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by jeherr 1680 days ago
I've really been getting into organization just by chronology lately. I don't separate notes by topic anymore, I just write all notes chronologically with dates to break up days. This way I can always flip back through the pages around the time I was working on something to find what notes I took.

I wonder if there are any digital document organizers like this. Something you just drag and drop important digital documents you want to keep track of and it automatically adds date and time information so you can browse through them in the order they've been added.

1 comments

Wouldn't the filesystem suffice for this? It already tracks creation and modification times, so all you'd need to do is sort chronologically in your UI of choice.

If you wanted something Web-based, you could use Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. and get similar functionality.

It could, but like another user pointed out the last file modification time isn't necessarily going to stay chronological forever, so something that understands the order in which documents are put in is immutable unless I explicitly rearrange them would be good. Easy text searching through multiple file types to help narrow down a search faster, automated encryption and cloud storage backup, syncing between multiple devices. All the usual nice stuff you would expect for an app like this.

It could watch certain directories on your computer or in cloud storage and create a queue to suggest adding new documents that appear there in the same order of their appearance, that way you never forget to add an important document and they still get put in chronologically even if you haven't checked the queue in months. It could make different "vaults" you could use to separate documents by person, or separate work and personal life. Vaults could have long-term upkeep rules to keep them from getting bloated, like maybe you delete everything that's 10 years or older.

Basically if it can help me even if I have sloppy organization and take a ton of the pain out of it for me, I'd definitely be willing to pay a bit to try an app like that. Can't say for sure that I would stick with it, but it's a reoccurring problem for me as I have documents across multiple devices, cloud services, emails accounts, and thumb drives that I just can't make myself organize or create and maintain a system to do it for me.

The date of the document and when it is add could be different. Also no note about the document in default file system.