A filing scheme that still works in ten years
Build a small set of folders you can still use a decade from now.
Most filing schemes collapse because they have too many folders, not too few.
Search already finds words. What search cannot do is answer "where do I keep the things about the house." So folders should match the parts of your life, not the senders or the months. Five or six is plenty. Home, Money, Health, Family, Travel, and one called Keep for the rest.
The other half of the scheme is the archive. Anything you do not need to see again goes out of the inbox but stays in the mailbox. It is still searchable. It is just no longer in front of you. A message either belongs to one of your few folders, or it gets archived, or it gets deleted.
A scheme lasts ten years when a stranger could sort your mail with it. If you have to remember a private rule to use your own folders, it will not survive a new phone or a bad month.
Key points
- Five or six folders, named after parts of your life.
- If you cannot name them all from memory, there are too many.
- Everything else gets archived, not filed.
- Archived mail is still searchable, just out of sight.
- Never make a folder for a single sender.
What to remember
- Folders are for categories of life, not for senders.
- You search for the topic of your life, so file by the topic of your life.
- Archiving is not throwing away. It is putting something back on the shelf.
Try this
Open your mailbox today, write down the five folders you actually want, and move one message into each of them.
Practice: A filing scheme that still works in ten years. Your first lesson is free, with no account or card; the rest are part of a Lantern plan. Interactive lessons require JavaScript.