Slashdot Mirror
How Do You Organize Your Data?
kpellegr asks: "After returning from a well deserved holiday, I was faced with an exploding inbox. While organizing and deleting my mail, I realised I was having trouble classifying each mail into one specific folder. I had the feeling I should be able to link to one email from several folders (e.g. product information should be linked to from the 'vendor' folder, as well as from a specific project folder where this product is used). The more I thought about this, the more I realised that trees (such as the Windows filesystems) are not really ideally suited for organizing data. On UNIX-like filesystems, symbolic links allow the creation of simple graphs for organising data, but I have the feeling data could be organized more efficiently. How does the Slashdot crowd organize their data? How do you manage files, email, contacts, meetings and all the relationships that might exist between them?"
That way, I never need to worry about what folder to put it in.
And I check it twice.
Checking twice really helps.
How do you manage files, email, contacts, meetings and all the relationships that might exist between them?
Easy! Do what I do and don't have any friends, contacts, meetings, or relationships with people!
This is exactly the concept behind virtual folders. The idea is that folders, whether they be in the context of an email program or a filesystem, are actively updated searches. For example, all of your emails could be in one pool, invisible to you. Then each folder would be associated with a rule similar to email filter rules we use now. If an email matches, it shows up, maybe in multiple folders. Bayesian rules allow for even better classifications, if an email is similar enough to several catagories, it can show up in all of them.
Spencer Ogden
I organize files according to breast size, number of women, and relative perversity of the acts commited.
Duh!
You can't take the sky from me...
...it's a windows only product, but for organizing email on windows boxes, I would recommend Nelson. I use it at work, and it allows me to organize a single email using multiple classifications and has a ton of other feartures. Check it out.
A dash of arbitrary directory trees and a pinch of grep.
But seriously, this subject is kind of lacking. The problem I have with organized storage is keeping it organized. I don't have the time nor the will. I need some sort of automagic organization.
porn1
porn2
New Folder
New Folder(1)
unsorted_porn
mp3s
I love wikis (see also Twiki, a very flexible one, and Openwiki if you prefer M$ technologies): you can organize anything you want, with anyone you want. It's more suited to a workgroup of people, but they work for individuals too. They're totally flexible, extensible, and templatable.
I'm sure people here will come up with ideas like knowledge trees and weird topological concepts, but gimme a wiki any day.
A friend of mine used to use what he termed an archaeological filing system.
It was based on the simple principal that the older something was the further down in the pile it would be.
Your all-in-one-folder technique and "ls -t" would work equally well.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Someone has to bring it up, so it might as well be me! Opera7 mail folders are really filters onto the mail database, meaning you can have the same message in multiple folders. Just in case you didnt know :)
All mail are kept into one place (say, a MySQL database). You, however, setup filters (that is, SQL queries) that show your e-mails in virtual folders.
That is, messages can be in as many folders as they meet the selection criterion of.
In addition to the obvious "from", "date", "subject", you could assign an arbitrary number of categories which could constitute more selection criteria.
David Gelertner, the comp sci professor author and unabomber victim, has created software he calls Scopeware. It basically organizes information in a series of related chains. These can be date based or otherwise. I haven't used it, but I've read that he is responding to some of the same concerns you mention.
On a less lofty, but free, note, Evolution has "virtual folders" in which you can place anything a filter expression can select. I use them to sort my email by sender address. I still have my main inbox, and all the categorized subfolders, but the virtual folders select particular people out of the massive mail database. So I can recall that Joe said something three weeks ago that relates to a current problem, and look in the "Joe" virtual folder to find it. There's still no easy way to add arbitrary messages to a virtual folder, other than adding a filter rule that selects just that one message. At least I haven't found a way. But it seems to address part of your concern, for email at least.
"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there" - Will Rogers
One folder for offers from Nigerians to make me rich, one folder for penis enlargement, and one folder for pr0n offers... that handles about 99% of my incoming email. Isn't that what everybody else does?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I just export it to my web server, wait a couple of weeks for google to index it, and then google it.
I have a organizational system which uses two folders and replication.
Folder 1: INBOX
Folder 2: SENT EMAIL
Any email which is important I send to one or more anal-retentive people who will create nice organized folders in which to store the email. This how I implement replicated storage with automatic retrieval. If I ever need an email back I can simply ask for it and get a copy forwarded to me. Using this method I don't have to waste valuable brain power deciding what folder things go in. As a backup, if for some reason my replicated storage goes on vacation or is out of the office, I can search my sent folder and usually find what I need in there.
This method works extremely well plus it has the advantage of replicated storage which helps thwart hardware failures.
Good luck! Staying organized is a full time job!
Or is that KAOS (as in "Get Smart") ?
