Zen File Organization
The eternal struggle to find complete peace with your documents, files, email, music and overall life is something humans have been searching for since the beginning of time. I myself have been trying to find the best practice of file organization for close to 4 years. The only thing I’ve been able to conjure up is smart tree structure naming conventions.
Whereas this is quite useful and productive, it’s also very difficult because it requires (1) alot of your time making sure things are archived correctly and (2) a constant self-reflection on your life to make sure you’ve covered all the areas in which you may have information.
Recently I read an article called “The Next Great American Newspaper”. The article explained various forms of information archiving and what we are doing now and what we should do in the future.
It’s a rather amazing article and goes into various detailed thoughts of converting to this new sort of file organization.
Scopeware is a company that seems to be the closest to what David Gelernter talks about in his article. Their philosophy is based on the basic premise that information should be woven into a flowing narrative stream with a past, present and future that you can tune in from anywhere. Information should mirror the structure of your life, not the structure of your computers and that it should be presented in a form that reflects human recall: time, type, look and essence.
With somewhat of a different look on file organization, The Brain came out with a product called PersonalBrain. PersonalBrain features a dynamic visual interface of thoughts that contains it all�your files, Web pages and applications�all linked the way you think!
I tried the PersonalBrain system a couple years ago and had a great time with it. I ended up moving away from the tool because it was a pain to reload onto my PC’s every time I reformatted my machine (which I do alot).
Both systems, however, are amazing and are working very hard to make file organization a much easier task. There are many other systems out there like these and each pull something different out of the usability pot. I haven’t seen one company come up with the one perfect solution - so at this time it’s more of what suits your fancy.
Someday we’ll hopefully see Microsoft, Apple, or Linux come out with their own research on new forms of organization but I haven’t found anything from them yet - Do note that I haven’t spent much time searching either. Until then we’ll keep on the path we are currently on and hope that we can remember what we named that one file back on that one day.
