HACKER Q&A
📣 brslv

How do you organize information: by type or context?


Here's a simple example.

You read a book about human's brain and find something particularly interesting that you'd like to remember.

You open your notetaking app of choice and are presented with the following dilemma: to put the quote in a folder called "quotes" or in a folder called "humans-brain". What do you do?

I'm particularly interested in the topic of organizing information and would be grateful if you could share any resources on the topic "type vs context" or simply share your point of view and experience.

  👤 AnimalMuppet Accepted Answer ✓
I'd probably have a folder called "humans-brain", and within that a file called "quotes". I care more what the information is about, and less what the meta-data about the data is (what type of info it is). Why? Because I more often want to find information about a topic than I do to find information of a particular type.
👤 simonblack
Always by type in a tree-structure of directories. By the time you've selected down finer and finer details you'll probably find you've only got a dozen or so files left to search carefully through for your information.

But, mind you, belt-n-braces. It never hurts to have a key-word index too.

👤 dvxvd
For me this question is open for a few decades.. one of the possible solutions are - tags

But im expecting classification to be done by some personal AI system. Latter system must be able extract this data on demand.

👤 pier25
The idea of folders rooted in the physical world is obsolete.

Use a system with tags so you don't have to chose one or the other.