Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?

   Programming: Language > Project_Name
   Writing: Month > Article_Title > 
   Resume: Year > 
   Professional: Company > Notes
   Photography: Year > Month > Photos
   Videography: Year > Month > Videos
   Music: Artists > Albums (or mixtapes) 

~/notes/journal.org dumpster for my personal day-to-day. from random quotes, to bizarre thoughts i had, and even code snippets (e.g. extract all image links from a page is one that i seem to keep going back to...)

~/notes/journal.work.org same thing as journal.org but for work related stuff. the layout is slightly different: it's a flat structure where each headline is top level (the personal journal is tree-like with year->month->day style nesting). it contains mostly technical details, notes on tasks and various bugs/TODOs.

~/code/qqj/ for my personal repos. i usually keep a "journal.org" style file in each private repo, detailing my work, thoughts, possible directions, snippets i found useful/interesting etc.

~/code/ for work repos

~/code/ everything that is not personal or work related goes straight under "code". if i'm learning a new language i'll create a ~/code/ dir and clone into it various repos to experiment with and learn from.

~/sync/ is like a dropbox dir that is synced across all machines. only the must have stuff that is lightweight.

~/cloud/ for cloud backup (exists on this machine only, not synced to other machines)

~/devon/ for devonthink databases (they are also synced to ~/cloud/ via devonthinks internal sync thing). most of my files i save in devon databases (i usually have two open: one for work and one for personal stuff, like interesting articles i find etc. but whenever i'm working on a personal project that requires extensive research and document collection i open a database for it. most of the documents are webpage captures in pdf format, pdf files (like papers and articles), and images. if it's text-based it's most likely under ~/notes/.

~/Downloads/ is for... downloads and pretty much everything else that is transient in nature. it's a big dumpster i clear out every month or two. every time i clean it i also empty the trash (before deleting current generation of Downloads). it's not automated because i like reviewing what i've been up to, and seeing how bad my adhd was this month :)

~/tmp/ is for files that can be deleted at any time (so... super transient files i guess). i'm not using /tmp/ because i want control over when they are deleted.

~/muhmusic is for offline music :) although i barely use it these days

~/ also contains a bunch of other directories that are synced to cloud backup, like a lecture series i downloaded from youtube. i prefer to have "big" meaningful collections like a lecture series under home dir because i'm much more likely to notice them when doing random stuff, and look into them.

But I use Org-ref to download pdfs and update my bibtex.

By all means keep a number in the folder name, if the number is meaningful, but also keep a human understandable name in there. That helps when you can't remember if it was the fifth show or whatever, maybe you can remember the name when you see it.

Or maybe I am missing something?

Anyway I try to organize my files kinda like that, but use my Downloads folder as GTD inbox: nothing is meant to stay there.