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Ask HN: Do you have a system for organizing your files?
An ocean of ink has been spilled about how to organize ones' notes and to-do lists and repositories, but I have not seen much in the way of a general scheme for how to organize the files on one's computer. I always end up re-inventing the wheel over time, so I end up having a bunch of places on my hard drive with different incarnations of the same folder (~/Documents/Pictures, ~/Pictures/images). I'm interested in whether people out there have a systematic way of organizing their files (bonus points if you've written up the reasons in detail somewhere).
- yarapavan 8y agoHere is an approach, advocated by Zapier folks - https://zapier.com/blog/organize-files-folders/ https://zapier.com/blog/organize-files-folders/
- Jugurtha 8y agoI've been using the same system for so many years and collecting things for so long, that I pretty much know where every file is. Technology Programming Meta (stuff about architecture, design patterns, etc) Python C JavaScript Scala Erlang Lisp Agriculture Automotive Building Architecture (books on colonial architecture, way to build, etc) Electronics Instrumentation & Control optimal control stuff, college stuff, Mechanical & Machines Signal Processing GSM Systems Engineering Design Food Tech Fluid Mechanics Aircraft & Aeronautics Core Knowledge MIR (books from "MIR Publishers") Mathematics Physics Documents Business Silicon Valley (books specific to sv: High output management, etc) Author1 books by Author1 etc Ideation History - Biography - Journals Democracy Language Learning Military Weapons Intelligence (intelligence analysis, etc) Cognitive Performance (cognition, meta-cognition, "How Learning Works", etc) Code lives here: workspace: musing (snippets I write, refactoring pieces of code, idioms, etc) python flask (flask repo) library_repo_etc scala c etc.. So, if you ask me about Flask's documentation, it's in Technology/Programming/Python and so on and so forth..
- davidh92 8y agoI use a (slight) variation of the "Johnny Decimal" System (https://johnnydecimal.com https://johnnydecimal.com). Essentially I have a folder called "library" with subfolders like this: - [1] Personal -- [11] Finances --- [11.01] 2017 --- [11.02] 2018 -- [12] Travel - [2] Work - [3] Education ... [94.xx] is my special inbox folder which I use when I am to lazy to immediately sort something. The website says that you should under no circumstances create subfolders within a [xx.yy] folder. I do break that rule - e. g. [31.04] refers to a specific course at university. Within that folder I have subfolders for specific assignments etc. The alternative would be either a (for me too) large amount of [xx.yy] folders or a messy course folder. The big advantage of the system is that everything is identifiable by a simple number, which makes searching in spotlight really easy. E. g. searching for "[12." brings up all the folders for my trips in the last years. I have been quite happy with the system over the last year or so and would recommend it.