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Student/Academic Filing Question
caseykoons | Apr 29 2006
Congratulations to you all, especially those of you who responded to my post in the "I'm new" forum. I took your advice and borrowed a copy of GTD from my local library, and I am beginning to try to implement in my life. I've asked a few questions surrounding GTD and the academic lifestyle on this board and I have another one. I'm curious about filing systems. I know that David Allen suggests an A-Z and warns that personal systems are dangerous. The vast majority of the things I save for "reference" are photocopies of journal articles and books related to my field, the History of Religions. I especially curious about the opinions of other graduate students in this matter. Should I have a separate file (by topic or by author) for my academic resources or should I through them in an A-Z general file with my owner's manuals, bank statements and newspaper clippings? Thanks for your help. 24 Comments
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 I figure: the point of...Submitted by Linda on May 5, 2006 - 11:11am.
I figure: the point of the "One filing system" GTD favors is because it's so easy to forget where you put things. (For instance-- the time I decided to seprate out all my "finantial" files (bank statements, credit card info, etc) into a seperate filing box. But I found that there were very fuzzy boundaries to what constituded "finantial" info, so it would indeed have caused problems later with recall: "what did I file this as?" However, any sub-set of files that is truely hard-edged will not suffer from having it's own file system, if appropriate. I keep academic papers in a seperate file system alphabetized by first author (I use Biblioscape as my index to the system, if I need to find something based on some other criteria). I'm not going to forget whether what I'm looking for was an academic paper or not, therefore I'll know what system to look in. Similarly, a writer is not going to forget if the thing they are looking for is something they wrote or not. A self-employed person looking for a client/prospective file is not going to forget that they are looking for a client/prospective. And so on. :) » POSTED IN:
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