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Comment by jpl56 | Hacker News Reader

I put all paper documents I receive on top of a stack. Therefore it's roughly sorted by date.

If I need to get an invoice from last december, I just lookup around this date in my stack.

Time spent to store information : 0 ; time spent to find something : a few minutes, once every other month.

Every five years, I take the bottom of the stack and file it in the cellar. And I come back from the cellar with 10 year old documents I can either trash (in my office secured bin) or keep in my filing box.

I also keep contracts (insurance, bank, ...) in this filing box.

Last thing : All documents that will be used for my tax returns (at least the equivalent of it in France) go in one folder. I will use it once a year then file this in the "taxes" box.

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I used to do this, and then I got married. My wife can't spend a month without rearranging the whole damn house though so it didn't scale to marriage. Now I just have a box I throw everything into that might be important. My few critically important things like birth certificate, passport, residency card, etc. live separately in a fireproof safe.

I just want to comment that your wife sounds like comedy awesomenesss.. So be kind and (in whatever way is your style) show her some appreciation....

EDIT: Its date-night bitch - figure it out

Ha I have the same problem. My wife is constantly cleaning and my organization strategy used to rely on remembering the last place I put something. Our home looks amazing but I can never find anything.

I do this too. If there's one Life Rule I've learned as I got older, it's that YAGNI extends well beyond software development.

The "important papers pile" is a great example of that. Not a second spent wondering where to put something, or even whether it's worth keeping at all.

I do this, too. It started because I was lazy but it turned out to be an almost optimal solution when comparing effort and use. I needed some specific document from a certain date from a huge stack of 3 years of documents. Some eyeballed manual binary searching and I was at my desired document within 5 or 6 lookups.

I do exactly the same. My stack is around 3cm every year, very manageable. Important documents i probably need to look at again, I also scan with my phone and store them in my backuped documents folder on my pc.

So when you need something and find it, do you just restack it on top of the pile, or do you spend time to locate the correct time slot in the pile and slide them in there?

> top of the pile

MRU cache, if you will

Now it's not sorted so you're going to end up having to do a linear scan of the entire pile if you do this regularly.

I leave a mark (folding the next sheet for instance) to be able to put the paper at the same place when I'm finished using it.

I did this in high school, which was, in terms of school work anyway, pre-computer, so everything was paper all the time. I was aware of people's binders and notebooks and so forth, but somehow ended up just accumulating looseleaf paper folded up in my back pocket until I ran out of space and ended up throwing most or all of it out and starting over.

I might resume that practice, now that I think of it.

This would be my ideal way of doing it! Too bad my memory isn’t good enough to remember dates even in the scale of years and I probably wouldn’t be able to locate contracts/warranty papers etc with ease. I’m curious to try it still however just to see.

For me, the few things that are more important (insurance paperwork, certain types of health records, legal stuff, etc.) I do file separately in a file cabinet (or my fireproof box). But tossing most of it in a pile works pretty well--and anything it turns out I do need (e.g. for filing taxes) is almost certainly near the top of the pile.

I've really been getting into organization just by chronology lately. I don't separate notes by topic anymore, I just write all notes chronologically with dates to break up days. This way I can always flip back through the pages around the time I was working on something to find what notes I took.

I wonder if there are any digital document organizers like this. Something you just drag and drop important digital documents you want to keep track of and it automatically adds date and time information so you can browse through them in the order they've been added.

Wouldn't the filesystem suffice for this? It already tracks creation and modification times, so all you'd need to do is sort chronologically in your UI of choice.

If you wanted something Web-based, you could use Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. and get similar functionality.

The date of the document and when it is add could be different. Also no note about the document in default file system.

It could, but like another user pointed out the last file modification time isn't necessarily going to stay chronological forever, so something that understands the order in which documents are put in is immutable unless I explicitly rearrange them would be good. Easy text searching through multiple file types to help narrow down a search faster, automated encryption and cloud storage backup, syncing between multiple devices. All the usual nice stuff you would expect for an app like this.

