Comment by Terretta

Hey, anyone who can't/won't/doesn't stick with a system... THIS IS FOR YOU.

Most organization methods predate search.

PARA, for example, can be a decent first cut (active Projects, Areas of responsibility, Reference(research/reading/recreation/really anything), Archive, and you could use that with the below, but don't need to thanks to search.*

The real reason we're still trying systems instead of search is we don't remember what to look for, and hope we'll find it where we should have filed it. Turns out we don't always file it there... Usually we don't file it at all.

So: whether you use PARA at the top or not, within that...

DON'T ORGANIZE!

Don't even try.

Instead, "journal" or "log" by simply saving all files to your desktop, then using a tool such as Hazel for Mac (or a python script, or whatever) "log sort" by renaming files once you haven't modified them for a while (I like once untouched for 7 days) into folders and filename like "./YYYY/WW/YYYY-MM-DD - Original Title.ext". Pay attention to WW, that means Week Number. Month folders get too many files in them, day folders are too sparse. Life and ideas tend to cluster by the week, so week folders are a natural fit, with only 50 of them in a year, so you can see them all in one window.

Why this works is you can find anything that goes with anything you worked on at the time by searching for anything you can remember from the time. Heck, you don't even have to remember anything, just, roughly when. The things from then will be adjacent.

When you find anything at all from then, what you want will be in that week's folder, or at most go back a couple weeks before or after, and you see what you created or modified around then. Boost your odds by stuffing some other keywords into (parens) in the end of the filename when you first save it, there's no downside.

If you can't even find by week, use YYYY-MM* and file type to see everything for a given month...

Auto log sort is low (zero) effort day over day, week over week, but when you start being able to resurface anything you want, even if you can't remember it only things around the same time as it, you may be amazed you ever bothered any other way.

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* Note: If you collab with others, try to organize everyone by responsibilty areas managed by known owners of those responsibilities, then let them organize in their area, and just deal with figuring out whose thing this is and let them file it if it's not evident where it should go in their scheme. But still rename files by date last changed, since most file systems don't keep dates intact when, say, emailing files, etc., and it's still helpful to see what was being modified along with what. Because of the temporal order, the "sorts" tend to cluster things better than alphabetic sort.