Instead, take advantage that ideas and work evolve through time, and store your work and notes chronologically. Combine that with good search.
This allows you to find items by time proximity and keyword / semantic / text embedding search.
The only folder categorization needed are slashes around ISO 8601 date parts (whichever groups a reasonable amount of content together naturally):
- YYYY/MM or YYYY/WW
With files named:
- YYYY-MM-DD - Topic headline keywords.ext
After a while, just stop filing anything, have a script sweep your desktop and downloads paths into this archive path if a piece of content hasn't been opened in x days.
(If you really really want a set of things together, make a folder for them on your desktop, put the bits in it, and ensure the script only sweeps the whole folder once no bits are being used.)
If you're still working on a set of stuff, it'll stay on your desktop. When you're done, it'll go where you can find it.
If you need something, search. If you can't search, remember when you worked on it, and browse. You'll find it, and all the things around it, that were in your head at the time, and can "reload" the whole context.
Instead, take advantage that ideas and work evolve through time, and store your work and notes chronologically. Combine that with good search.
This allows you to find items by time proximity and keyword / semantic / text embedding search.
The only folder categorization needed are slashes around ISO 8601 date parts (whichever groups a reasonable amount of content together naturally):
- YYYY/MM or YYYY/WW
With files named:
- YYYY-MM-DD - Topic headline keywords.ext
After a while, just stop filing anything, have a script sweep your desktop and downloads paths into this archive path if a piece of content hasn't been opened in x days.
(If you really really want a set of things together, make a folder for them on your desktop, put the bits in it, and ensure the script only sweeps the whole folder once no bits are being used.)
If you're still working on a set of stuff, it'll stay on your desktop. When you're done, it'll go where you can find it.
If you need something, search. If you can't search, remember when you worked on it, and browse. You'll find it, and all the things around it, that were in your head at the time, and can "reload" the whole context.