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Comment by etamponi | Hacker News Reader

This idea looks great, and it would be great if it worked: I've been struggling to keep all my documents organized many times, and I think I've followed basically the same system (except for the number.mapping).

This is my gotcha: how do you decide where a document go? The categories might be clearly split, but documents typically won't fall in exactly one category.

How do you manage temporary tags? That is: how do you operate on the documents? You might be having some documents for your "2020 tax return" in several categories of your system. And what now? Do you duplicate them in another category (tax return?)? Do you tag them? How do you keep track that you moved them? (In case they're real objects, like pieces of paper).

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> This is my gotcha: how do you decide where a document go? The categories might be clearly split, but documents typically won't fall in exactly one category.

Symlinks!

> How do you manage temporary tags?

Symlinks again!

Basically you put everything in an incoming folder, maybe organized by year or month/year or even type. Then you symlink to all of the categories it would be interesting to you.

Your temporary tags would just all be a folder of symlinks, so you can kill the tag and retain your document.

(I'm the eponymous 'Johnny'.)

Symlinks can work, and I've used them.

My advice to people is usually, though, that your brain will sort it out for you. And it really does.

The canonical example is "home insurance". Say you have a category of "home" and a category elsewhere of "insurance". Perfectly possible.

Which one does it go in? Well, you designed this system. Your brain came up with it. I've found that in nearly all cases, you just know.

I see where this may fall down in a shared environment (work), which is why I advocate (in one of the many unwritten posts on my as-yet-to-exist blog) for the role of a 'librarian' at work. We seem to think that 20 people can work on a project together and all just magically decide where everything goes. That has been shown again and again to be a fallacy that we believe search will help us with. My argument -- from experience -- is that it does not, and that we need to go back to a world where we organise things, and that people are responsible for this organisation.

I do not like your organizational system (nested folders are a great way to collapse conceptual complexity IMHO) but I thoroughly agree with the need for someone to dictate organizational systems for a group project - my time in the animation world taught me the value of everyone who touches a project having a little cheat sheet or two stuck on the wall near their desk that tells them how to name things so as to not cause conflicts when merging with others’ work, and to make it easy for other folks to find stuff!

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