I'm another mostly happy Yojimbo user who would be even happier with
nested folders. Well, that and being able to sync my notes to my
iPhone -- hopefully that will come soon enough.
I admit that I have very little experience using tags. I have made a
few forays with one program or another, but eventually I always seem
to find that I hardly ever end up using the tags that I've made. So
maybe I'm just missing something. But I also know that in over five
years of using various note-organization programs very heavily, I have
wanted to keep a note within two different categories exactly once. So
I'm also not feeling much motivation to break out of the hierarchical
model for organizing my notes.
Someone recently invited us to describe a problem that needed to be
solved rather than the solution we wanted somebody to design. So
here's mine.
I too use the GTD method, tailored to my particular needs. And I also
take and make lots and lots of notes when I'm working on a project. In
a meeting or when I'm planning, I often have six or seven or eight
notes open at once and switch back and forth among them -- this is the
sort of thing that I find Yojimbo terrific for. The ease of doing
that, the .Mac syncking, and the lack of SOHO Notes's bugginess (I
really want to love that software, but it has eaten my homework more
than once and I feel awkward trusting it with anything really
important now) are the reasons I'm using Yojimbo instead of one of the
several other note-organizing programs I own (many of which are
otherwise perfectly fine).
I have:
-- one folder for all my GTD lists -- active projects, projects I'm
committed to but which are on hold, possible projects (what Allen
calls the "someday/maybe" list), and my to-do or "next action" lists
-- a general "inbox" folder for dropping quick notes to myself into,
that I will process later
-- several more specific inbox-like folders for things like links to
webpages to look at, stuff I need to read, shopping lists: some of the
commoner destinations for new notes to myself, basically, to save
myself one step in the processing process
-- one folder for each active project, plus one folder for "small
projects" which are projects that don't need more than one note page
each
-- a "general reference" folder, which probably contains more than
half my total notes; it's the equivalent of my file cabinet and I keep
it simple, just an A to Z list (of course I try to title things in way
that makes sense to me, but I can generally find what I'm looking for
by keyword searching)
-- a few more specific reference folders for categories that I refer
to often enough that it's useful to have them up on top
It's important and useful to me to be able to bring up all my notes
for an active project quickly, so putting each one in a folder seems
handiest to me. I could, I suppose, use the project name as a tag on
each of my project notes, but then I'd have to search on the name of
the tag instead of opening the folder, and that seems like a little
more trouble to me. Plus I might slowed down by a mindburp causing me
to forget the exact name of the tag I'm searching for. Plus the worry
about the possibility of inadvertently using different tags on notes
from the same project ("July: Workshops" on one note and "Workshops:
July" on another). And, you know, it's just handy to have that list of
project folders there to run my eye down.
The problem that nested folders would solve for me is that I want to
keep my notes for completed projects handy, too, because I do refer to
them now and then. A lot of the projects are annual or quarterly or
otherwise regular things, and either I'm doing them again so I will
want to review all my notes on what I did the last time or times, or
somebody else is doing them and I want to share my old notes with him
or her. But I don't want these old project notes to get in the way of
my active projects, either; I just want them available.
What I'm currently doing is prefixing the name of each completed
project folder with an omega (control-Z), which is the symbol I use in
my file naming for something completed or that for whatever reason I
want to send to the bottom of the list where it's out of the way. The
result, of course, is that I now have a very long list of folders, the
bottom three-quarters or so of which are completed projects that I'm
not likely to look at very often. It would be nice to be able to drag
them all into a superfolder called "Completed projects".
I have tried exporting old project notes as text files, storing them
in subfolders in my Documents folder, and deleting them from Yojimbo.
But that's an unsatisfying solution -- I just have to reimport them if
I find I want to have them handy on a similar project later. And the
whole point of this sort of software is to be able to file things away
where you can get at them again and browse through them again very
quickly, right? So it seems silly and unsatisfying to me not to be
keeping all my old notes in Yojimbo too.
I have tried adding tags (using the year, month, and project name) to
old project notes, and then organize and search for them that way, but
it seems like more trouble to add all those tags and then search on
the tag than it is to just keep one project's notes together in a
folder and then open that folder. And having all my old project notes
in a jumble in one folder seems awkward. I could prefix all my note
titles with the name of the project so that they'd sort within the
folder, but again that seems like way more work than being able to use
nested folders would be.
Heck, I don't even need nested folders, plural. Just one folder I
could put the subfolders for completed projects into. Just one!
Is there an easier way of using tags that would duplicate the effect
of having all my notes for an old project together in a folder where I
could find them again? At this point my list of folders has gotten so
long that I'm thinking about going back to the plan of tagging them
with the name of the project, but as I said, that seems like a lot of
repetitive typing in order to avoid putting one folder in another, so
maybe there's an easier way I'm not seeing.
Another idea I'm messing around with is adding the name of the project
as a tag to each note and then replacing all my folders with tag
collections. Then I could delete the tag collection when the project
is complete but still retrieve the set of notes by recreating the tag
collection. But again, seems like a lot of typing of tags to
accomplish exactly the same result that would be, it seems to me, more
simply accomplished by putting all the inactive folders into one super-
folder, and that would also let me just open up the folder and run my
eyes down a list of all my completed projects for which I have notes.
Or is there a way of doing this with tags that I don't know about?
If there's some technical reason why nested folders would interfere
with, I don't know, .Mac syncking or something, then I can accept
that. But it it's just a design choice, well, it's your software and
you get to do what you like with it, but I'm not sure I see the point.
It's not like hierarchical organization is unintuitive nor necessarily
any more complicated than tags. What I'm talking about seems simpler
to me than a system where every note gets a dozen tags. But maybe I
just haven't wrapped my mind around tags enough yet and someone can
give me a suggestion toward an elegant, intuitive, and hopefully not
too typing-heavy method of keeping my sets of notes for completed
projects organized and handy.
I like Yojimbo a lot, but I have to say that if an equally good
program comes along that also offers both .Mac syncking AND nested
folders, I'm gonna be tempted.
Scott Marley
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