On the sustainability of folderless notes structures

[ryanjamurphy]

Splitting out an interesting conversation on folders and notes into its own thread.

I’m quoting @alltagsverstand’s initiating reply and then moving the other posts in below:

@alltagsverstand

Some general, unordered thoughts related to [this post]:

1. The good thing with digital note-taking systems is that you actually don’t have to care at all about folder hierarchies. I mean, in the end it all depends on your working habits and specific purposes - but a major advantage of digital systems is that you are not forced any longer to spend lots of time thinking about where to put your information, how to name it etc. A note called “Dopamine” can just exist anywhere in your folder structure - doesn’t matter as long as you link to it from within the right place. So, as long as there is a more general topic “Neurotransmitters”, just put a link to your other note and each time you think about Neurotransmitters you can easily jump to your “Dopamine” note.

2. If I understand you correctly, your main purpose, however, is to have an overview from time to time: which notes do you already have on a topic, what links from where to where, etc. Sure, you can create folder or name structures for that - but after all my experience I won’t recommend this. It already pre-structures your thinking about how things should connect and behave to each other, thus making it difficult to find new, rather unexpected connections. The better way, in my view, is to use one (or several, or all…) of the following methods:

   • Use tagging: If you tag all your single notes that represent a certain neurotransmitter with #neurotransmitter (or even nested tags like #neurotransmitter_examples), a single click on or search for this tag shows you a list of all notes you have already collected about specific neurotransmitters.
   • Use MOCs (or whatever you want to call it): That is, establish a basic overview note called for example “Neurotransmitters: Index” or “Neurotransmitters: MOC” and use that note only for collecting different topics and subtopics, by linking directly to the respective notes - you can rearrange your (sub)topics any time, thus reflecting your evolving work on a broader research topic (without thereby breaking any links). Search for “MOCs” in this forum, you will find a bunch of nice ideas how to arrange your information - for example this thread. You can rearrange the idea to your own needs and working habits, but the general idea behind these discussions is exactly the question how to combine hierarchy with flexibility.

3. Luhmann’s naming conventions were especially necessary in a time where all those digital possibilities haven’t existed yet. But in the end his workflow was a kind of combination of having index cards (where he started a topic, put some “table of contents” and registered any new note within that index), source cards (where he put his bibliographical sources) and single, “atomic” notes. One possibility for him was to take an index card about a specific topic - and that index card told him all the information he had already collected about that broader topic and where to find the respective notes in his physical zettelkasten. Another possibility he often made use of: he just opened his zettelkasten, took any random note and explored its content and its linkings (backwards and forwards). His naming habits (combination of letters and numbers) always told him a) where to find that note and b) how it related to the other notes. As I said, we don’t need this anymore today. But there are many people who still like this kind of naming their zettelkasten notes, for various reasons. A short overview of his working system is for example described here (but there are many interesting articles about that).

4. The good thing about giving your note files just numeric titles (for example automatically created date-time-stamps) is that you don’t have to care about what the main point of your note is. Just create a note, let it be named automatically (in obsidian, for example, by the zettelkasten plugin) and start typing. There have already been a couple of discussions about the pros and cons of giving “real” names vs. numeric names here in the forum (or a combination of both) - at the moment, of course, real names should at least be part of your file titles as obsidian to date is not able yet to show the headings (instead of file titles) in its file list, which makes it also difficult to open a note with the quick switcher or to link to other note titles. Yet, I think this feature will probably be implemented in the future…

[Dor]

@StoltHD

If you don’t have a folder structure and a naming regime for your notes and files, it will just end up as a pile of junk on a HDD, FD or SSD.

Text search would work
Regex would work
Tags would work
Even links would work using search/regex.
Folders are a choice, naming structures are a choice, and neither is frictionless.

[alltagsverstand]

I don’t say that folders don’t make any sense at all - I am just saying that you are not that dependent any more on folder structures than you were with a phyisical environment or with just using file managers.

I use folders in my vault as well, separating for example between work-related notes, private organization stuff, zettelkasten notes etc. But, for example, within my zettelkasten, I don’t use any subfolders as this would rather restrict my productiviy instead of triggering it. But all of these workflows are very subjective of course - that’s why I started by saying that it all depends on what your actual purpose is.

And, as @Dor said, even if obsidian wouldn’t be available anymore somewhere in the future, with tags, internal links and so on you can just open your notes with a bunch of other markdown editors - and you can use many other tools as well in order to bring a new structure into your files.

[alltagsverstand]

@StoltHD

In a MD file, a tag is just another plain text word.

