Comments on: Improve performance by getting files off your OS X desktop

By: PJ Doland

PJ Doland — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 15:18:28 +0000

We’ll actually be devoting several upcoming posts to file organization. In particular, we’ll be discussing the relative merits of hierarchical organization vs. flat organization in detail, so please visit again.

By: Betsbillabong

Betsbillabong — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 14:55:30 +0000

You know, Joel, I was thinking about this yesterday in fact – many people I know now put their emails into a single searchable folder.

The problem with this searchable, random-access approach is that it works great when you know exactly what you’re looking for (ie who the email was from, the copy of your receipt from Apple, etc) but it fails completely for browsing. I like being able to look at a project folder ordered by date modified – but I might not remember exactly which month a particular draft was written in, for example.

Iconic film/sound editor Walter Murch wrote an amazing book, In The Blink of an Eye, about editing, in which he devotes a large section of the book to the difference, and advantages/disadvantages, between analog and digital film editing, This question of file hierarchy vs search reminds me of that.

Oh, and now that I’ve written all that, I see that you’ve made exceptions for working project folders. And of course, when the project is over, you can just put the project folder away, named. Oops!

By: Joel

Joel — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 03:37:45 +0000

Why not use search and a single directory, rather than a “clearly named directory structure” to locate files. I’m thinking it takes more time putting files into folders than it does to put them all into a single folder. Plus it’s hard to remember where they go anyway.
I make exceptions for single folders for working projects.
What do you think?

By: Betsbillabong

Betsbillabong — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 12:31:49 +0000

Wow, that’s really interesting. I didn’t realize that. I’m doing a laptop performance tonight that is stressing the CPU, so I’ll be sure to put it all away!

By: Jerry Brito

Jerry Brito — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 16:48:04 +0000

Ethan Schoonover, of Kinkless GTD fame, has a series of posts and screencasts on his site that explain how to automate your desktop using Hazel to rid it of clutter. I've been using the system and it's working gangbusters.

By: WTL

WTL — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 16:20:43 +0000

I have heard this repeated over and over, but I’m unconvinced that it is actually true – I’ve at one time had over 100 icons (long story) on the desktop, and I didn’t actually see any performance issues on my 1.8 Ghz G5.

But, I could be wrong.