On 5/6/08 at 5:26 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
(The reason David Allen recommends a simple A-to-Z filing system as part of the GTD method, it seems to me, is less about ease of retrieval and more about ease of filing.
For me, this is where Yojimbo excels. With the current model, I don't need to give any thought to the filling system. Simply tag the item with something simple and let Yojimbo stick the item in the Library.
If you're in the middle of a productively heated bout of planning and you have to give every item even twenty or thirty seconds of thought and preparation before you can file it, you'll start putting things in a "To be filed" pile, so as not to break your flow of thought, instead of filing each item immediately. The point isn't to put thought into your filing system so that you can find things again easily; the point is to make the filing effortless so you'll do it for each item right away the very moment you generate it,
For me, this is exactly the issue with nested folders. I have to think about where an item should go which takes more thought than simply adding a one or two word tag to the item.
and if that means that when you're retrieving it you have to look in a couple of wrong places first because you can't remember whether you filed something under "Banana cream pie" or "Desserts" or "Recipes", big deal, it's nowhere near as big a drain on your system as it is to let a "To be filed" stack pile up.
This is debatable. There is a time cost with either method, the time I spend looking for an item that I just don't recall where I put it versus the time going though a group of items to be filed and filing them. I think which costs more time for a given individual will depend on the individual.
The fact is, whether you use tags liberally or not, the fear that you're going to lose a file forever is 99% illusion. The only way you're really likely to lose a file forever is if there's a software glitch or a hardware failure that destroys the file; if you stay backed up, the worst that's likely to happen is that it may take you three or four tries to find your file instead of one.)
Depending on the size of your hard drive, the number of items you store etc, this could easily be more than three or four tries. Given a sufficiently large drive with a sufficient number of files, a misplaced item could be effectively lost.
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