Why, then, organize when you can search?

AlexanderChow

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Just a fool question.(But David said, it never hurts to ask the "why") so, Why Organize When You Can Search? It can be your notes, stuff in your computer, etc. Just Why? any benefits? and to a bigger picture, why you should organize your life? by categorizing things to be done.
 

kkuja

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For me the answer is:

For me the answer is: to know there is nothing requiring action buried somewhere.
 

Myriam

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I think Alexander meant reference material

kkuja;88338 said:
For me the answer is: to know there is nothing requiring action buried somewhere.

I think Alexander meant reference material, material you need/want to keep but with no action attached to it. And it's a good qestion. I know people who don't organise reference material in foldes and subfolders, just relying on a search to find what they need.

I personally like to have some kind of structure. I'm a consultant, and I do like to have my files ordered by client or by type of activity. I don't think a search would be faster for me than clicking the client folder to find a specific document. Anyway, it would make me feel uncomfortable, so I wouldn't trust that system. But it might work for other people...

Myriam
 

Oogiem

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AlexanderChow;88335 said:
Why Organize When You Can Search? It can be your notes, stuff in your computer, etc. Just Why? any benefits? and to a bigger picture, why you should organize your life? by categorizing things to be done.

Because searching takes far too much time, uses up way too much energy and is totally frustrating.

Sure, searching on a computer within computer files may work most of the time but search is totally worthless for searching paper reference material. My reference filing system for paper is 3 four drawer file cabinets plus 2 two drawer cabinets. If it wasn't organized I'd spend hours searching for stuff when I needed it. As it is I can usually lay my hands on the folder or paper I want within a minute or two. Occasionally I have to search within a folder, I have one set that is about 6 inches of papers, but I made a quick index for that folder so I know roughly where in the stack to go to find the item I need.

Organizing also gives you a chance to see whether the item needs to be kept at all and if there are any buried action items or projects within that item.

Lastly, just because *you* can search and find stuff within your stacks doesn't mean someone else can. If all of your tasks and action items had to be taken over and done by someone else with no warning would they have any clue how to pick up the pieces and carry on?

Organizing in some relatively standard way is one step to enabling someone else to step into your shoes on an emergency basis if required. Another is cheat sheets or checklists of major tasks. Even if you don't normally use them having them documented is critical.
 

Gardener

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AlexanderChow;88335 said:
Just a fool question.(But David said, it never hurts to ask the "why") so, Why Organize When You Can Search? It can be your notes, stuff in your computer, etc. Just Why? any benefits? and to a bigger picture, why you should organize your life? by categorizing things to be done.

Well, I don't organize my email in the sense of dragging mails to folders. Email is inherently organized in several ways because it's tagged and searchable by sender, recipient, date, and so on. However, when I have an email that leads to a GTD action, I include, in the action, enough information to find the email. So that is, I suppose, organization by reference and tagging, instead of organization by filing.

I could see doing this for a variety of other things - with a robust enough tagging or recordkeeping system, I could abandon a lot of "put similar things in the same bucket" organization. But that doesn't mean that the stuff isn't organized, it's just organized in a different way.

I'd also say that sometimes those buckets are too stringently defined. For example, if I had extremely simple finances, I could see myself replacing a few dozen file folders with a single box labelled "2011 Finances" or even just "Finances", and dropping bank statements, credit card statements, bills, etc., in that box.

So I'd say that a search system is only OK if (1) the search method is clearly defined, (2) there's assurance of finding the searched-for item and (3) the maximum search time is acceptably small. If I know that every bank statement is in the "Finances" box, and I know that I can find the one I need in less than fifteen minutes by digging through the box, and I rarely need a statement, then that method is perfectly acceptable - to me, that is.

Gardener
 

kkuja

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Myriam;88343 said:
I think Alexander meant reference material, material you need/want to keep but with no action attached to it. And it's a good qestion. I know people who don't organise reference material in foldes and subfolders, just relying on a search to find what they need.

I personally like to have some kind of structure. I'm a consultant, and I do like to have my files ordered by client or by type of activity. I don't think a search would be faster for me than clicking the client folder to find a specific document. Anyway, it would make me feel uncomfortable, so I wouldn't trust that system. But it might work for other people...

Myriam

My answer still applies to me. Before GTD I had piles of reference material, which was not organized and I always had stress because I though there might be something requiring my attention in there. For me, organizing reference material is my definition that something doesn't require my attention anymore. (or reminder of required action is already in its place).

I also organize my emails to email folders, because sometimes it's not obvious how message is related to project it is (people use poor subject lines, and content may not be searchable (for example image)). And I try to keep all electronic materials organized in folders.

I just, few days ago, used two hours trying to find refence email, and ended up asking client to resend to me because it just could not be found. This is just one of my bad experiences with searhing electronic stuff.
 