I'm currently playing around with putting all my mail messages, bookmarks, web pages loaded, file accesses (on a day to day basis) into a database. Maybe not all the actual data, but the stuff that might help me find it when I need it. I'm hoping to eventually scan everything that changes on my computer or that I do for keywords and so on and then organize them so I can browse them by some kind of visual graph/map metaphor on any of several axes (type of file, date/time, keywords, directory ....).
I want to be able to go in with a query like "sometime in july I did something having to do with a picnic and watermelon" and get a list of possibilities, then be able to rate those in the hopes of finding the exact info I'm looking for.
OK, so far I only have some pieces of it. But I'm getting closer to a database schema for the information and that will help me figure out better what info I need to collect.
I know other people have mentioned Evolution's vFolders, but here a little more.
My goal is to never have an email that has value to me land in my inbox. Every time I get an email of "value" which stays in Evolution's inbox, I right click, and "Create Filter from Message". (I'm paraphrasing.)
Every good message should have at least one filter putting it into at least one folder. Some emails have more than one rule, but the whole right click -> create filter thing makes this quick and easy.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
I use microsoft exchange, and it randomly deletes, my data and users so i don't have to worry about organizing it :)
Sorry, i'm frustrated... I'm setting up an exchange server right now.
It also sounds similar to how Opera handles mail with the M2 e-mail client. It defines "access points" that can (but don't have to) look like folders for jumping into messages that meet a certain criteria. For example, all messages with an attached image are grouped together, as are all messages from a specific person, and all messages meeting some sort of user-defined criteria might also be lumped together under an "access point." In the end though, there really is only one mail box, these tools just allow you to "slice and dice" through your mail.
I think MIT has a project called Haystack designed just for this
BeOS used file attributes and file system queries to organize data. Longhorn's WinFS is built on this concept. The real question isn't how to organize your files, it's why does your data need to be in files? Why are folders so closely entwined with our computing experience? This type of grouping is best suited for your clothes in your dresser. In real life, tossing everything into a pool and pulling out what you need by characteristics ("attributes") is much more useful.
I think this is a step in the right direction. I have been using it for a while now - check it out.
"The goal here is to do for email (starting with your personal mailbox) what Google did for the web... The Google principle: It doesn't matter where information is because I can get to it with a keystroke. So what is Zoe? Think about it as a sort of librarian, tirelessly, continuously, processing, slicing, indexing, organizing, your messages. The end result is this intertwingled web of information. Messages put in context. Your very own knowledge base accessible at your fingertip. No more "attending to" your messages. The messages organization is done automatically for you so as to not have the need to "manage" your email. Because once information is available at a keystroke, it doesn't matter in which folder you happened to file it two years ago. There is no folder. The information is always there. Accessible when you need it. In context." ZOE
Ok, now to actually answer the question posed here (as opposed to what a lot of other people here are doing, which is either come up with something witty or else attempt to codify a sweeping new all-inclusive whiz-bang OS change).
Ahem.
I know the question is asking about emails, files, contacts, and meetings, but as I keep relatively few contacts permanently filed and don't much like meetings, I'll address what I do about files and emails.
Files: I start with a simple folder: "Files". In my case, "D:\Files". (I like folders Windows doesn't much know about, nor mess with.) Inside that, I have pretty much a heterogeneous hodgepodge of hierarchies of folders: "Projects", "Photos", "Temp" (big one, that), etc. Nothing earth-shattering.
Emails: I try to organize these into folders denoting conversational thread ("Buddies", "List Stuff", "Family", "Work", etc.), combined with where they are in my email-processing conveyor belt ("To Do" (I haven't replied yet), then "Transfer" (I've replied, but not archived), then "Done" (archived and ready for deletion)), for whichever conversational threads I want to save. Using the examples above would result in:
- List Stuff
- Work
- To Do - Buddies
- To Do - Family
- Transfer - Buddies
- Transfer - Family
- Done - Buddies
- Done - Family
(I would use a bit of hierarchy here, like:- List Stuff
- Work
- To Do
- Buddies
- Family
- Transfer
- Buddies
- Family
- Done
- Buddies
- Family
, except Yahoo! Mail doesn't allow folder nesting. (And before you laugh at me for using Yahoo! Mail, can you access your mail at any web browser anywhere? How many times have you changed addresses in the last 5 years? I haven't at all.))And that's pretty much it.
(Hey, you asked...)
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Ah yes, the 'traditional' method. Byproducts include numerous "Desktop Stuff" folders, frewuently nested within others of the same name. I'm a fan of the 'berserker trashfest' style myself - let it build up until it drives you insane, then chuck everything in sight.
I know other users have already pointed out how well Evolution works for sorting mail, but I just wanted to attest to how well it works even for large amounts of email.
