There’s magic in mess: Why you should embrace a disorderly desk • Hacker News Board

Re: There’s magic in mess: Why you should embrace a disorderly desk

#91

Post by dictum » Fri, Oct 21, 2016, 8:42 PM UTC

tdb7893 wrote: post #27

Rezo wrote: post #14

In 2011, Whittaker and colleagues published a research paper with the title “Am I Wasting My Time Organizing Email?”. The answer is: yes, you are. People who use the search function find their email more quickly than those who click through carefully constructed systems of folders. I used to organize email into folders meticulously, later using tags and rules. What a complete waste of time. These days I refuse to spe…

What works for me on my computer is put things into general buckets of downloads, things I don't care about, things I need to keep, and programming projects. This really basic organization allows me to be able to delete lots of files without worry while taking almost no time to organize. With search finding things is easy but deleting everything you don't need can still be hard.

I also settled into something similar.

I only use 4 main directories. One for code projects, one for design projects, ~/Downloads for transient files, ~/Documents for files that don't belong to an specific project.

Once in a while I create a YYYY-MM-DD folder, drop the current version of each of those folders, and start again with a clean slate. If I need to edit a file, I just search for it and edit it where it is; if I notice I'm having to edit it often, I may bring it back to its previous folder.

If it looks like what a regular user would do, that's exactly why I started doing it. I don't want to care.

Re: There’s magic in mess: Why you should embrace a disorderly desk

#92

Post by paulryanrogers » Fri, Oct 21, 2016, 9:56 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #63

putterson wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found it striking how similar the system that I have settled into is to yours, and also the similarity of the benefits that you ascribed to it. I love having my /home/name/tmp folder and being able to delete everything in it without worry when I find it becoming a bit crowded. I find that it takes care of most things I don't need but there are a lot of small projects and downloaded libraries that sit in my programm…

The way I do it on both Linux and Windows is: all the downloads go into Downloads folder. I keep the folder sorted by date (newest top) - 90% of the time I'm looking for something recently downloaded, and for the remaining 10%, I usually have an estimate in my head how old the file is, so I can do a visual binary search on the dates quickly. When I need to free up some space on the drive, I resort the folder by size…

Honestly I feel like the downloads folder is something of a waste. Typically the software there is too old by the time I find myself reinstalling.

Perhaps it should be auto purged as things age. Most users probably instinctively move things to be kept elsewhere

Re: There’s magic in mess: Why you should embrace a disorderly desk

#93

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Oct 21, 2016, 10:01 PM UTC

paulryanrogers wrote: post #92

TeMPOraL wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I do it on both Linux and Windows is: all the downloads go into Downloads folder. I keep the folder sorted by date (newest top) - 90% of the time I'm looking for something recently downloaded, and for the remaining 10%, I usually have an estimate in my head how old the file is, so I can do a visual binary search on the dates quickly. When I need to free up some space on the drive, I resort the folder by size…

Honestly I feel like the downloads folder is something of a waste. Typically the software there is too old by the time I find myself reinstalling. Perhaps it should be auto purged as things age. Most users probably instinctively move things to be kept elsewhere

Software is only a portion of my Downloads folder. It's usually a random collection of pictures, music files, videos, documents, spreadsheets, archives with data, archives with code, etc.

Re: There’s magic in mess: Why you should embrace a disorderly desk

#94

Post by krylon » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 6:48 AM UTC

johngalt wrote: post #69

krylon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst I have seen is people using the Trash folder to store mail, without eve emptying it. At work, I once had to clean out about 10000 mails from user's mailbox and thought it polite to empty the trash. Oh, was she mad...

The first time I saw this I was floored. After seeing it a few times, I was curious: "what establishes this pattern?", "how do people arrive at thinking of the trash folder as an archive?" In most cases they are using the delete key something like a surrogate for the read/unread flag. Keeping the inbox 'clean' of old email. I tried testing with view filters set to only show unread email, but that didn't work because…

That makes sense. Except for that one guy who had subfolders in his Trash folder. ;-) I tried to explain him that Outlook supports archiving mails and can even do so automatically, but he - like most of us - is a creature of habit, and I quickly stopped.

All in all, if it works for these users, I am not going to impose my style of organizing my mailbox on them. But using the Trash for that purpose seems dangerous for the same reason using the trash bin in the office as an archive is.

Re: There’s magic in mess: Why you should embrace a disorderly desk

#95

Post by Chris2048 » Mon, Oct 24, 2016, 5:56 PM UTC

thedevil wrote: post #13

vinay427 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually take a photo of documents that there's a small chance I would need in the future. This way, they take up a very small amount of space on my phone but in case I need something again the photo will usually be sufficient and I can search by date to find it.

I do something similar: put in a pile and about once a month I scan the pile (I bought a printer with a paper-feed just for this), upload it to cloud storage, and date it.

What printer do you use?

Only prob I have is some places insist on original docs :-/