I've pretty much given up on trying to find an all-encompassing hierarchical organization for things, on the grounds that I kept needing to make things that cou

I've pretty much given up on trying to find an all-encompassing hierarchical organization for things, on the grounds that I kept needing to make things that could go in one of several places and it was hard to choose which was the 'right' one. Now I instead just try to adhere to several principles: 1. Everything I want to keep for a long time lives in my home directory, so I don't lose it in machine migrations and OS reinstalls, separated (as best as I am able) from big stuff I don't need to keep (like installer images and stuff I could download again), simply so if I have to back it up to a space-constrained device it is easy to fit without needing a weeding out first. 2. I use the simplest file format I can, so for example a text file instead of a word processor document, for longevity. I still have old documents in obsolete word processor formats as a painful reminder of the cost of breaking this rule. 3. I rely on search (like find or spotlight) to find things. Accordingly, I try to use standard terminology and make sure my spelling is correct. It sucks to try to find something I know I wrote a few years ago, fail, and later discover my search failed because I originally misspelled the term I was searching for, or used an esoteric synonym. 4. Probably the most structured thing I have is my journal, which is just text files. For instance, today's journal entry is in ~/Documents/Journal/2018/2018-02-21.txt. The first line is today's date in ISO-8601 format, which means I can concatenate multiple entries and still be able to know which day any given line refers to. I have some awk and grep scripts that help with this. Other than all that, I have lots of snippets stored in Yojimbo, and academic papers organized in Papers (Mekentosj). I have the iPad partners to both programs, and content synced to the iPad, one way (so the desktop is the definitive copy) because I've learned to not trust two-way sync.