Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [82]
Suppose, instead, that your files have names like “AT&T bill 2006-08-12.pdf.” Now a glance at the file name will tell you the right one. When you are downloading your bill once a month, it only takes a couple of seconds to give the file name. Or, if you are unwilling even to type a name once a month, suppose you created a folder each year like so: “2008/bills/phone/AT&T”—and then just selected that folder to save your bill in each month. Then, at least, you would know you are only looking at actual bills from AT&T of that year.
You have three ways to add information to help organize your e-memory: putting your files in a good folder structure, creating a useful file name, and adding attributes to the file. All this takes work, and there will be a bigger payoff for some items than others—so you might as well be selective about what you organize. Still, for many items you will be very glad you did a little work to keep things organized so that you can find them again. Our friend Professor William Jones, of the University of Washington, calls this activity “keeping found things found.”
Your computer file-and-folder system is a sort of electronic file cabinet. Using it is no harder than figuring out what hanging folders go in your steel file cabinet and what manila files go in each hanging folder.
You may want to organize folders the way Apple or Windows suggests, which is by the type of information. They create folders like My Books, My Music, My Notes, My Pictures, My Videos, and so on. Or, you may want to create a hierarchy organized around aspects of your life, with folders like My Health, My School, My Work, and My Children. Either will serve; it’s up to you. I like to organize first by the type of information, and then use an aspect of my life as a subcategory. So, I end up with the folder “My Pictures/ My Children/Brigham” for pictures of my son and his family.
Having as much information as I do stored on my computer, combined with being in my seventies, affords me with a new view, what I call “life lines.” Looking back at my own life, I can see distinct chapters or well-defined segments of time: my childhood, the different schools I attended, organizations I worked for, activities, projects I carried out within each of the lives, vacations, my family, and so on. What’s nice about this is that I ended up with everything about a particular life line in one place—a folder with files of pictures, correspondence, notes, and anything else related to that period.
In the Annotated References and Resources, I’ve included my file-and-folder hierarchy as an example of a design of this size. It’s just an example, not a recommendation. Once you get your own collection going, different organizational ideas will emerge. There is no perfect structure! So, just get started and do your best.
For file names, I recommend cramming in as much information as you can. Files get moved around, so it is risky to rely on the name of the folder they are in. The more description, the better. I name my photos with the following information: What/Who; Event; Location; Date—in essence who, what, where, when. Say I’m looking at a photograph of myself and my granddaughter, Kolbe, at her eighth-grade prom. The photo would have the following name:
Bell, Gordon, and Schultz, Kolbe; Eighth-Grade Prom; Hillsborough, New Jersey; 2008-11-15
The last number is the date, November 15, 2008. I used the format year-month-day, e.g., 2008-11-15, because that makes an alphabetic sort the same