How Do You Organize Your Data? 713
kpellegr asks: "After returning from a well deserved holiday, I was faced with an exploding inbox. While organizing and deleting my mail, I realised I was having trouble classifying each mail into one specific folder. I had the feeling I should be able to link to one email from several folders (e.g. product information should be linked to from the 'vendor' folder, as well as from a specific project folder where this product is used). The more I thought about this, the more I realised that trees (such as the Windows filesystems) are not really ideally suited for organizing data. On UNIX-like filesystems, symbolic links allow the creation of simple graphs for organising data, but I have the feeling data could be organized more efficiently. How does the Slashdot crowd organize their data? How do you manage files, email, contacts, meetings and all the relationships that might exist between them?"
Evolution Virtual Folders (Score:2, Informative)
Agreed... (Score:5, Informative)
Suggestion (Score:2, Informative)
Links to check out:
-Their site(scroll down to "PATHS" for what probably will interest you) http://usercreations.com/spring/SpringContent.htm
Wiki (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sure people here will come up with ideas like knowledge trees [runtime-collective.com] and weird topological concepts [upgrade-cepis.org], but gimme a wiki any day.
Opera (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Virtual Folders (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Evolution Virtual Folders (Score:2, Informative)
Q: What is the difference between a virtual folder (vFolder) and a regular folder?
A: A vFolder is a powerful new email management feature available only in Ximian Evolution. vFolders save email searches to dynamically create powerful, contextual views of your online messages. Regular folders are populated with physical copies of emails that are moved manually or automatically. vFolders represent the next level of email management, allowing messages to appear in multiple folders without requiring multiple copies.
More info here: http://www.ximian.com/products/evolution/features. html [ximian.com]
Re:Wiki (Score:5, Informative)
TWiki is a good bit of work to set up, but I like its features more than most of the others I've seen. It has good access control, page versioning, formatting features, and extensibility.
If my email was integrated, that would be great.
Opera M2 (Score:5, Informative)
Check out M2 (Score:3, Informative)
"If this is a sig, and sigs are for losers, then I am a loser..."
Symbolic links in Windows is possible ... (Score:2, Informative)
It's just undocumented.
See this nice app here [ractive.ch] which set itself as a shell extension. I use it extensively and it works wonder for organizing music, photos, etc.
Boswell (Score:1, Informative)
It works with imported text files (for my e-mail), pasted text (stuff I find on the Web) and lets you create text within it (I _am_ going to finish that novel someday). Everything you create can go in multiple categories and they can go in them _automatically_.
And everything is searchable by multiple criteria -- time, content, and how it is already categorized. There are no hierarchies or links. With the searches it does, you' don't need them.
Their site is at www.boswell.com.
Re:Virtual Folders (Score:3, Informative)
Try evolution's vfolders (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Archaeological Filing system (Score:4, Informative)
Why not just reverse sort?
alias recent='ls -lrt'
Finally, it has a name... (Score:5, Informative)
Ok, now to actually answer the question posed here (as opposed to what a lot of other people here are doing, which is either come up with something witty or else attempt to codify a sweeping new all-inclusive whiz-bang OS change).
Ahem.
I know the question is asking about emails, files, contacts, and meetings, but as I keep relatively few contacts permanently filed and don't much like meetings, I'll address what I do about files and emails.
Files: I start with a simple folder: "Files". In my case, "D:\Files". (I like folders Windows doesn't much know about, nor mess with.) Inside that, I have pretty much a heterogeneous hodgepodge of hierarchies of folders: "Projects", "Photos", "Temp" (big one, that), etc. Nothing earth-shattering.
Emails: I try to organize these into folders denoting conversational thread ("Buddies", "List Stuff", "Family", "Work", etc.), combined with where they are in my email-processing conveyor belt ("To Do" (I haven't replied yet), then "Transfer" (I've replied, but not archived), then "Done" (archived and ready for deletion)), for whichever conversational threads I want to save. Using the examples above would result in:
And that's pretty much it.
(Hey, you asked...)
Re:Virtual Folders (Score:5, Informative)
Folders in Lotus Notes (Score:5, Informative)
If you are deleting an email, that implies that you are done with the information. If you just want to reorganize it, then you (the user) should understand what it means to organize.
The problem is that users are trained on the MS vision that everything can only exist in one place and to put it in two places requires making a copy. This approach has problems:
1. Very wasteful of hard drive space. You need to have complete copies of a document in every folder/directory it belongs. Today hard drive space is cheap, but MS is trying to grow the data file sizes to keep up.
