How I organize my directory tree of personal files

Yasin

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I assume you refer to your digital referencing system, not physical.

As a general rule, I would avoid deep nested files. Have maximum three clicks deep.
Sort files alphabetically. And rely on search function to find the documents.

For documents that relate to ongoing projects or those that you refer frequently, have a favourites section. In other words, make them easier to reach.
 

Cyberthal

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My favorites section is called "persinter" for "personal and interstitial".

I can break the depth rule due to Treefactor, which makes refiling rapid.

Treefactor is for Emacs. Non Emacsers can try http://brainstormsw.com for a similar experience, although it only handles text, not files.
 

cfoley

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That looks interesting. I have a couple of questions.

Let's say I spent an evening writing some ideas down for a possible future adventure. It's a six month long travelling trip around the world. I may never get to do it but I want to keep my notes somewhere. How would I file them in this?

In the example given of the US Civil War, let's say I want to write an article about the civil war, how would I retrieve the information?

Where do I file this month's utilities bill?
 

Cyberthal

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> Let's say I spent an evening writing some ideas down for a possible future adventure. It's a six month long travelling trip around the world. I may never get to do it but I want to keep my notes somewhere. How would I file them in this?

You have two choices, depends on how important this idea is to you:

If important, ~/1-Textmind/2-Linked/3-Persinter/Vacations/~

If you want it out of the way, ~/1-Textmind/2-Linked/5-Location/Global/Vacations~

You might have a different word for this than "Vacation", or a different way subdirectory structure under ~/Global~

> In the example given of the US Civil War, let's say I want to write an article about the civil war, how would I retrieve the information?

In general, when starting a new project such as writing on a topic, I orient myself by walking the directory tree. Maybe there's a central keyword I'll jump to first, such as "Civil-war" which would be under ~/1-Textmind/2-Linked/5-Location/1-name/United-states-of-america/~. Otherwise I may just walk down the tree, starting with ~3-Persinter~. I drill deeper into the tree until I lose interest, then ascend and continue forwards. I take notes on what info resources I find, with links and summaries of their relevance. Those notes tell me what I need to do next, whether it's outlining a rough draft or literature review. If I'm missing something I may grep for it.

While I'm walking the tree, I'll also reorganize any relevant info to help me write about it, and move the irrelevant out of the way.

If it's sufficiently complicated, e.g. I plan to write many articles about the Civil War, I may refile relevant headings to a separate git repo, which contains both a Textmini and a Hugo documentation site like this one: https://cyberthal-docs.nfshost.com

The Hugo Learn theme's hierarchical page layout lets me develop content by turning Textmini into Hugo pages into an evolving tree.

Once a page is sufficiently mature, I'll promote it to a wiki-like site such as https://neuron.zettel.page, so that it can be heterarchically linked. It's safe to make lots of internal links now because the page won't change scope.

> Where do I file this month's utilities bill?

~/1-Textmind/2-Linked/4-Time/1-me/Economic/Accounts-payable~

But you also want some kind of accounting software, of course.
 

cfoley

Registered
Thanks for taking the time to comment on my questions. I had definitely misunderstood the way it was supposed to work.

I think this is a really interesting way of organising a large amount of personally-curated information.

One thing I struggle with when processing an item in GTD is the random thought that might be useful one day but is difficult to organise right now. This structure would give me somewhere to put it, and might make me likely to stumble across it opportunistically.
 
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