The Ultimate Guide to File Organization: 5 Systems You Must Know

Thanks!

Great video. Thanks!

Thank you for making the video!

I'm blown away - your method of presenting data may not be right for everyone, but for me, this was one of the best videos introducing productivity systems and file organization methods that I have watched. I have subscribed and I truly look forward to watching more of your content. Great job.

An excellent, clear presentation of the several methods of organizing knowledge. Congratulations!

Hi, what program do you use for create those visuals ??

I like this video. First time here and will explore more.

Topic: File Organization Systems 📂
🤔 What inspired you to explore different file organization systems?
🧩 Can you briefly explain the Pera system and its key principles?
📊 How does the Johnny Decimal System help maintain a clear and logical file structure?
🗃 Tell us more about the Access system. How does it balance knowledge management and action?
📁 What are the main advantages of using a flat file structure in organizing digital files?
📝 How does Zettelcasten encourage knowledge management and exploration through notes?
🤷‍♂ Which file organization system resonates with you the most, and why?
⚙ How do these systems accommodate various knowledge management tools like Obsidian, Roam, or others?
🗄 Can you share any real-world examples of how these systems have improved your personal or professional file management?
📆 What are your future plans or adaptations for your own file organization system?
These questions should help you delve deeper into the discussion about file organization systems and their practical applications.

Hi, your work is definitely remarkable. Thank you so much for sharing this illustrated summary of this book. I'm working on my PKM, and it has been really hard for me to choose the right organization method, but I already found your channel, and your videos have blown my mind! Thank you. I hope to join a cohort soon. Best regards from Ecuador.

1

You do a great job of explaining things clearly and concisely. The visual aids are very well done.

Thanks for the thought provoking video. I’ve been using PARA but was curious about the others. After watching, I feel more certain that it’s right for me. Something I’d point out in case it’s not obvious- while these systems achieve similar outcomes in different ways, folders are unique because they are the most relevant for using external tools-e.g, bulk renaming, editing metadata, or looking at version control history (if you are that detailed) can all be made more convenient by working with a folder structure.

My intention is not to undermine these attempts All of these approaches seem like attempts to square a circle.

Ultimately it just seems to be that fundamentally a 1d-hierarchical folder structure is insufficient for this purpose.
And so no matter what structure you choose, it will fall short under a particular scenario.

My current organization system is like a 7 or so in my mind. Mostly feel good about it because compared to your average information worker, more thought has gone into my files and notes, and the ability to find what I need in any given moment is pretty decent, though fairly dependent on my own memory and history with it all. The core issues I have are that my notes a decentralized across many mediums, making a lot of my work invisible at times to myself and unsearchable unfortunately. Beyond that, the question of whether I take too many notes, and how those notes functionally persist across time feel somewhat unaddressed for me as well.

Though I have just been learning about PARA today, and I feel like my current schemes can pretty easily be reorganized into that scheme. PARA would essentially wrap my already extant structure, and further, would offer insight into prioritization, sort of like Trello does for me now.

Thank you man, amazing content!!! I think the only reason you don't have millions of views is your English♥️

I have millions of files that I used throughout my life but a lot of them I never touch anymore. Do you recomend dumping what I have with the organization I currently have on an harddrive and start fresh with the files I really need and go from there and if needed go get the old files on the hdd, or should I organize them all wich will take probably weeks?

Nick’s ACCESS (or E-ACCESS) was the only methodology that made sense to me. Without it, I’d be completely lost. All the other systems have terrible flaws and inherent inflexibility baked in. I started with ACCESS when I had less than 50 notes (which is not recommended) but now because of it, my note-making cadence is supercharged and my knowledge graph is growing bigger and bigger by the day. Feels like I’ve been searching for something like this all my life… finally I have a way to make sense of the world, and myself!

Accent? sounds half-american half...austrian?

I guess my structure is somewhere between GTD and Johnny Decimal. I like to keep my folder structure only a few folders deep at the most, but I'm not a fan of using numbers to sort. It's kind of arbitrary to assign a number to things, and alphabetical sorting already sorts things arbitrarily, so why add another layer of arbitrary? (I do understand some reasons to but that's my thinking for my system)

I do like creating a identifier for projects, similar to Johnny Decimal but with a word or two in camelCase to reference and connect them to a project using tags or yaml across my different apps

Thank you for this exploration. I am trying to organize my Obsidian now and it's very precious to me. Thank you for taking time and research and telling about it!

I don't know how I'd rate my current system (I know where most things are, but they're hard to retrieve, and when I do I rediscover things that could have been useful if I'd remembered I had them) but I know it needs a complete rework!

I got interested in obsidian (and related explanatory videos) a few months ago, and discovered the JD-system, which combined in a similar way than you do (picking from each idea) feels like what would most fit the way my brain works.

