Mobius:

Let the cage match begin!

Before too many people throw down their organization system du jour, I'd add my $.02.:

1) They aren't that different from paper files: file it where you will look. My favorite example of this is Radar from M*A*S*H. "I need a Jeep requisition form" "Look under M" "Wha?" "All my cousins live in Montana and they all drive Jeeps."

Radar files stuff so HE could find it. (In an office environment, you WILL have to agree on methods, etc. but the question seemed to be aimed at personal files) THEREFORE, build a file structure that makes retrieval easy

2) They are TOTALLY different than paper files. The great thing about computers is that they do dull, repetitive, overwhelming tasks quickly and without complaint. If I was faced with 400 pages and told, "Find me the page that has the word 'orange drink' on it.", I would quit. My computer is totally cool with it. You do have the option of installing an indexing/desktop search app and just throwing everything into My Documents. The folder will end up looking like hell. It will look like a pile of crap. But Google Desktop or Microsoft search or x1 or Copernic will gleefully dive into the pile and come out with a few things that might be relevant.

3) The goal is YOUR TRUST IN THE SYSTEM. One woman I work for is concerned the computer will forget where stuff is (not a Desktop search person). Another person I work with longs for the day his computer will write the report for him. (Excellent Desktop Search candidate). If the idea of a trashed My Docs folder makes you cringe, DON'T DO IT. If the hassle of making filing decisions causes you to save everything to the desktop, DON'T DO IT. Use the system that makes you feel good.

That is all. Proceed to your regularly scheduled argument.

BillK

It may seem like there it's whatever works for you, but my system is, in fact, objectively best.

just kidding of course.

I organize my stuff topically, as opposed to by medium (primarily), although i do have separate folders for music and my general photos. Images related to particular tasks get integrated into my general documents folder.

Here are two Documents/ subfolders I *strongly* advocate using:

_IN and _OUT

_IN is all stuff I haven't yet processed--downloads, saved attachments, whatever.

_OUT is where i keep, for example, local folders of webpages that I mirror up on external drives.

This is a very clean way of working, I think. I do a lot of syncing with remote drives, and work across different computers, so having a well defined _IN and _OUT keeps me from overwriting things.

(As I first GTD'd, I created _ACTION and _READREVIEW folders. I've abandoned that. It was better to keep pointers in lists then move actual files.)

Then I have topical folders, for example Oberlin for my current job; PM for "Project Mine" which is basically intellectual project topics (I'm an academic--this is where my papers and ideas go); P for papers, which is like my .pdf library; Personal, self-explanatory; PPL for people with subfolders for different people, for project support materials related to helping others (hey, duus, could you read my draft? goes in one of these folders); Software for support materials related to software, and the folders of scripts I write for myself; Financial; Gear for documents related to stuff i've bought (like my powerbook and my car); and x_basement which houses my old file structure and what's left of it. The x_basement folder is really nice. That's just the stuff in crates that I don't want to throw away, but don't want it floating around in my active workspace. If you're thinking of constructing a better file structure, I strongly advocate moving your current structure into a basement folder, and "unpacking crates" and putting stuff away.

Okay that's it. You're lucky I'm here, so I was able to share my objectively perfect file structure.

I'm pretty much with Duus on this one. When I was in college and grad school, I had a chronological filing system: organized by semester, then by class or other topic. This lasted until I was no longer in classes in graduate school, then began to become ineffective as I had to pull more and more projects across from semester to semester. Then, of course, when I was no longer in graduate school, it became unreasonable entirely. One could still have annual or quarterly chronological folders, but I don't recommend it. My chronological folders now live in a .tar.bz2 archive in my Archive folder. My Archive folder is very much like Duus's x_basement.

Everything since then is topical, with the top level topics being areas of my life: work, hobbies, volunteer, free software (which is sort of hobbies, sort of volunteer), etc. Below that, it's less well organized --- mostly a folder per project, but without any hard and fast rules.

I am trying to learn to love indexing systems (Beagle at home, Windows Desktop Search at work), but I don't fully trust them yet.

@duus:

Thank you for picking up the comedic timing EXACTLY where it needed to be taken up!

