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For years, I had a system that the structure was mirrored in a synced cloud drive and my notetaking tool at the time, using sort by name to keep its order and using numbers, with the added benefit of just typing the first numbers when in the main folder to point the selection there. 00. inbox, 01. frequent (stuff that doesn't change and I keep coming back to, like an ID copy), 10. ---- (separator), 10. 2023, 11. 2022, 12. Prior, 20. ----, 21. developer, 22. wiki, 23. projects, 24. topics, ......, 30. ----, 31. archives, 32. downloads. For each year I'd create a monthly folder (as the year progressed), inside a per-topic subfolder with the date prefixed, so results didn't repeat when using spotlight (2022-03-finance, 2022-03-career, 2021-05-retail), then inside the final subfolder with the files related to the event in particular, still with date prefixed. Topics and Projects inside is a bit like PARA, which I added later, but the month by month one has been a staple. By the end of the month I did a sweep on the inbox folder, and put everything into the month folder with event name or somewhere else. The thing is that during the pandemic I did a few experiments with this system and since then it's been such a mess, because I keep procrastinating on moving it back to what worked, as some things I tried later seemed to work but didn't. Things like... keep a lot of scattered notes in a doc file per topic? Or separate in my wiki as markdown? Merge 'topics' and 'wiki'? What about the documents related to an event, like a new broker account with all their contracts, signed stuff and such... less subfolders and more verbose filenames? Or more subfolders and more frequent archiving to keep old stuff out of sight? I usually had this routine of tidying up in the days near the end of each month, kind of mirroring what I did in my day to day job in the office. Ever since commingling different spheres of my life, testing new tools and so on, it led to excessive cruft, duplicates and less organization overall, and I was just looking at improving my system where it fell short. |