here's a tip that will instantly make you more productive: don't spend much time on trying to come up with the perfect file-name. now that we finally have fast desktop search, such as spotlight, there isn't much to naming files. if you don't want to read through this lengthy comment, here's the essence in a nutshell: use a system that will work with your lazyness, in spite of your lazyness, something that doesn't rely on you forcing yourself to play by tedous rules.

your main goals are that you want to find the one file you need quickly, and that you want to be able to handle groups of files efficiently. i.e. it's good if you can quickly find that one folder that holds the 20 files you need, but you still have a problem if there are 1000 other files in the same folder and the only way to select the 20 you need is to hand-pick them. thus, you need such devices as tagging and grouping. folder organization can help a lot with that, especially with grouping. but if the files are, say, photos, and you use, say, iPhoto to manage them, there's absolutely no need to handle tagging and grouping at the file system level. there's nothing wrong with a folder holding 5000 files that all have names like 'DSCN5867.JPG'. OTOH, if you're saving a web page with an interview with richard dawkins, and you know you'll want to use that file when you're writing a book about religion in five years (when you won't have the file on your computer any longer, but on some backup medium, so spotlight might not be able to see into it, but still know about its existence), it's a good idea to call the file religion-dawkins-interview-god-delusion-fundamentalism.html. you might just as well call the file salon-interview-richard-dawkins-atheism-evolution-war.html. now that's the part that doesn't matter much, that you don't want to spend much time thinking about.

thus my second tip is: don't even try to come up with a system that covers all eventualities. your OS just isn't there yet. use a proper versioning system for files that benefit from it, but don't bog it down by throwing your whole MP3 collection in there as well. make sure your backup system keeps useful data like a file's creation date or date of last edit intact. make sure MP3s carry the proper meta-data inside, photos the proper EXIF data, etc.

BUT, and this is my third and last tip regarding file naming: don't concoct a complicated system that requires you to come up with file names according to some strict rules, such as topic-title-location-category-subcategory-date-time.extension. because the day will come, probably rather sooner than later, when you get sloppy with it. the day will come when you only have so much time to migrate to a new system, and you won't be able to go through those folders called "unsorted", "unsorted2", "unsorted3" and "miscellaneous", which you created when you didn't have the time to name all those files properly just now.

personally, i have a folder structure for files that i created/edited myself, and in an ideal world i would back that up daily. another folder structure is for files that came from somewhere else, and i back that up monthly (approximately). the reasoning behind this division is this: if i lose an e-mail i wrote a week ago, it's gone. but if i lose NiftyToolX.app that i downloaded a week ago, i can download it again; all i need is my browser history with the download link, and the configuration file with my personal preferences, and those are files that i created/edited myself (not directly, but it's still data no one else has, that's the important point here), thus they are in my daily backup.

within these folder structures, i do what i call successive refinement by letting files trickle down the hierarchy. if i'm in a hurry and don't want to take the time, just now, to decide whether NiftyToolX.app has to go in applications/graphics/pixel, or applications/graphics/vector, or applications/tool/display, i can at least confidently throw it into the 'applications' folder, so at least it won't sit on my desktop and clutter that up. next time when i look at that applications folder and am not in a hurry, i can move it deeper into the structure. but of course a hierarchial system has its limits, it doesn't handle items that belong in multiple categories. this is just to make sure that when i'm looking for the driver for my graphics tablet, while i won't be sure whether it's on the "drivers" CD-R or the "OS" CD-R, i can at least rule out the "movies" and "games" media and don't have to search them as well.

now, if spotlight was only able to search media that aren't currently mounted. iPhoto, iTunes, etc. suffer the same illness, as does time machine. the idea that all my data should be mounted on my puny iBook is just plain stupid. i really want to index all of that ... suggestions, anyone?