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Organizing vs. searching
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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
Posted by David Dunham
Sep 2, 2006 at 06:00 PM
> thoughts on why organizing is or isn’t worth the time?
It’s true that using Spotlight searches or Opal’s search field finds most stuff for me. But just last night I was searching for something, and I couldn’t remember quite where I put it. Or exactly what I wrote. I thought it had to do with “land” and/or “defense” which are rather common words. I simply wasn’t finding my notes (even though I knew which file system folder they were in).
Finally I ended up skimming some of the outlines, expanding the major topics that might be relevant, and was able to see the orginal note as a subtopic.
So while too much attention to organizing or categorizing everything is probably wasted, I think it would be false economy to do none. If I didn’t have a file system folder hierarchy the search would have been impossible. And logical topics and subtopics were also a help.
Of course, organization can also help you create notes in the first place, by helping to organize your thoughts. That’s a major part of what outliners are all about…
Posted by Chris Murtland
Sep 2, 2006 at 06:44 PM
Thanks, I think I just needed some validation that I haven’t been wasting ALL my time for the past ten years.
One thing I did overlook while thinking about this is that even after locating an item, having it in the outline structure also lets you see it in context with other related items that may not exactly match the search.
I guess the thing I need to work on is defining the conceptual boundaries of where to stop building structure because it won’t be used and where it is really useful. A lot of reference type information seems to lend itself to just needing to be able to be located by a search, but active ideas/thoughts and writing are where outlines really help me. And in this case, the tree-based database approach seems less helpful than the one-pane outline approach (where the text *is* the outline item instead of a separate note attached to the outline item). So it looks like I need a more traditional outliner for active thinking and a database approach to storing reference information. Ecco or BrainStorm on Windows would probably be my top choices for the former. (I’ll be sure to try Opal if I ever get a Mac).
It’s sometimes hard for me to make distinctions between ideas/actions/reference material; they seem to shift and morph into each other along the way. I suppose that’s why I still lean toward trying to do all my info management in one app. For all its crippling flaws, one thing I did like about Info Select was that you could kind of effortlessly switch between tree-based database type info and fairly decent one-pane outlining all within one tree.
Chris
Posted by Jan Rifkinson
Sep 2, 2006 at 07:31 PM
Chris, I find it impossible to structure/organixze my thoughts, interests, projects, blah_blah. If I tried it, I’d be spending time doing that rather than following my intersts or accomplishing anything so I’ve always searched for programs that could absorb random info & then organize it for me.
To that end, I started with Lotus Agenda, then switched to EccoPro (when, sadly, Agenda was abandoned)
Then I revisited Zoot (direct descendant of Agenda) but it’s in the process of being coded for 32bit
For the past few years I’ve been using Ariadne & ADM. (basically). I just dump everything into ADM & use it to gather data when I need it. It makes me feel warm all over when I see the results. Both these programs are a little quirky but affordable & in continuing development… albeit not always as quickly as one might like.
Daly & a few others can talk about both these programs as well. I’m not touting either. I’m just telling you what I use for the exact same reasons you’re concerned with.
—
Jan Rifkinson
Ridgefield, CT USA
skype janrif
Posted by dg
Sep 2, 2006 at 08:01 PM
I’m toying with the idea of going to a chronological filing method with tags (meta-data). That is, filing by date and adding tags (meta-data) to aid sorting/searching. Has anyone else tried this?
For years I filed by topic. Then, like most, found this produces..
(a) too many folders to know where any particular item is, so you wind up doing searches across multiple folders to find what you need anyway; or
(b) the never ending cross-filing problem…that any given item could be filed in any of a half dozen different topics, meaning you need to either store multiple copies, or try to put shortcuts or something to that effect in the alternate locations pointing to the one real item (waaay too much work); or…here it is again….just wind up searching for what you need anyway! (there’s a theme here!).
So then I took to storing everything in one folder with tags (meta-data, categories, whatever-you-want-to-call-this-sort-of-thing…)...and filtering/sorting/searching to find what I want. This works better, but still can take too long to find something because much of my work has all the same words in it (and the same tags or meta-data)...so searching returns too many items with no ability to discriminate between them. For example, my team at work and I are constantly exchanging e-mail with data attached…but all the messages have the same recipients, many of the same words, they’re about the same topics, and they have similar data attached. How do I find stuff in that pile???
Sorting through the results of all these searches showed a new theme…and that was that I often could remember the period of time when the item was filed. Hence my idea that I would give up on the everything-in-one-folder-with-tags approach and go back to filing, but by chronological folders.
Has anyone tried that?
TIA,
—
dgg