Dynamic Digital Organization

There has been a never-ending supply of what’s-the-best-way-to-organize-my-digital-files discussions and software to accomplish the same1 recently from all of the “productivity” sites2. I won’t lie: I have been party to many of those discussions, and I am indeed contributing to the madness here and now. But, that’s what we geeks do, right?

My new system utilizes features built into Mac OS X and is comprised of three components:

1. A “catch-all” folder for my documents.
2. A helpful use of Finder’s color labels.
3. Smart folders.

As such, this system is software agnostic and only requires that you use a Mac running OS 10.3 10.4 or later3.

The “Catch-All” Folder

I have a catch-all documents folder called trunk4. In the past, I had a lot of trouble with catch-all folders. I liked the idea of not maintaining some ridiculously detailed hierarchical folder structure, but there are also times when some things have to have their own folders or it just gets nuts5. So, I treat these folders as meta-files. This works for me since I think of things that way a lot. For instance, my handouts, saved assignments, and other documents for any class I am taking goes into a folder. I think of my classes like that, not as individual files. So, if I need a folder, I use one, but generally, files are just thrown into trunk to duke it out for attention.

Using Finder’s Color Labels

I have renamed the color labels in Finder on my new machine.

• Red → 1. School
• Orange → 2. Business
• Yellow → 8. Hands Off
• Green → 6. Reference
• Blue → 4. Home
• Purple → 5. Personal
• Gray → 7. Other

I like this for a couple of reasons. First, it limits the number of categories that I can have. This is good because it reduces the amount of faffing that I can do with my categories. Second, it gives me an additional sorting criterion. I view this folder in list view and sort by label. Finally, naming the labels (in accord with this obvious hint that wasn’t so obvious) with numbers allows for more intuitive and controllable sorting.

The Smart Folders

The key to my system is the Smart Folders. I have six Smart Folders in my sidebar: @toTag, Business, School, Reference, Personal, and Home. The @toTag Smart Folder has only one criterion: namely that it doesn’t have a color label set. The others have two: Label is {the corresponding label to the Smart Folder’s name} and Last opened in the last two months. This ensures that my Smart Folders are not full of old cruft, and it allows me to not have a separate “Archive” folder for old files; they just stay in trunk but don’t show up in my Smart Folders.

A serendipitous realization of this system came when I actually opened a Smart Folder after setting this system up: an increased level of dynamic organization and sorting based on filetype. I knew that Spotlight searches did this, but I have never used Smart Folders very much, so seeing this in the Smart Folders was pleasantly surprising.

This is a brief write-up of a very new system of organizing my digital files, but I think that utilizing dynamic technologies is one of the keys to sustainable, adaptable, and scalable digital filing systems.