I wanted to share an example of the power of this question.
I am pretty pleased with the ‘abstract’ categories I discovered for my admin area, which group seemingly non-related things in surprisingly natural ways, reducing my category count from ‘I really-need-a-few-more-than-ten’ to ‘four-is-really-enough’. I will share more about my categories in a separate post.
But there were a few things that seemed to need a category ‘unclassified correspondence’. Mail from organisations I have no existing relationship with, but that happened to actually be of potential use; for example a company offering disability insurance for self-employed.
But when I asked the question: ‘why am I saving this thing, what purpose does it serve?’ within twenty seconds I knew exactly which existing thing they related to. for this example: it goes in the Services category, as simply a note regarding disability insurance; in this case, I can create an ID for disability insurance and add this to the index.md file under the heading ‘Todo’ or something.
tada; a whole category I thought I needed goes up in thin air. the category error I was making was to think that, because I had no existing file for this correspondent, it needed to be flagged as important by getting its own category, like an inbox. When a good classification allows you to think about the things itself.
So I think this is a good illustration of how we need to (re)train ourselves to think in terms of good classification. I was doing really well with my categories, but fell into the habit of using a category as an inbox. I think this is what leads to the hard drives full of folders like project_x_final_final_version_export_share_LAST. Obviously that will happen when that’s the only tool you have.
The question ‘why am I saving this thing’ is an example of a cognitive tool which allows you to organise things before filing them. As has been said elsewhere, people used to be trained to classify and organise files!