I used to create new folders for specific types of email, but I found it very difficult to manage and search all the folders after a while, so I ended up moving all of my email to a single folder, Inbox. I currently have 24,949 messages in my Inbox and Evolution is still extremely fast when it comes to sorting and searching through them all.
I also make use of the excellent VFolders feature of Evolution, to save frequent searches into their own folders. I've been using Evolution now for several years, and it just keeps getting better and better.
--It's Pimptastic!--
For file systems I use symbolic links in a column viewed filesytem. I really like what a company formerly known as NeXT has done with some of their products. Their software for pictures and music both have a "Library". From there you can drag songs or pictures into "Playlists" (music) or "Albums" (photos).
Very cool.
As for software, I use OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner from OmniGroup. OmniOutliner is especially simple, yet unique. I wonder why no one else has an idea organizer that is so incredible? I couldn't do my job without it. Well, I could, but I'd use a lot of paper or spend a lot of time in OpenOffice messing around with things.
And when you delete a message from one folder, it's deleted from all of them!
If you are deleting an email, that implies that you are done with the information. If you just want to reorganize it, then you (the user) should understand what it means to organize.
The problem is that users are trained on the MS vision that everything can only exist in one place and to put it in two places requires making a copy. This approach has problems:
1. Very wasteful of hard drive space. You need to have complete copies of a document in every folder/directory it belongs. Today hard drive space is cheap, but MS is trying to grow the data file sizes to keep up.
2. Each copy is not updated with the others. You usually forget which should be the master copy. And the users don't care about maintaining the master copy; they want to work on the one to which they have access. Making it read-only means there will be even more copies made so people can get their work done.
Unix/Linux users have symbolic links. They are exposed to them very early, and learn that a link to a file can be treated as the file, for everything except its organization. Updating the file updates it everywhere.
Lotus Notes allows all approaches:
1. You can make copies. Copy/Paste always does this.
2. You can make links. Dragging always does this.
3. You can put links to anything inside other documents. This allows you to send a memo with links to the documents that need your attention.
4. You have Views, which show all documents based on selection formulas.
5. It has great filtering capabilities. You can show all documents that contain the word "slashdot" that were created between 2 dates.
But is a first-time user going to expect it? Of course not, he thinks the folders work like everywhere else, and copy means make a copy, not just a link.
Your "first-time user" expects "the folders work like everywhere else"?
- A first-time user should not have a problem. They learn what happens without any expectations.
- A "first-time user" that has been using MS products for a while should know never to expect consistent results. Try dragging a file in MSWindows:
1. If it is an executable, it will create a Shortcut.
2. If it is to the same hard drive, it will move the file. (And remember that "My Documents" and "Desktop" are usually on the C Drive.)
3. If it is to a different hard drive, it will make a copy. (What happens if it is a mapped network share on the same computer?)
That is 3 different results from the same user action! So how do folders work everywhere else?
---
Anyway, I expect MS to die soon. Windows will wither without MS. The next generation of users will probably start with Linux and be better off.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
You can take that a step further and use IMAP with fetchmail and procmail. Set it up once and fine tune as needed and have one set of folders and filtering available to any IMAP client.
The backup is easy if working with standard mailbox style folders because the format is text, readable by any viewer. You can tgz your mail directory to a file via cron. I back mine up on a rotating basis to a different drive. For things I know I will never need but want to keep anyway or for archiving important things, I create a new IMAP folders with my client, move the messages over to that folder, tgz it and move it out of the mail directory. If I ever need it, I can extract it back to the mail directory and view it again or I can add more mail to the archive file later with a few commands I am not familiar with the native format of any mail clients anymore because I have been using IMAP for years. I switched for two reasons, I got tired of always trying to convert proprietary mail formats everytime I wanted to change mail clients and I wanted access to all of my mail regardless of what type of machine or where I was coming from. I will never go back no non-IMAP. The fetchmail and procmail functionality are an added bonus. You get the most from IMAP when it is running 24/7 on a stable machine somewhere on your local/home network. If you don't have such a thing already in place, it might not be worth the initial effort.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
That is 3 different results from the same user action! So how do folders work everywhere else?
Well, IMO the real problem is not whether one maufacturer or another has his own user interface rules, it is the fact that folders and documents were introduced as the universal metaphor for arranging data on a computer in the first place.
And now we are stuck with the restrictions imposed by that representation, which will often lure first-time users into believing that just because it looks like real-life a folder it will behave like a real-life folder. No matter how you then try to squeeze the concept of links, views, etc, into some kind of association with this rather limited concept, you are likely run into problems. What, really would be the real-world counterpart of a symbolic link, a virtual forlder (!), a view, etc?
The file/folder metaphor comes from an age where files were few and far between for the average user. Maybe we need a completely new user interface concept to deal with today's overload of data.