Earlier this year I read one of the best articles I’ve ever read on personal filesystems and organization. For one who has struggled over the years to keep a well organized digital archive that is easily searchable and can work on pretty much any computer, this article written by Stephen Wolfram was a godsend. Inspired by it, I took some of Wolfram’s tricks and started experimenting with different hierarchies and tools until I got to something that suited my needs.
What follows is the description of the filesystem that I’ve been happily and productively using for the past 6 months or so.
Requirements
Before jumping right in, let me give you some context. Based on my struggles and usage I decided that my filesystem had to fulfill the following requirements.
- It needed to be agnostic to operating systems (as far as Unix-based Operating Systems go).
- It needed to work without any external tools. This meant that not third party apps or services were allowed. (In the past I kept a lot of my files in Evernote).
- It needed to be based around plain-text files. This is mostly because I am used to Vim a terminal-based text editor without which I feel I almost don’t know how to use a computer. And also because plain-text files are Lindy.
The Filesystem
Requirements out of the way lets dive into the details of my system.
At the root of my filesystem I only keep five folders:
- Life: This directory contains all my personal information. From school transcripts to medical reports.
- Pictures: I like pictures a lot and tend to produce quite a few of them. This is where all my pictures, screenshots, memes, etc. live.
- Biblioteca (i.e. Library): This is where I keep all the ebooks, papers, and reference materials that I’ve collected.
- Projects: In terms of my daily routine and work this is the most important directory. It contains all of my current and past projects.
- dotfiles. This is one that I believe every programmer should have. In it, I keep all the configuration files I need for my terminal and editor. I keep a copy of it hosted on GitHub.
Inside each of these folders, I keep a directory named ARCHIVE where I dump anything that’s not relevant anymore but that I don’t want to through away. I took this from Wolfram’s system and I have to stay it is very useful. For example, I know now that all my previous projects are somewhere in my ARCHIVE. I also follow strict naming conventions as detailed below.
Life
The Life directory doesn’t have much of a structure.
I just keep a folder for my personal documents and one for other members of my family. I also have top-level folders for documents related to possessions such as my home and car.
Pictures
This folder starts to get more organized.
In it, I keep separate folders for pictures of specific things. These can be places that I frequently visit, screenshots, etc.
Most of the pictures are kept inside a folder named Events. This is another trick I copied from Wolfram. Inside it I keep one folder for each year. Inside each year I keep one folder per event using the naming convention YYYY-MM-DD-event_name.
What I like about this folder is that I now open a given year and see all the events and pictures in it. This has helped me remember quite a few cool events and has brought good memories as well.
One thing I started doing for events of this year is to add a summary file where I write a small review of the event. I look forward to reading these in some years!
Biblioteca
This folder is named in Spanish because Library is a folder name that macOS reserves for itself. While this might seem to break requirement (1) above, it is a minor thing that doesn’t really bother me and does not affect anything else.
In this folder I keep a loose category of reference material, mostly pdfs of papers and books.
This has been the folder that has taken the most time and effort to get used to. For a long time I kept all my research and reference material in Papers 3. This was a very good app but after it was acquired by Springer the version that I used stopped being maintained and changed to an online subscription that seem to restrictive and in violation of requirement (1).
After the initial struggle of getting al my files out of the Papers app, I went through the effort or renaming all the files using the convention YYYY_Author_Title. By naming it in this way I can now just use macOS’ search tool grep in the command line to quickly access any paper or book.
Projects
As I said above this is the folder that I use on a daily basis. It is the most organized of all the folders in my system.
At a high level it looks as follows:
I keep the usual ARCHIVE folder. Each active project (a project I am currently working on) sit in its own folder.
Notable in this folder are:
- TODO.md this is my master TODO list that I review on a weekly basis. I try to follow GTD principles for this.
- IDEAS.md this a brain dump of ideas that come to my mind from time to time. I end up working on some but most of them just sit there forever.
- PLAN. This is a folder inside which I keep my weekly plans. I always try to plan my week in advance and block off hours for productive work. This is a system that I learned from Cal Newport and it has served me well over the years, especially when I was in college. It helps me be organized and schedule all the things I want to do.
Each project has also its well-defined structure:
- 00.md This is the “roadmap” of the project. Here I detail what the project is about, what is the status (starting, active, ongoing) and what are the next actions (periodically I translate the next actions into entries in the master TODO list so I can plan my weeks accordingly).
- 01.md and beyond. Each new file is named using numbers in an increasing fashion. This lets me keep track of how the project progresses over time.
Backups
It wouldn’t be a robust system without backups! I keep two backups:
- A Local hard-drive that’s attached to my dock-in station so that whenever I plug my laptop while at home the backup is done automatically.
- I keep all the folders inside iCloud Drive with symlinks to my home folder. This enables me to have a second copy of all my files as well as accessing them from my phone and other devices.
Onwards
While I’m pretty sure this system will evolve over time with new and different requirements, I feel I finally have a solid starting base. I feel I am now more productive and spend less time looking for the information that I need and I am more focused on actual projects.