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Last summer I worked at an art gallery. It was my first time working on a shared file server and it was a mess—except for the exhibition files. There was a mai

Last summer I worked at an art gallery. It was my first time working on a shared file server and it was a mess—except for the exhibition files. There was a main “exhibitions” folder. Inside of that was a folder for every show in the gallery’s history. Each of these was named starting with the year of the show + another number indicating whether it was the first show of the year, or the second, etc. There was a somewhat standard structure for what you would find inside of each of these (contracts, artists bios, press photos, etc), but it didn’t really matter because there were few enough files that it was easy to browse. After a couple of weeks, I went home and organized my projects and documents according to the same pattern. I find things faster now. The keys are this: (1) broad top-level categories (“exhibitions”) (2) dated folders (3) shallow structure inside dated folders (files in root or one folder deep) This pattern makes it easy to know where to put things, and Easy to browse. Find the category you want, then the date range you want. Now you’re only have a few folder names to read. Browsing the files inside of there might take a little while if there’s a lot, but usually there won’t be. And you can relax because if the file exists, it’s gotta be in here. (Or maybe one other place—sometimes files don’t make it out of “Downloads,” and sometimes I have to check both “Art” and “Design” before I find the project I’m looking for. But that’s ok, because dated folders makes that easy to do.) Others will suggest giving up and relying on search. Search is great, but it only works for files you know (or remember!) exist. Build a simpLe browsable structure and you can find things you’ve forgotten about, or tell collaborators where to look for things they want.

tomjen3 6y ago
I like that in general, but I would suggest not to use dates in folders - the date is automatically in the file properties of the folder so you can sort by it. By all means keep a number in the folder name, if the number is meaningful, but also keep a human understandable name in there. That helps when you can't remember if it was the fifth show or whatever, maybe you can remember the name when you see it. Or maybe I am missing something? Anyway I try to organize my files kinda like that, but use my Downloads folder as GTD inbox: nothing is meant to stay there.
- nickloewen 6y ago
  Ah! The folder name is still human readable, just with a date out front: “2019 open education conference” for example. Putting the year in the name is helpful because the year you did the thing may differ from from the created/last modified date. At the gallery, for example, these folders go back to the 1950s. Even for more recent projects, I find myself adding to old folders from time to time (converting document formats etc), or not recognizing that a handful of files represent a coherent “project” until a year after I created the first one. So it’s useful to be able to swap between sorting by file-system time and “actual” time. It prevents alphabetical sorting, but if I know enough of the name for alphabetical sorting to be useful I can usually just use a search. Agreed re: Downloads, although it can take some time to get to it. Edit: I also see others talking about having “archive” folders. The date system makes that mostly unnecessary.

tomjen3 6y ago

I like that in general, but I would suggest not to use dates in folders - the date is automatically in the file properties of the folder so you can sort by it. By all means keep a number in the folder name, if the number is meaningful, but also keep a human understandable name in there. That helps when you can't remember if it was the fifth show or whatever, maybe you can remember the name when you see it. Or maybe I am missing something? Anyway I try to organize my files kinda like that, but use my Downloads folder as GTD inbox: nothing is meant to stay there.

nickloewen 6y ago
Ah! The folder name is still human readable, just with a date out front: “2019 open education conference” for example. Putting the year in the name is helpful because the year you did the thing may differ from from the created/last modified date. At the gallery, for example, these folders go back to the 1950s. Even for more recent projects, I find myself adding to old folders from time to time (converting document formats etc), or not recognizing that a handful of files represent a coherent “project” until a year after I created the first one. So it’s useful to be able to swap between sorting by file-system time and “actual” time. It prevents alphabetical sorting, but if I know enough of the name for alphabetical sorting to be useful I can usually just use a search. Agreed re: Downloads, although it can take some time to get to it. Edit: I also see others talking about having “archive” folders. The date system makes that mostly unnecessary.