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How do you organise your 'My Documents' folder

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TucknDar:
as soon as I get a new hard drive, I will come up with some sort of organization method that works for me. ;D
-nite_monkey (August 20, 2007, 09:54 PM)
--- End quote ---
Yeah, right! :P

brett:
Being notoriously bad at staying organised. (I failed mousers GTD experiment) I am leaning towards a more automatic system. I have been using the Client/Theme/Job folder name approach for the last couple of years, but sometimes fail on the discipline of maintaining it.

I might try some of the auto-file moving utils out there, use X1 to index it all. just cant decide on alphabetical or extension.
Not that I have much time anymore, but I might even try a AHK solution.

(And of course, multiple backups before and after trying anything)

Brett

Armando:
I too have a partition for data.... who wouldn'T? (edit : precisions : "My documents" redirects to E: which contains "my pictures", "my music", etc.)

So, following MS "suggestions" I tend to first organize my data by medium (but not by extension… because, for example, a picture is a picture, regardless of its format -- jpg, gif, bmp, etc.), using of course some “preconceived” folders (mymusic, mypictures, mywhatever…). But that’s mostly for backup convenience : because of the generally big size of multimedia and music/sound files, and  because I use a laptop, I tend to archive these on an external hard drive — it’s a bit easier to do so if files are grouped by medium.

Past the gross “medium filter”, I use folders pretty loosely… I will create folders sometimes just to have a better view of what I'm working at, but will often dissolve these once the job is done. (Applications are different case altogether and are dealt with differently: for example, I strictly adhere to the rule of having one folder for each downloaded application)

My main organizational weapon is not based on folders though, but on a strict naming system (now powered by AHK…) which separates filenames into different information fields (I don’t use the file'S metadata fields or any tagging software for many different reasons, two of them being reliability and coherence). Using that strategy has several advantages, and almost no disadvantages. The main advantages are that files can 1-belong to many categories at once; 2-be found with Farr, X1, in a flash 3-be reorganized easily with BRU or Flash Renamer. (And I do have a lot of stuff, like most researchers — about 20 000 textual files; of course I’m not taking into account other media). The main disadvantages are that 1-you have to be comfortable with abstract structures; 2- filenames can get rather long (one has to be careful…)

In the end I guess that one could say that my data is pretty much… "all piled into one folder" (but one folder per medium) and that... I allow "file search programs to locate stuff"! Yes, I admit: I've become pretty dependent on file search programs, but that's because I have the feeling they won't disappear anytime soon...

One last thing, maybe… IME many aspects of organization can be automated, but, obviously, not everything can. It takes some discipline and effort to remain in control of your data: nothing replaces your judgment when it comes to finely categorized info.

cthorpe:
I organize by subject with folders such as Receipts, Lesson Plans, Landlord, Certification, etc.  Then I move all those folders into appropriately named yearly folders at the end of the year.

justice:
I'm wondering if it's possible to have an organisation filter based on for example the Bayesian spam filter.
It would learn how you categorize your start menu and my documents and then do it for you. Based on the content of these documents.

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