2. Each copy is not updated with the others. You usually forget which should be the master copy. And the users don't care about maintaining the master copy; they want to work on the one to which they have access. Making it read-only means there will be even more copies made so people can get their work done.
Unix/Linux users have symbolic links. They are exposed to them very early, and learn that a link to a file can be treated as the file, for everything except its organization. Updating the file updates it everywhere.
Lotus Notes allows all approaches:
1. You can make copies. Copy/Paste always does this.
2. You can make links. Dragging always does this.
3. You can put links to anything inside other documents. This allows you to send a memo with links to the documents that need your attention.
4. You have Views, which show all documents based on selection formulas.
5. It has great filtering capabilities. You can show all documents that contain the word "slashdot" that were created between 2 dates.
But is a first-time user going to expect it? Of course not, he thinks the folders work like everywhere else, and copy means make a copy, not just a link.
Your "first-time user" expects "the folders work like everywhere else"?
- A first-time user should not have a problem. They learn what happens without any expectations.
- A "first-time user" that has been using MS products for a while should know never to expect consistent results. Try dragging a file in MSWindows:
1. If it is an executable, it will create a Shortcut.
2. If it is to the same hard drive, it will move the file. (And remember that "My Documents" and "Desktop" are usually on the C Drive.)
3. If it is to a different hard drive, it will make a copy. (What happens if it is a mapped network share on the same computer?)
That is 3 different results from the same user action! So how do folders work everywhere else?
---
Anyway, I expect MS to die soon. Windows will wither without MS. The next generation of users will probably start with Linux and be better off.
Check out Zoe (Score:2, Informative)
It's worked well for me and my tens of thousands of email messages.
File by email alias (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Haystack from MIT (Score:3, Informative)
I've been trying to figure out a good solution to this question myself, and I think I'm just going to have to make one I like. It's hard to find something someone else has programmed that suits your own needs for such a personalized usage, in my opinion.
What I've planned out is something that would have a calendar, address book, to-do list, misc storage, etc. Problem is, I don't want to have to do all the categorizing myself. So I figured, so long as I enter appointments in a predictable way (e.g. LL1: Date LL2: Time LL3: Place LL4: Comment) I can make the computer work out what kind of information it is. Same with the other types. I can even add simple stuff like URL's I want to remember. Then, I can just enter in a generic text-area any information, and have the machine do the categorization and organizing. Have it recognize dates and give me a timeline for my day, week, month, etc. Have it recognize contacts and store them in my addressbook. Etc.
What I think could make this really nice, though, would be something you see a lot of in Wikis (and some neat ideas like infocalypse [wonko.com])--the ability to link elements together with some sort of simple syntax, e.g. [link]. Better yet, have the machine link it.
The point is that it isn't just the information, but the relationships it makes, that are important. If I have an appointment for a certain job, I might want a list of "relevant links" next to it, such as the contact information of the people involved, any notes I've made in relation to that job, and so forth. I'm not sure how to do this, exactly, by automation (keywords are limited but may work, making me do it by hand defeats the purpose; I'm far too lazy to do anything by hand) but I probably won't actually start coding this for a long time anyway, so I suppose I have time to think. Any suggestions?
Windows Longhorn (Score:2, Informative)
This is pretty clearly a better system. The only thing that concerns me is that every existing set of programming-language file system tools expects to be working with directory trees, even if they do support different delimiter characters, name length limits, multiple vs. single roots (drive letters vs. '/'), etc. I expect they will include some sort of mapping to a traditional hierarchy, though, as VB will have just as much trouble with the new system as Java will.
News story about it (news.com) [com.com]
Re: Yahoo mail (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Easy (Score:3, Informative)
It works great for me, although I must admit, I'm far more comfortable on the command line than the GUI -- my setup is not for the faint of heart or inexperienced.
Personal Brain 3.0 (Score:4, Informative)
I'd still like to get into wikis, though. =)
Opera (Score:2, Informative)
DocuSEEK. (Score:3, Informative)
--grendel drago
Mail sorting (Score:2, Informative)
I used a free app (the name eludes me) to export my PST folders to
Then I wrote a python script that could recognize the different plain-text formats of the various clients I have used (The Bat, Rebecca Mail, etc) and chew them all into one the same format (plaintext with FF separation), after which I wrote another script that put them all into a MySQL database with separate fields for headers, body and the most used fields like from, to and subject.
Then I set every email program I have to leave messages on the server, and instead I now have a script that takes all my email every 3 days and sticks it into my database.
