NotesNudge the notes you never go back to

Why I Stopped Organising

I rebuilt my note system four times. Folders by subject, then by project, then a tag taxonomy, then links between everything. Each rebuild took a weekend and felt like progress.

None of them changed anything, and it took the fourth to see why.

A related workplace concept is how employees can tell if they are being monitored, which offers a useful contrast with the personal knowledge-work problem discussed here.

I was never lost. I was never looking.

What organising was actually doing

It produced a visible artefact. After a weekend the system existed, tidy and legible, and it looked like work because it was work.

It felt like solving the problem. The complaint was that my notes were not useful. Organisation is the obvious response, it is satisfying, and it is the fluent half of a pair whose other half does the work.

For an independent external reference related to this topic, see Craft.

And it deferred the actual question, which was not where things were but why I never went to get them.

That question has an uncomfortable answer — nothing in my week occasioned a return, and building a trigger requires ongoing effort rather than a weekend of pleasant sorting. So I sorted instead. Four times.

What I noticed the fourth time

I had a well-linked, consistently tagged, sensibly foldered archive of about four thousand notes. In the three months after finishing it I opened, deliberately, perhaps six.

Not because they were hard to find. Because the retrieval problem was never a findability problem — I could not query for things I had forgotten I had, and no amount of structure changes that.

The structure would have helped if I had been going to the archive with questions and failing to find answers. I was not going at all.

What I do now

Almost no structure. One flat collection, dated. A single tag for a small marked set. Search for everything else.

Effort moved to the two ends. A why-sentence and a claim-title at capture, which is thirty seconds and does more than any folder ever did. And ten minutes a week of review on the marked set, which is the part that was missing for years.

Deletion during review. Three or four notes a session, which is more archive maintenance than four weekends of reorganising achieved.

The whole system fits in a paragraph. The four that preceded it needed diagrams.

What I am not claiming

That structure is useless. For reference material with a real lookup pattern, folders help. For a body of work you write from, links record reasoning that would otherwise be lost. For files mixed with notes, actionability sorting genuinely reduces friction.

That my ratio is right for everyone. I write to think and reread very little. Someone whose notes are working material has a different problem and needs a different answer.

And that this was insight rather than exhaustion. I stopped rebuilding partly because I ran out of enthusiasm for rebuilding, and only afterwards worked out why the rebuilds had not helped. The order matters, and pretending it was analysis would be flattering myself.

The test I would offer

Before your next reorganisation, ask: in the last three months, how many times did I go looking for a note and fail to find it?

If the answer is several, structure is your problem and reorganising will help.

If the answer is none or one, you do not have a findability problem, and the weekend will feel excellent and change nothing. I spent four of them establishing this.

The short version