AlexanderChow

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So, the difference is just the speed? If that's ture, I really doubt the value it brings to the table.
Since one day, as technology advances, search speed will catch up with any manual navigation.
 

AlexanderChow

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if you never organize things, you would end up having a google like system.
Google comes in handy when you need something. I think as long as things don't require your actions, it's fine to just put them quickly in the basket. The disadvantage I can think of is you hardly know what you have, which create a bit level of anxiety and a feeling of less control and thus a less relax life.
 

Tramter

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Eye oponer

AlexanderChow;88403 said:
if you never organize things, you would end up having a google like system.
Google comes in handy when you need something. I think as long as things don't require your actions, it's fine to just put them quickly in the basket. The disadvantage I can think of is you hardly know what you have, which create a bit level of anxiety and a feeling of less control and thus a less relax life.

This comment has been an magnificent eye oponer for me. In my dilemma of Google vs Mircrosoft for GTD I find Google quite useful for its versatility, mobility, etc., but in a way that I cannot explain it doesn´t give the peace of mind that a well structured Windows-based GTD system grants me.

Thanks
 

Jamie Elis

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a few thoughts on organizing and retrieving

I just looked up the antonym for retrieve and it was lose. What I was trying to find was the word or simple expression for putting things or ideas into categories by some attribute. I was hoping to find the word for creating an organizational scheme and the word for what you do when you put an item into it. Maybe one is something a reference librarian would create and the other a library clerk was "service".

So why organize? What the heck is it? Maybe classification and placement according to some attribute for some purpose.

To keep things accessible: that you use frequently, that when you need one you may need something related.

Because in the process of setting it up and retrieving you see connections and redundancies.

Why not just hodge-podge things? It depends on the degree of heterogeneity, the volume and how functional it is for you.

Sometimes it works for a certain class of items very well--I have box about 12" x10" by 6" labeled "odd parts and mystery objects" this works perfectly, within the family odd sock bin, I was spending too much time searching for a match so I categorized the socks by color and placed each color in a clear plastic bag. My dear friend keeps everything important in a pile on his desk. That would kill me but it works for him. A dear family member makes so many categories he can't remember what is in what (not functional). Some things just do not need to be put into plastic sleeves and alphabetized but if you need to keep a canonical set of original forms it might be a good idea.
 

Gardener

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AlexanderChow;88402 said:
So, the difference is just the speed? If that's ture, I really doubt the value it brings to the table.
Since one day, as technology advances, search speed will catch up with any manual navigation.

I'd say that it's not just speed, it's also whether you can find the item at all. If the search string either doesn't find the item, or it finds hundreds of thousands of items, it doesn't matter how fast the search runs.
 

tabinfl

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It depends, I think, on how much stuff you have, how much effort is involved in keeping it organized, how often you need to find something, and how much effort THAT takes.

I keep my household files organized because it's quick to put new items into the proper folder, and I need to be able to find things quickly often. Some of my digital data is similarly organized, some is in fact easier to search (archived email, for example, which I only infrequently need at all).

At our office, there are a number of paper documents that we need to keep (contracts, timesheets, etc.), but which we almost never need to access again once it's "filed". These literally get dumped into a box, labeled with the approximate dates, and put in a closet. The few times we've ever needed to retrieve something, the "search" time has been far less than the time it would have taken to organize all of that paper all along.
 

AlexanderChow

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I have been thinking it, our brain is kind of a network where related things are connected. For example, when I just ask you to give me 10 words whatever you can thing of. You will be surprised how few you can come up with.
But when I ask you to give me 10 words that related to a car. You would soon come up with things like, Benz , color, tire, wheel, driver, licence, road, police, etc.
So, if something has no boundaries of definition, it would wander in your brain, finding nowhere to hook on. And that creates anxiety and take you far longer time to decide what to do with it. Because it lost the connections to otherwise some useful informations and pre defined actions if any.
 

May

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So do you think that connections are more important than categories?
Also take a look at the main wikipedia categories
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fundamental_categories
and try to find information about a certain topic (for example GTD) starting from those main categories and drilling down to bottom, how fast would that be? I'd say it's quite useless actually so this thread has a good question.

I mean sure some information is best to keep categorized like the gtd system. It has restricted entities, clear edges and so on.
However maybe some information shouldn't be categoriezed and searched for instead?
If it has unrestricted entities, no clear edges and so on...
What I think is that maybe you should use connections to whatever the topic is related to instead if using some Categories.
Project support material is a good example of this because it's connected to whatever you are doing and makes sense to you instead of being filed under lots of different categories...
 

JohnV474

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reasons to organize

Whether or not to organize a given chunk of data depends on many factors. Here I will mention only one:

1) being able to search your data when your data has become mobile.

