in both locations, and if you change or remove the file it will be removed in the other directory as well
it's only going to be one of a few places though, and the key thing is you know where those places are and can get to them quickly