Organizing vs. searching

Posted by Chris Murtland
Sep 2, 2006 at 04:18 PM

Lately I’ve been struggling with the fact that it may be impossible to really organize personal information. ;-)

The sheer volume of things I have to deal with and the questionable benefit of putting it into some kind of well-structured environment makes me think the best approach may be to just not try to structure it. Using one of the desktop search programs, you can pretty much find what you need as long as you export any proprietary formats to something the search apps can index.

I think Ultra Recall is sort of like my ideal file system - if saved search and metadata features were just built in to the file system (and they eventually will be, I think), I don’t know that I’d ever need to build a tree to attempt to organize stuff. I do have a pretty extensive tree hierarchy built in UR, but 90% of the time, I am just searching through UR to find a particular item or set of items. I rarely just browse the tree to see what’s there. So what good is the time I spend setting up and organizing the tree? The biggest benefit with UR is being able to tag diverse types of items (email, documents, web pages) with a single system; that helps a lot, but perhaps I should just dump everything in one folder in UR and not worry about organizing (beyond saved searches based on the tags/attributes I have set)? The only problem with just using files and not software like UR is that there is no consistent way (that I know of) to tag or set user-defined attributes on files (with text files, I can just put the metadata in the file, but there are other file types where this wouldn’t work).

Anyone else run into this problem or have thoughts on why organizing is or isn’t worth the time?

Chris