For example, your computer crashes, but you have your data backed up on an external drive. You plug the drive into someone else's computer and now need to find a particular photo, or document, etc. Your external drive does not have the file index built for desktop search to work, and so they are useless.

I realize that this scenario may not occur very often, but it does occur. When it does occur, time becomes especially valuable.

FWIW I have not yet found a desktop search tool that works well in all cases. Google Desktop, Copernic, Windows Desktop Search, etc.... each has significant limitations. For example, no tag search, or not filename search, or no contents search, etc. If I use desktop search, I have to keep 3-6 of them installed.

If you only have 1000 documents to sort, this may never be an issue. In an ideal world, a system (like GTD itself) is scalable and functional whether you have 10 items or 10 million.

JV474
 

ArcCaster

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In my current world, I am working on a laptop with 11 years worth of data stored on it.

Search is frustrating, because it often does not retrieve what I want, or worse, returns screen after screen of 'hits'.

My 'system' of organizing is frustrating because the categories and 'buckets' that were appropriate ten years ago are no longer appropriate given the influx of additional data -- that is, they need to be gone over, some categories consolidated, some categories expanded. And who has time to wade through 11 years of material to improve the organization?

I wonder whether an improved file naming system might help improve search results and make organization less important? Suppose my files are all named various flavors of 'what_where_when'? Or 'why_how'?

suppose I embed half a dozen keywords in each file when I save it?

Anyone have a naming system that adds little to overhead but greatly enhances retrieval?

Regards,
Rob
 

JohnV474

Registered
Filing systems

There are some very simple filing systems that can be extremely helpful. However, even these systems will require some occasional reevaluation and trimming, unless you're the type of person who never rearranges furniture.

Here is one such system:

Main folder:
INBOX = any files saved to the computer that are not put in their permanent spot with an appropriate name, goes here.
READ & REVIEW = may include articles you may want to read, web clippings, websites, etc.
PROJECTS = includes project support material for all current projects, all of which are appropriately named
REFERENCE = includes all reference material and also archived projects, all of which, ideally, would be appropriately named
EQUIPMENT = this contains software (optional).

Under Projects, include subfolders by project.
Under Reference, you could include a folder for Pictures, another for Music, another for Videos.

When I have used this system, Pictures are sorted by year taken. Within each year, they are listed by batch in date order (for example, a May 19th trip of that year: 0519-Trip to Kentucky). I then use a dedicated photo organizer (e.g. Picasa) if I care to sort by person, or by vacations, etc.

Videos are sorted by topic: e.g. Cars, Exercise, TV shows, Comedy clips, etc. If I had a large collection, I would use a dedicated organizer.

Music sorted alphabetically, grouped by letter. Within the artist, by album. If I need further abilities to sort, etc., I use a dedicated program, e.g. Winamp, iTunes.

In project support files, I put the date on all files I work on in YYMMDD format, followed by the project name, followed by the whatever I'd be thinking of in searching for that file. Examples: 110214-Valentines-brainstorm of poss gifts. This file is stored in the appropriate Project folder. If I download something new to Reference, I likewise give an appropriate name immediately or plop it into Inbox to do later.

Your Reference files will be a real bear, especially if you have 11 years' of old data. I can relate, as I have hundreds of thousands of files to keep track of, some of which are vital, and some of which I would delete if I came across it again.

I recommend looking for broad categories that won't change often and then store based on what comes to mind when you file it. David Allen recommends purging your files from outdated or no-longer-relevant material every year. At times, I have found 9 different versions of the same piece of software that I've downloaded over the years.

I would also recommend not going back through that mountain and trying to start from scratch. Start with all of the new information you put in, and as you touch older files, rename them. As you find the old categories don't work, rearrange enough to continue functioning. You do not want to spend an inordinate amount of time rearranging silverware when there's food to eat.

Hope this helps
-JV474
p.s. I use my folders exclusively, ignoring "My Pictures" or "My Documents", as I can use my folder layout with different operating systems instead of just Windows. This is a personal preference.
 

pxt

Registered
Some miscellaneous things I do ...

When I decided to dump my old laptop and get something new, I created a folder on my new Macbook called Lenovo. This was just everything that was on my old PC.

Then I created a folder called GTD, at the same level as Documents, and then started organising new material in there.

So I have, under my user name:
Documents
Lenovo
GTD

If I ever need to touch some data from the old laptop, I search for it using whatever tools ( Spotlight on the Mac ), and then I may copy the materials into some project support material under GTD, and then file it and rename it under GTD/Reference.

I never touch the old laptop's contents as I'm afraid of accidentally mangling a file.

I never use the Documents folder, because other software tends to use it as a default and so it doesn't go through my organise step.

I like to name reference files starting with the key object and then the year: Car - 2010 - Insurance Certificate.

I scan as much as possible. If I must keep the original I write "scanned 110525" in the top right corner and then put that anywhere in the scanned file name.
 
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