I have underlined in the Nelson essay, on page 144, “Thus it may help integrate, for human understanding, bodies of material so diversely connected that they could not be untangled by the unaided mind.” and then I wrote next to that “cleanliness & ease.” I’ve written about it briefly before, but I have, within my Documents file a bit of a labyrinth of files. And I would say I do it for a clean look, and the ease of knowing which category to look in for a specific thing, instead of scrolling through a whole bunch of documents.
The first level is general: a creative writing file, an article writing file, the file I had for work for a former employer, a file titled GRAD PROGRAMS that has all my stuff from applying to grad school (and it seemed a good idea to keep personal statements, for future reference and ideas), a title for my Pitt work, a file for job stuff like resumes, a Microsoft User Data file, a misc file, a RDC Connections file, a Scanner Output file, a file for my undergrad work.
The Microsoft User Data, RDC Connections, and Scanner Output files are all made by my computer. I don’t mind them. Scanner Output has nothing in it, I’m not sure why because I’ve done substantial scanning but I don’t know if my scans would be input or output. While I don’t mind these automatic files when I looked online just now to find out what a RDC Connection is the first thing I came upon was an Apple forum titled “getting rid of the Evil Microsoft rdc connections folder”. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3242111 According to user excelcius while s/he does not want to get rid of the file completely in case s/he wants to use it, at present “what Im trying to accomplish is stopping Microsoft messing up my documents folder with its ugly named files which have no place in my filing system” so some people do apparently get annoyed at these files (although I think you can rename them whatever you want).
The misc, jobs, and former employer files have no further files within them. All others have at least one. Not surprisingly, my creative writing file branches out the most. The first level within the writing file has four files: “other”, “personals”, “poetry”, “prose”, and also an Excel spreadsheet for keeping track of submissions. The “other” and “personals” file then have only documents within them, “other” less than 10, “personals” less than 15, poetry has one other file, “Intro to Poetry” which I sort of remember taking from my undergrad file (titled “school”) and putting in there. “poetry” has fifty documents. Then “prose” has four files: “Finished” “In Progress” “[my undergrad school]” “Unfinished (Open-ended)” and two documents: “Manuscript front pages” “The Manuscript” which I could have put in the Pitt work file but as all the documents for the manuscript are in this file it is much cleaner to have it here. So these four files are very key to helping me stay organized with my writing. Additionally, it is so satisfying to move something from “In Progress” to “Finished.” Within each of the four files there are some additional files but mostly documents. Those additional files are for certain stories that had a lot of drastically different drafts, although I do think it is very satisfying to see a large amount of documents–my growing output!–so I don’t think I’ll do any more of those story files (as I was recently considering) and instead just keep them together via having the same initial part of of the document title being the same (with add-ons such as numbering, (short), EDIT, rewrite, new, Final, et cetera).
