Ad Hoc Folders

While reading a 2017 article from the Substack archives for Kent Beck's newsletter Software Design: Tidy First? about Ad Hoc Infrastructure, he described ad hoc as a positive adverb or adjective that describes something with a purpose that is necessary or needed.

Idea Development vs Software

This reminded me how software architecture and development is somewhat like idea emergence and development in a PKM system. He mentions that infrastructure represents a bundle of related functionality that achieves economies of scale to support many applications.

Structure

I always remember how Nick Milo strongly emphasizes that structure must be earned during LYT Workshops as we establish, develop, and evolve our personal PKM systems. This is especially true with excessive upfront design with folder hierarchies before we even know how they will be used.

Kent also points out that it never works out when you build the infrastructure first, and then build the apps on top of it. Because it constantly grows and adapts over time, it always needs more but it's never enough. So it makes sense to include some sooner, some later, in the infrastructure.

Workflow

Nick again stresses how our ideas emerge and adapt with both architect and gardener thinking styles as we add ideas, think and write, relate to existing ideas, collect and cluster related notes in maps, and connect related maps, as we do actions for my efforts that produce outputs to share.

Kent illustrates how infrastructure can be derived from experience. When: apps have some functions that need refinement, which could be extracted and refactored in infrastructure and shared with other apps.

In our PKM system, this is similar to refactoring notes by extracting sections into separate atomic note on a single idea to enhance reuse and linking.

Folders vs Maps

Kent asks how much: Just enough to let the app return to doing its job by reusing those functions in the infrastructure. Using regret as the primary motivation, "I wish we had built this a different way...", leads to building a small part of the application in a better way that can also be useful for other apps after a bit of tweaking.

I think the same idea applies to your PKM system. Folders can be useful when they are created with a purpose when they are necessary and needed. However, it's important to remember that note links, maps, views, and tags should be the primary way to provide structure, navigation, and connection to your Ideaverse web of linked notes.