@all:

Full Disclosure: I use a hybrid system (folders/search). I am a graphic designer and web developer, so all of my work projects fall into a very organized folder structure. Project Support Materials all go into appropraitely labeled and easy to find folders. I do, however, use an ARCHIVE folder for all of the Word Docs, PDFs, etc. that I collect (White papers, receipts for online purchases, ChangeThis manifestos, etc.) and they all just get dumped in the pile. Microsoft Desktop Search makes it easy for me to type "GTD" and find every reference peice I could need in a flash. Or "Outlook" or "CSS" ... I will often rename files so that the file name has some "tags" in it. (ex. HintsTips.pdf might become HintsTips_gtd hpda tiddlywiki.pdf)

I have found that every time I try to go "all folders", I spend way to much time developing the tree and then quickly slide into having a "File This" folder on my desktop because I just couldn't be hassled to remember where to put stuff. I also "version" my files that are under revision with date strings (YYMMDD= 061031 = October 31, 2006) So I will have BillResume.doc followed by BillResume_061015.doc BillResume_061022.doc, etc. Same Day versions add a letter 061031A, 061031B.

So there it is, full disclosure ... and clearly this is better than anything Duus has ever imagined. :)

BK

I tend to throw all my pictures, audio and video files into my Pictures, Music, and Movie folders (these are all more easily catalogued in iPhoto or iTunes), and then organize my Documents subfolders by file type (Apps & Disc Images, Excel Files, HTML Files, Word Files, Outliner Files, etc.). The latter isn't really necessary, it just keeps my Documents folder from becoming such an unnavigable mess, so that if I do have to go looking for something there, I can still find it reasonably quickly. The only topical folder I maintain under Documents at this point is "Case Files," since I still find it useful in my legal work to save all the various files associated with a particular case in one place. Otherwise, I use Smart Folders or Spotlight or Quicksilver's functionality to filter and go fetch what I need.

That's TDDFSEADFS to those of us cool kids in the know.

At this point, I find Mail Act-On sort of system for filing my stuff.

My downloads sort automatically based on the kind of file, and some of them based on where the file came from. For instance, if I print a hint from MOSXH to PDF for archival, I save it to Desktop (CMD+D in the save panel is a lifesaver.) and Hazel looks at it, realizes it contains the url macosxhints.com (It's part of the filename.) and happily shuffles it off to my Reference folder.

Other documents get passed over by Hazel as long as there are no tags (in the Spotlight comments) associated with them. That leaves the files there until such time as I tag them. Then, Hazel moves them to ~/Documents. I keep a series of Smart Folders in Finder that serves the same purpose as some of the above systems. A SF for .xls, a SF for word processing documents (.doc, .rtf, .pages, etc.), for PDF's, and anything else that I can think of. Then I have SFs for my functional areas: Business (for my web design business), Clients (records for each of my clients. Receipts, invoices, contracts, etc.), School, Work. The functional area SFs are powered by Spotlight tags. Then, I use Quicksilver triggers for creating common sets of tags for the files. For instance, if I run my School filing trigger on the selected item, it tags it as school. I would like a more robust rule system (some conditionals perhaps?) similar to what can be done with Act-On. In Act-On, I can have multiple instances of the same AO key with different rules. Depending on which rules match, the rule that runs may be different each time. This would be nice in Finder to look in the filename for a semester, year, professor, etc. to see what other kinds of tags would be appropriate to set.

Another part of my filing setup (as I alluded above) is filenames. I name my files with tags similar to duus above, but with a little more structure. I guess you would call them metatags. For instance, today, I turned in an assignment for class. The filename is Fall 2006 - Professor Name - Lab6 Experiment Answers.pages (with one saved as .pdf for good measure). I think this helps with the chronological thing as well. Although, I am thinking that doing 2006 Fall would probably be a better way to go about it if nothing else than for sorting purposes in Finder.

I don't use the Smart Folders very often. In fact, rarely. Between Spotlight and Quicksilver, I can usually find things very quickly. (I have learned to use Spotlight if I can't remember exactly what something is called or if I am trying to locate a phrase that I know is in some document somewhere and use Quicksilver for launching applications and finding files I know the filenames for, not to mention the myriad other things QS does.)

So, there you have it. I think this works out well. Particularly the Smart Folders bit because it doesn't force you to embrace only one filing system. (Well, it does, but it just happens to be insanely flexible.)

There is one primary limitation to this system that won't rear its ugly head for a long while. I would like to group my Smart Folders into metagroups. I know this is contrary to the concept of Smart Folders, but it would be helpful for me to at least be able to split them into a directory for File Types and one for Tags. I can see the number of Smart Folders I create (for projects, important tags, etc.) becoming insanely large and then, I would be essentially in the same boat, creating Smart Folders of my Smart Folders.