It could watch certain directories on your computer or in cloud storage and create a queue to suggest adding new documents that appear there in the same order of their appearance, that way you never forget to add an important document and they still get put in chronologically even if you haven't checked the queue in months. It could make different "vaults" you could use to separate documents by person, or separate work and personal life. Vaults could have long-term upkeep rules to keep them from getting bloated, like maybe you delete everything that's 10 years or older.

Basically if it can help me even if I have sloppy organization and take a ton of the pain out of it for me, I'd definitely be willing to pay a bit to try an app like that. Can't say for sure that I would stick with it, but it's a reoccurring problem for me as I have documents across multiple devices, cloud services, emails accounts, and thumb drives that I just can't make myself organize or create and maintain a system to do it for me.

This is pretty much my system as well. It's funny, I thought I was the only one "cheating" in this way, but the comments here indicate that I am in good company.

For over a decade my no-brainer digital file system at both home and work is similar.

Auto-file everything as a time-stack:

- new files go on the desktop

- if I didn't name file right rules automatically rename it per ISO 8601 to "YYYY-MM-DD - title.ext"

- after the file isn't opened for >2 days, it gets auto-sorted into (more or less) "archive/yyyy-mm/yyyy-mm-dd - title.ext"

- note: stick to ISO 8601 across tooling: https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html

With this system, the effect is:

- my desktop has today's and yesterday's working files, everything else is auto-cleaned (you may want 5 or 7 days depending on nature of file work)

- when i need something, I "lookup around that date in my stack" because I find it easier to find things by time than by trying to re-imagine what I'd named it.

- when working somewhere where i create more content then I consume, I group by weeks not months: "archive/yyyy-ww/file" (given ~520 folders per decade, you may, or may not, want "archive/yyyy/yyyy-ww/file" depending on your file system's speed at iterating dirs)

- turn week numbers on your calendar, and you can directly open any folder for any week you did stuff.

- no brain power needed!

More about usage:

Method works beautifully even if you prefer topical folders like project-name or finances or whatever, and computer search is fast/easy at still showing you everything made in a given month no matter what folder it's in.

Seeing files by when made visually 'bundles' files made around the same time (e.g. several days' or weeks' work on the same project). Update dates for new versions and a find by name for the rest of the file name will show you all the versions you have, sorted.

This is infinitely superior to the standard workplace practice of "Title Whatever v3 (tim edits B) jfk (copy).doc".

Thanks to the date prefixed name, if I email files, backup/restore them, or otherwise round trip them to some other file system (looking at you, most NAS, SANs, and object stores), I don't lose the metadata of when created, meaning I can still sort round tripped files by name reversed and see files by recency or clustered by when made.

If I can't find by looking around the date, I can always fiddle with search to find things.

I now get unhappy any time a file doesn't start with a date.

Pro-tips: Apple Shortcuts supports ISO 8601 by name for dates and time. On MacOS I use Hazel to maintain this w/o touching it: https://www.noodlesoft.com ... On Windows I use powershell, Linux perl.

I do exactly this, except I take a time-stamped photo of it and throw the hard copy away. Google docs automatically turns it into a PDF.

It increases the Big O on capturing it, but reduces space and access complexity.

For long running docs like titles, and certifications, passports, and whatnot I stick in an important papers storage Tupperware so it's safe from water damage

Nitpicking (of course, HN, what did you expect): capturing is still O(1).

HA. True I guess it just adds a constant to capture time . Good catch.

I would argue that it’s O(n), increasing linearly with number of pages of the document ;-).

I see where you're coming from and we're probably getting wayyy in the weeds on this...:)....but I think they mean an insert of item into already existing array is O(1) and from your perspective ..traversal over time would be O(n) so I think y'all might both correct from diff perspectives.

I was thinking increasing insert time would increase Big O but they made the point that it's a constant which will cancel out as n approaches infinity.

God I'm a nerd.

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