Focus Folders

Focus Folders
Photo by Paul Skorupskas / Unsplash

Folders can provide focus for a group of related notes on a certain topic because they are located together.

Temporary folders

Creating temporary folders within my inbox helps me focus while I work with these new notes. It's quite common that I refactor and link new notes into a cluster of related atomic notes that each focus on a single idea. This simplifies the chaos somewhat and calms my mind without being distracted by a long list of new notes in default alphabetical order.

Greenhouse incubation

While I'm just getting started with my digital garden, I may tend to keep these temporary Add folders around a bit longer, but in my main Ideaverse vault I clean out my inboxes every day. For now, treating my Add inbox like a greenhouse as an [[Idea Incubator]] allows me to focus on the workflows that make sense for my new digital garden.

Maps over folders

However, it's always better to use a map for this purpose because the notes could be located anywhere and you can provide additional context and structure for the links that can't be done with folders.

The main difference is that notes within a folder can ONLY be located there since a note file can't exist in multiple folders. On the other hand, with a map, any note can appear in many maps so there's much more flexibility.

Kinds of focus

Currently, I have several different kinds of focus folders:

  • App folders: Used while actively exploring a specific app; these are included under an Atlas/App folder rather than being nested under Atlas/Notes/App.
  • Topic folders: These are helpful when creating new notes on a topic of interest; it might be useful to have an Atlas/Topic folder to collect such topic note folders.
  • Ad hoc folders: Sometimes its useful to gather a group of notes together. temporarily; I could use an Atlas/Temp folder to collect these temporary folders.

I'm considering whether additional kinds of focus folders might be useful:

  • Effort folders: It might be helpful to gather notes for a specific effort together.
  • Project folders: Keeping notes and files related to a specific project might simplify client communication and/or archiving when completed.
  • Output folders: Grouping a cluster of related notes together for specific works.
  • Package folders: Packaging of related resources as zip downloads.

More folders

Also, I have folders in many other places in my PKM environment.

  • Arc browser folders: Group tabs with web links together in the Arc sidebar.
  • Shortcut folders: Groups of related shortcuts for key ACE and ARC topics.
  • OmniFocus folders: I use ACE folders to organize efforts, projects, lists, and perspectives (views).
  • DEVONthink folders: I have a similar ACE organization in DEVONthink databases, where they are called groups.
  • Finder folders: I also use the ACE framework in my macOS file system. This consistency with Obsidian structure helps with Hookmark file links.

Summary

Although this seems like I might be using folders too much, I think it's appropriate when they have a specific purpose as reflected by their adjectives.

It's interesting that while deconstructing and simplifying my existing folder structure, I discovered that there were actually specific use cases where using folders with a purpose made a lot of sense and I started creating them in context.