Then I made a nice little interface for searching emails, and it is SO much nicer and faster than anything any email program has ever offered me in terms of searching, and I am free to switch email clients as much as I want to.
Re:Archaeological Filing system (Score:2, Informative)
I use nmh [nongnu.org] with exmh [beedub.com] as a GUI. It does all the above: sort by most recent, symbolic links to multiple directories, etc. The O'Reilly book is now freely (beer) available [uci.edu] on the Web.
Don't use folders; use Categories (Score:2, Informative)
Categories are a feature of MS Outlook; it probably exists in other clients as well (Evolution?), but my experience is with Outlook.
Outlook allows you to assign any number of categories to any object. An object can be an e-mail, task, contact, appointment, etc. Outlook comes with a list of "common sense" categories out of the box, but the user can make up categories as he/she sees fit.
If you keep all your messages in one folder and assign them to categories, you can use Outlook views to sort through the data however is most applicable at the time. One of the built-in views is "By Category". Items are grouped by category, then further sorted by whichever field you prefer within each category. If an item is in more than one category, it will be displayed multiple times in the list, inside the appropriate category grouping. It is better than folders, I assure you!
You can assign categories to objects multiple ways:
I find categories particularly useful for contacts and appointments, as they quite often fall into multiple categories. For example, a contact might be a family member, but also a member of my local LUG (Linux Users Group), and also works at a certain company where I have several business contacts. Folders simply won't do in this situation; I have no desire to maintain three seperate contact entires, but I want the contact to show in all three groups. But with categories, happiness ensues.
Why, Lotus Notes ofcourse... (Score:2, Informative)
I do not like its interface, its menu structure and generally the way it works. (see the interface hall of shame [libero.it] for details on that)
However, it has some excellent search features built in (fast & reliable) and my only favorite option: the "All documents" folder, where all records are piled onto one big pile for me to search in. Really handy. So I can make folders and organise, but if I want I can just pretend there's only this one big folder.
Re:Archaeological - ls -Flatrck / ls -Flatrock (Score:2, Informative)
F = show file type with final character
l = long directory format (detailed)
a = even the
t = sort by time
r = reverse the order
c = by change date
k = block size of 1k... not really useful, but helps me remember the alias to make on a new system.
On FreeBSD, before BSD died(*) I would use ls -Flatrock but the 'o' has a different meaning with the GNU ls (omit group column in long output) than the BSD ls (include the file flags in the long output).
(*) Before the -1 Flamebait, I mean 'Died on my system'. I decided to install RedHat instead though, because as everyone knows: BSD is dying.
Evolution has this, sort-of (Score:3, Informative)
Furthermore when you update the filters, your virtual folders are (of course, by means of the way that it is implemented) updated.
I used it for a while and it worked great. Until I started having more mail, then it started getting slow. Then it got really slow. I quit evolution entirely when it was unable to show any of the mails in my inbox, using virtual folders or not.
In short, the feature is in evolution, but if you have a lot of mail lying around (an inbox with 20-30k e-mails), it just doesn't work. Evolution has some nice features, they're just not implemented in a way so that they work on anything but toy mailboxes. Which is really a pity, since the ideas were great.
Now, I'm on bogofilter+procmail+kmail, and I'm fairly happy with that. No virtual folders, but I can read my mail again. Yippie!
A possible solution (Score:2, Informative)
Hi,
the problem you describe is really terrible - with the folder structure you always have to decide on the order of folders. What I want are not exactly folders but keywords, and then you can search by keyword.
Actually, there is a tool available at
http://www.mail-sleuth.com [mail-sleuth.com]which does this. You can assign keywords which then appear as folders. But if you give for example the keywords "Slashdot" and "interesting" you'll find the "Slashdot" folder as subfolder in the "interesting" folder and vice-versa. Also it comes with a nice graphical representation.
Unfortunately, it's currently only available as MS Outlook-plugin, but they plan to develop also a plugin for Mozilla (at least I was told so at the conference I saw the presentation of the tool). If you want other things, just bug them - the e-mail address is on the website.
Cheers,
JoZOE - Like Google for your personal email (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Archaeological Filing system (Score:3, Informative)
ls -lart
which has the added bonus of being mnemonic as well as including an obligatory BOFH reference :)
If and when it's available... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Personal Brain 3.0 (Score:3, Informative)
It's not much use as an email, calendar or todo tool, but as an all-around personal database, you can't beat it.
Re:Archaeological Filing system - corrected link (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Easy (Score:3, Informative)
ZOE (Score:2, Informative)
ZOE [evectors.it]. It does all this and more.