43 Folders

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43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

One folder to rule them all

I've long dreamed of dumping the contents of my Byzantine Documents sub-folders into one, giant, unorganized pile, relying on Spotlight and ad hoc smart folders to find whatever I need. I've managed to do this with my email to great success, but I've held off on the Documents folder because I'm afraid it would require too much work renaming files, setting metadata, etc, defeating the whole purpose.

Has anyone done this? Did you come up with a nifty naming convention, or do you just toss whatever you have in the junk drawer, renaming only if there is a conflict?

wood.tang's picture

Mission Accomplished

I was able to pull this off without much difficulty. I made an Automator script to rename files in batches, so I just prepended a few tags that made sense to each group of files so I could sort them together if I need to. Then I made a couple smart folders to pull up related files for the active projects I have going on right now.

I was pretty pleased, we'll see how it goes. I'm putting a lot of faith in Spotlight and my rudimentary Quicksilver skills. I was actually depressed by how many files I have sitting around that I don't even need anymore :(

 
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