Which is actually great as exactly because of this you don’t need any apps - you can just type a very simple line into your terminal, which would for example allow you to search for all tags named for example #tag even in a million of files and moving them automatically to a separated folder - all of that within some seconds… Try to do the same by browsing through your local folders! This is actually the huge advantage of plain text files - you are not dependant on any apps at all…

[alltagsverstand]

Actually I don’t really get your point… What do markdown editors have to do with being online or offline?

[Dor]

@StoltHD

you need as you say a markdown enabled reader or editor

No, any program that can read text. Markdown is irrelevant for this.
I can do this offline and on mobiles.

@StoltHD

Tags will not work unless you have a piece of software that support them, in Windows there are only some file format that’s supported with tagging from within Explorer, and, if you move the files to another system, the tags can be gone.

No. They’re just a text string. But a curated or semi-curated text string which adds extra power to a whole text search.

@StoltHD

The tags and links are great feature, but to only depend of those to navigate your notes… well… I wouldn’t do that…

That’s the point. It’s a choice. Some people like folders. Some people don’t. Some people are very good at advanced regex type searches, others aren’t. Some files fit comfortably into one box, others don’t.

[ryanjamurphy]

@StoltHD

one of them included 18000 documents, that was saved without any system, copied and recopied, the copies was edited, it took the researchers and document writers more than 15 weeks to reconcile and merge all the changes, because they didn’t use neither a document system or version control, nor any form of a file and folder structure, nearly 8000 of those had edited copies on peoples local HDD’s. nearly 2000 documents was found on flash drives, no structure what so ever… and it cost them both a lot of money, but most of all time…

I have got to ask. What was the domain? Why were these files so important?

Related… I think three things are missing from this conversation: context, scale, and cost.

If you’re doing work that may have legal or historic implications (and I suppose anything could have either of those eventually—the world is a weird place), you should be taking scalable, sustainable stewardship into account.

Scalable means “Does this organizing approach still work if I have orders of magnitude more items than I currently have?”

Sustainable means “Will this still work in 20 years, with whatever technology we might have?”

Stewardship means “Will this work for others, if I have to get someone else to work with this?”

This is where context comes in. Many of my notes are just for me, so I’m not so worried about these questions.

And finally, this is where cost hits. Any organizing schema has two kinds of costs: input (storage) and output (retrieval). The more rigorous and complex a system is, the more likely it will be costly to file something away. However, it’s also likely easier—less costly—to retrieve it. For your average “note-taker,” balancing these two costs is going to be paramount.

[alltagsverstand]

I have the feeling we are talking about completely different things… Of course obsidian (or any kind of text editor) is not meant as a system that manages all your files - in the end it is just a note-taking program… And notes, in the end, just represent my thoughts on different topics - with the final aim (if you use the zettelkasten method) to link different thoughts together in a - sometimes - unexpected way.

[Dor]

@StoltHD

I have had to many assignment where I had to clean up and reconfigure storage, to see someone say a structured storage is not needed anymore…
… so don’t go around tell people that structured storage are not needed.

Actually, this is what happens when someone who thinks in folders encounters information that isn’t in folders. It doesn’t have to be like that.

I have some very large archives and I use others which are many many times larger than that. Some are in a highly complex system of folders and some are essentially random.

With undigitised paper documents there is no choice. Each document will be in a box on a shelf in a bookcase, and there will be only one way to find it. Even if there is a highly structured logic behind the original structure, it needn’t make much sense now and will often not be intuitive.

With digitised documents, I never utilise any folder system because search will be much faster. The folder system will still exist, because that will be the guide to the placement of the paper document, but I won’t use it.

With pure text files that is even more the case. And tags, depending on how they have been constructed, add to the ease of search.

If I discover an old device or memory stick with potentially useful files, I never attempt to merge any folder systems. I might remove duplicates, but that would be it. With this system I can find any file I want, I can check whether it exists or not in seconds (which would tend to be very slow in a pure folder system).

I have shifted computers, devices and operating systems quite often. I’ve found it is much faster to use new search programs and start from scratch rather than try to move an existing index.
With these the biggest time cost is the analysis of more complex file formats (docx, pdf etc etc) to create an index; plaintext is fast to process.

As I said, I am not saying this is how people should do it. Some people will find it much better to work with folders. But it’s not the only way.

I don’t think Google keeps the internet in a series of folders.

[quote=“StoltHD, post:10, topic:7619”]
if you need to reinstall your OS or move files and folders to another computer without the needed software, you shall be able to find what you are looking for just by browsing [/quote]
Well this might be true. If I should ever find myself with the files and a computer that only has a file explorer that can’t search.

But I think my planning will be done on the basis of having computers that do have a search ability.

[Nato]

It is also possible to have both, with “Link Shell Extension” …

• a loose note space, without structure,
• and a structured folders system with “physical links” and/or “symbolic links” etc, to the respective files.

Thus the files in disorder are moreover accessible through a system of folders.