A file management system
Five conclusions matched a design I'd built separately, and not one of the reasons overlapped. It also named three gaps in mine exactly.
A nine-minute video about organising files. Five of its conclusions matched rules I had built separately, and not one of the reasons overlapped.
The tension it works with — tidy and findable pull against each other
Filing has two forces working against each other.
| Keep it tidy | Keep it findable | |
|---|---|---|
| What you do | Split into fine folders | Pack information into the name |
| The cost | You forget where you put it | The folder looks a mess |
The video picks a position between them and sets two ceilings.
- Folder depth: five
- Ninety-nine items in one folder
The reasoning behind five is the interesting bit — “past five levels, we get lost.” Not a technical limit but a human one.
The sharpest part — how precisely to write a date
The best idea in the system.
When you put a date in a filename it is easy to pick between 2026, 2026-09 and 2026-09-17 on taste. The video treats that choice as where findability is decided.
Finer dates sort more precisely and group less easily. Coarser is the reverse. So it depends on which you will need to do more often.
Five conclusions matched mine, and none of the reasons did
The heart of this piece.
My own folder rules, built separately, agreed with the video on five points. And why each of us chose them was completely different.
| Their reason | Mine | |
|---|---|---|
| The kind of grounds | People — complexity exhausts them and they stop | Machines — a path tied to the classification breaks when the classification changes |
Different routes, same destination.
That is worth more than the conclusions matching. Same reason, same conclusion is hearing one thing twice. Different reasons converging means the conclusion is not tied to a condition — it holds for the human reason and the machine reason both.
And the video named three blanks in mine, precisely
Three things I took.
One — things that belong nowhere had nowhere to go.
I had a holding folder, but I had defined it as “things that can be regenerated.” A place for things it is safe to delete.
Which left things that matter but resist classification with nowhere to sit. The delete-safe folder is wrong, and the proper shelves reject them. So they piled up on my desktop.
Two — put a quota on the index.
Important-markers in my index kept growing. One line of the video hit it exactly:
If everything is starred, nothing is starred.
I had no mechanism capping the count of important markers.
Three — my depth ceiling had no basis.
Mine said three levels. Asked why three, I had no answer. I had just picked it.
The video recommends three inside a folder, five overall. And it gives a reason. So I changed mine. The number changing matters less than the number acquiring a reason.
One thing I corrected in myself
I had a rule saying never use tags. Too strong.
Stated properly: tags must not replace the primary structure, but for things whose names you cannot change, tags are the only instrument. Files handed to you, files a system generates — you cannot rename them. Tags are all that is left.
There is a half of my problem this video cannot cover
Stated plainly.
Its subject is 100% documents that people read. No code repositories, no caches, no pipeline outputs.
A large share of my working folders are directories machines write to. So this video covers less than half of my situation. A good source applied outside its range starts producing wrong answers.
And I do not leave rules to willpower
The video says set rules and keep to them. I rejected that part.
Rules kept by willpower are the first thing to fall when you are busy. And busy is exactly when the rules matter most.
So mine go to automatic checks. Break a rule and a machine complains before a person notices.
The detailed record starts here
The value of this piece is arriving at the same answers for entirely different reasons. A nine-minute video about organising files agreed with my own folder design on five conclusions. And the reasoning does not overlap at all — he arrives via human factors, “make it complicated and people run away”; I arrived via systems, “a path that depends on a taxonomy breaks.” The video also named three gaps in my design precisely. One of them was a number I had picked with nothing behind it.
What the video says
It starts from a balance — between “how tidy is it” and “how findable is it.” The ceilings are five levels deep and ninety-nine folders wide. The reasoning is simple: “past five, we get lost.”
It opens by openly mocking one numbering scheme. It puts an official “two digits, decimal point, two digits” rule on screen and says “memorise this not-at-all-complicated numbering system and… wait, where are you going?” Complicated systems don’t get used is this video’s consistent axis.
One folder is his own invention. “Temp sharing” — a place to isolate the parts you’ve carved out of confidential material to share. A legitimate temporary home for things that belong nowhere.
The first of five tips matters most.
Organise by where you’ll use it, not by where you found it.
The other four: learn your file manager’s search syntax, plant keywords in the description field for shared files you can’t rename, at most five stars (“if everything is starred, nothing is”), and when something is shared with you, choose one of copy, shortcut, or ignore — a shortcut lets you file it into your own system without moving the original.
The conclusion is modest — “there is no perfect file system. Over-optimising actually costs you productivity. Pick one and stick to it.”
What broke — same answers, different reasons
The important conflict is the number prefix. He uses them. I banned them. Both are right — the conditions differ.
He is on ID-based storage. Rename a folder and the links survive. I am on local absolute paths. The moment a number enters a path, the path becomes dependent on the taxonomy. The same technique is harmless on one side and fatal on the other. Folded into a rule: numbers are fine on ID-based storage and banned on path-based storage.
And he is paying for it too. His own screen shows the archive containing folders with duplicate numbers. The numbers have lost their meaning. His system’s failure is captured on his own screen.
I got two things wrong. Depth 3 was a number I picked on instinct, and his 5 has real usage behind it. But the levels were different — his 5 is document depth, my 3 is root-rule depth. Correction: root rules at 3, free below that, 5 as the overall recommended ceiling. And calling tags an anti-pattern was too broad a statement — for things you cannot rename, tags are the only tool available.
Held against my own setup — the half this video can’t cover
Everything this video addresses is a document a human reads. No code repositories, no caches, no lock files, no pipeline output. A large share of my working folders are directories machines use, so this video doesn’t cover half of it.
There is no “is this safe to delete” judgement. There is a backup folder but no concept of something being regenerable. Which is why the archive becomes a graveyard for “things I can’t bring myself to delete” — he says so himself. My design asks “can I rebuild this” first, which blocks that graveyard at the source.
There is no answer for time-series output either. Dates go only in filenames. When results accumulate automatically by the hundred or thousand, a naming convention alone collapses — you have to partition into folders.
And the only enforcement is human willpower. “Pick one and stick to it” is all there is. The result is printed on his screen as disorder. Without a script that checks the rules, rules decay with time.
Verdict
| What | Verdict |
|---|---|
| A temporary home for things that belong nowhere | adopt. My temp folder is defined to take only regenerable things, so anything unclassifiable had nowhere to go |
| Cap the index | adopt. “If everything is starred, nothing is” — a discipline device my design lacked |
| Correct the depth ceiling | adopt. Root rules at 3, 5 overall. My 3 had nothing behind it |
| Tags as anti-pattern | corrected. They must not replace primary structure, but for things you can’t rename they’re the only tool |
| Number prefixes | still rejected — conditionally. Fine on ID-based storage, banned on path-based |
| Enforcement by willpower | rejected. This goes to automated checks |
The lesson I paid for here: that the reasons differed mattered more than that the conclusions agreed. Five matched, and not one reason overlapped. Reach the same point down different roads and the odds that the point is right go up.
And ⚠ a technique that “works for them but not for me” usually has a hidden condition. The number prefix was exactly that. Stopping at “it works for him, not for me” would have produced no rule; asking why it splits produced one — the kind of storage. Find the condition and you get a rule; miss it and you’re left with a preference.