Thank you for gathering all this information in one place, the way you explain the different systems helps visualising which parts of each concept are most relevant to the file sorting someone is trying to (re)organise, I'll be using this video as a reference while building my (upcoming) folder system!

Raycast. Done & Done.

The best way is not to collect or obsess about the data in the first place.
Archival information can be collected withoit any organization if you have quick way of searching inside these files.
As for imidiate knowledge it should either be in your brain already or be researched when needed for task at hand.

Hi Zsolt, I stumbled upon your video and fell in love for your topics and your (visual) style, so I will go through many of you videos to grab the most I can, be patient! 😉

Currently I would rate my organization system as a 4 maybe a 5... it doesn't follow any actual standard.. it is something I created in the years... I dont have a lot of files.. around 10tb total

My system is a 10. Make an alphabet of folders and then put systems on it. You can also do multiple alphabets. You will find your stuff in a sec

Very thorough presentation. Definitely gave a of food for thought in considering the best filing system for me

I rate myself 1/10

This is amazing! Could you please share which tool you used to create these visualization?

Hi Zsolt, is there any way to show at a glance the notes (Markdown) into an excalidraw mindmap?

I'm creating a Mindmap for a large topic, and making small notes to explain every detail of the topic. But the option "Excalidraw: Insert markdwon file from vault" will insert all the information/text into Excalidraw, which makes my Mind Map difficult.

I just want to have a glimpse of the small-notes(atomic-note) when I look at the mind map.

Please share your thoughts on this Zsolts.

Thank you for your time and effort to make this wonderful thing happen.

Zsolt - Excellent job presenting the 5 organizational methods.

However, I would have to believe that beginners, novices, and probably a lot of intermediate users of note taking systems would find those methods overly complicated, difficult to understand, and dependent on unclear concepts such as areas, categories, indexes, etc.

I believe that all people relate to objects/topics (like Art, Entertainment, Equipment / Parts, Family, Food, Investing, Medical, Politics, etc.). I always recommend to users of note taking systems that they initially build their system around folders, each of which is an object / topic.

After creating perhaps 300 notes, then people can start adding “meta” data (commonly called “tags”) to their notes. Here are some examples of types of tags:
Type of Note (Article, instructions, invoice, map, receipt, etc.)
Status (Planned, Active, Completed, etc.)
Locations (San Diego, Home, Farm, Ohio, etc.)
Sources (Email, boss, teacher, Internet, etc.)
Retentions (DeleteAfter2023Q2, DeleteAfter2023Q3, DeleteAfter2023312023, etc.)

I hope you feel these thoughts are useful.

I finally landed on a different system. A series of folders A thru Z. Everything is one or two steps away from the root. >T\Taxes\2022 or >M\Medical. I also have two other folders at the top level: _Pictures and _Monthly. For the monthly folder I have a folder for each year and then each month. I put all my receipts and bills and other random stuff.

great video, but none of these methods seem logical and easy to use, yet to find a better one

Excellent 👍. Thank you.

Zsolt, thanks for these videos! Been watching you for a while now. Your series of videos on PKM helped me understand the uses and limitations of the so-called "toolbox". Really appreciate the insights, structured analysis, and concrete examples in each video.

Thank you, Zsolt! Very useful content!

How did you made this presentation? Is there a Feature in your awesome excalidraw plugin I didnt know about?

astonishing knowledge and reflections.
i'm very grateful for you to be so keen on sharing / teaching what i would not have the time to optimise myself, yet still want to make use of in depth.
thanks once more

I find the idea behind obsidian plugin "Binary File Manager" quite interesting in terms of attachment management. I'm not sure if it's still actively maintained, but it seems the underlying idea can be combined with excalidraw to create more powerful tools for image management in the Vault.
here's the link to the plugin if anyone is interested.

Dude, your content is AWESOME ! 😍😍

When you were giving your presentation, I noticed something very interesting: an element would appear in your slide show that wasn’t part of the big picture, such as the rectangle with “ACCESS” in it that appeared at 3 minutes and 40 seconds, or the hierarchy chart that appeared at 12 minutes and 39 seconds. Because these elements appeared and disappeared in a controlled way as the video progressed, I’m curious to know if this control was a feature of "slide show", and if so, how was it achieved?

Great Video ! Thank you so much for helping everyone learn more about the process of File Management and finding our data!

I'm not sure if the introduction is sarcasm or genuine, but great video.

Very Helpful!

This is how i manage my files. I created a note with whatever topics with Dailynote as quick note. After getting more informations about that topic and i gonna review and reorganize my notes in my flat zettelkasten (my attachments stored in flat system also). I tend to use 4 til 5 Tags for my final note so and can search it quick. My final note is act as a moc which link to specific notes. I am quite happy with this system.

Thank you! It's very important to organizer.
I use some similar to a mix between PARA and ACESS.
Your videos are inspiring me to review PKM estrategies.

Thanks a lot, you give a lot of value and help me improve my vault. 🙏