That won't be for a few years though, so this is working out well for me now. Anyway, I hope this diatribe/manifesto/someotherwordforreallylongmessageboardpost is helpful and contributes to this discussion.

Until recently, I had an enjoyably but unworkably byzantine folder structure at home. Like many people here, I ended up with a big pile of stuff "to be filed", and never got around to it.

Now, I just use four folders:

• 1 - In (for unprocessed downloads)
• 2 - Action (anything needing action)
• 3 - Reference (anything not needing action)

This mirrors the structure of my work email, my home email, my work desk trays and my home desk trays, so I can apply the same mindset to each.

The fourth folder houses my GTD system:

• GTD

To retrieve files, I use Copernic Desktop Search 2.0, which is excellent.

There isn't really one best way or right or wrong way to do it.
I've recently reorganized my whole file system partially to get away from a date based system and to make it more shareable between multiple OS's.
Since your listing the windows default folders I'll list mine from the windows side.
I never cared for Micorosft's way too long of names for "documents and setings\blah\my documents\my pictures" and stuff like that. I partioned my drive and keep all my data on one partition to start with then pointed my user profile there. I then dropped the my from the front of everything making it easier to use command line stuff without haveing to always put " around ethe names due to the space". Then I renamed and moved a lot of the Microsoft default because IMHO pictures, music, video, etc are not documents and therefore do not belong under the "my documents" structure and you typically use something else to manage them as others have mentioned things like picassa, itunes, etc.
So now that I have the profile moved everything looks the same under Linxu or Windows and its on a seperate drive that I copy to a removable drive for backups. If that drive would get messed up in anyway its an easy task to switch over to the backup drive since its all structured the same.
So I have:
G:\enine\Documents
G:\enine\Pictures
G:\enine\Music
ad well as a few other profile related folders
\enine gets mounted under home under linux so its \home\enine\documents etc there.

Under Documents are now actually just documents and divided logically.
\Documents\Archive
\Documents\Projects
\Documents\Reference

Then you furthur divide projects down into whatever project I'm working on so
\Projects\project1
\Projects\project2
\Projects\project2

I've worked as a consultant before so sometimes this has another level like
\documents\customer1\project1 so its a fairly flexible system, since I'm not employed full time for one company I just drop out the client level.

Then when a project is finished the while folder gets moved to \archive
so I have then
\Documents\Archive\Client1\projetc1
\Documents\Archive\Client1\projetc2
\Documents\Archive\Client2\projetc1
\Documents\Archive\Client2\projetc2
etc

then there is a personal folder whith things like my resume, certifications, etc

\reference are documents that I have downloaded that others have created so I can refer to them as needed. Its divided down as necessary.

So putting it all together:

enine\Documents\Archive\Client1\projetc1
enine\Documents\Archive\Client1\projetc2
enine\Documents\Archive\Client2\projetc1
enine\Documents\Archive\Client2\projetc2
enine\Documents\Projetcs\Project1
enine\Documents\Projetcs\Project2
enine\Documents\Reference\...
enine\Documents\Personal
enine\Pictures
enine\Music

The \enine\Documents\Projects is sort of my inbox then I create a project folder for a new project or file under an existing project.

My data is all in My Documents, sorted topically. I have multiple businesses and interests and projects; each area has a folder with subfolders. For instance: Indexing/Jobs, Indexing/Invoices, Indexing/Publisher information; Art/Shows, Art/Promotional Materials, Art/Finished Pieces, etc. I don't distinguish between personal and business (they're all home businesses). I have folders for older-generation relatives for whom I produce computer things. GTD stuff is in Organization. New interest, new folder. I rarely have trouble finding things, and use Windows search when necessary.

Speaking of appreciating Windows search, until the recent days of page proofs on PDF (not yet universal), my indexing work DOES require me to search 400 hard-copy pages for one appearance of a particular phrase, missed in the first read-through...Yikes!

Do Mi

I'm not sure if this would work for the PC, but I'm guessing it probably could.

http://homepage.mac.com/toddvasquez/apps

What I like most about this organization of files on my Mac is that it creates those "sharp lines and clean edges" David Allen talks about in his _Getting Things Done_ methodology. All of my 'Active' stuff is right there on the desktop of my Mac. And all of my 'Non-Active' stuff is in the Reference folder of my home folder.

Having those clean edges on my mac affords me better focus and the added bonus of easier backups. By having all of my 'Active' stuff on the desktop --i.e. the stuff I work on the most often -- I can back that up more frequently and back up the 'Non-Active' stuff in Reference on a less frequent schedule.

Todd V