A few years ago a read a great article in Fast Company by Douglas Merrill from Google. He said forget about a storing strategy (and subfolders), just dump everything under one floder and “define file as search”. What he meant was, give the file a meaningful name, store it in a general storage bin, and use any search engine (Windows, OS X, Google Desktop) to find it, but don’t waste time finding a sub-sub-sub-subfolder to dump it.

That single tip has made my life a whole lot easier.

I’m thinking about just getting a new laptop it is so bad! Haha.

Good website by the way!

Not only that, a host of programs want to dump *their* data in *my* documents folder, making a mess of what’s My and Mine.

That’s why I have a “File Cabinet” folder on an external drive instead

* bin => folder to hold simple scripts I write
* Desktop => typically empty, but some program always tries to save files here so it’s around to keep them happy
* dev => Larger development projects
* doc => Documents. Inside they are sorted by A, B, C, … and then the topic. Similar to the GTD filing system.
* PDF => Printed PDFs appear in here
* tmp => Temporary files. Downloads go here along with random program downloads.

In addition, everything is in a Subversion repository. It’s nice to sync two computers’ files with a single command.

I’ve used this system for over two years now and it’s great, I always know where something is.

I really need to apply more discipline in dealing with new downloads, new files as they come in as opposed to just opening up a file and dumping all the junk in.

Thanks for the article.

@belasungkawa – My folders go deeper than three levels, but I am very careful to have a minimal number of high level folders. For example. I might have Business and Personal in My Documents. Once I get to a particular context, my folders aren’t very deep. For example. Once I get to the folder for a particular client, my folders will probably only be 1 or 2 deep.

Deep folders become a very big problem if the upper levels are fluid. If the top three levels merely get you to the proper starting point and very rarely change, I find a deep folder structure can be more useful because it means I very rarely have to create new folders.

1. Using Mac OSX, I am able to create a much “flatter” folder hierarchy because of Spotlight. I can be more broad / less specific about the folder into which I put things, knowing that Spotlight searching can at the very least tune out the “noise” when I’m looking for something.

2. I’m a pastor, and I gather all sorts of news items and factoids that might someday work as illustrations in sermons or teaching presentations. I have one folder for these, with a Folder Action set up so that every time I save an item (usually an RTF file, sometimes a printed-to-PDF copy of a web page) to that folder, its Get Info box pops up for me to add “tagging” comments in the Spotlight comments box. I have a similar folder for stock photos that I plan to use in presentations. When I use an illustration, story, or visual, I tag it “used” plus the date in its comments box.

3. Most of my files are saved with the date first, in YY.MM.DD format. So, if I am looking for my notes from a meeting last month, it’s quite easy to find.

I hope these are helpful! Thanks for a great blog.