First, decide what you're studying in life. If you do not do this you cannot be organized, because you will be left at the whims of any "great opportunity" or "

First, decide what you're studying in life. If you do not do this you cannot be organized, because you will be left at the whims of any "great opportunity" or "potential threat", mostly the former when young and the latter when old, owing to inherent biases. Those things lead you into constantly chasing after an image of organization instead of a benchmark. Regardless of the potential others see in you, you can only have an edge at those things that you are inclined to continue studying, and to do so you must aim towards a benchmark for what's better. The apparent object of study may shift over time, but in general, you carry around the same principles and approaches with you and continue finding further applications of them. This much is seen in the biographies of notable figures. Only after this can we even begin to discuss "productivity" with respect to information systems. When working with information, you generally do not need great quantities of raw material - you do not have the capacity to "think" about that. You mostly need transformative perspectives, which rarely come pre-digested(that form is teaching). A transformative perspective comes from the repeated application of those principles you study, and from some occasional introduction of chaotic influences to probe and test your ideas. From this we can come to the conclusion that organization is primarily about filtering and exposure to the serendipitous, which begins with the life obligations that you take on. You don't want everything completely under control, since that would erase the chaos. Neither do you want to feel like there are no predictable elements to hang on to, just one emergency after the next. Either one could be described as an impoverishment. When we talk about tools and media, that's really a matter of finding the medium you need to think in at that moment and a way to reach it. So, personal collections are a good way to start - I collect and organize according to how I want to think at that moment, versus trying to universalize. When I need to arrive at new concepts I look for ways to bind material together. The literal example that propelled me down this path was in deciding to clear out old gadget boxes last summer by putting all their leftovers in binders, using plastic dividers, pencil bags and pockets. In a loose collection the contents would get lost, but in a binder they become satisfying to browse - a dual purpose of "remove clutter" and "make space" is served by shifting around the physical dimensions and axes of the problem. This same strategy applies to other common physical organizers from bags and trays up to rooms and streets. And on a computer a light amount of hierarchy, combined with lengthy filenames to tag, helps filter, but you have to push the serendipity a little bit harder, since the computer "only does what you tell it". So I am often looking for new ways of getting that.