Ask HN: How do you organize information: by type or context?

[brslv]

Here's a simple example.

You read a book about human's brain and find something particularly interesting that you'd like to remember.

You open your notetaking app of choice and are presented with the following dilemma: to put the quote in a folder called "quotes" or in a folder called "humans-brain". What do you do?

I'm particularly interested in the topic of organizing information and would be grateful if you could share any resources on the topic "type vs context" or simply share your point of view and experience.

[AnimalMuppet]

I'd probably have a folder called "humans-brain", and within that a file called "quotes". I care more what the information is about, and less what the meta-data about the data is (what type of info it is). Why? Because I more often want to find information about a topic than I do to find information of a particular type.

[brslv]

This is exactly what I'd do as well. But let's think in a more broader terms. For example in my house we organize good by type. Fruits go in one place, meat in another, milk and milk products in third etc. But, isn't a context-oriented organization more reasonable? Food for breakfast goes in one place, food for dinner in another etc.?

[simonblack]

Always by type in a tree-structure of directories. By the time you've selected down finer and finer details you'll probably find you've only got a dozen or so files left to search carefully through for your information.

But, mind you, belt-n-braces. It never hurts to have a key-word index too.

[dvxvd]

For me this question is open for a few decades.. one of the possible solutions are - tags

But im expecting classification to be done by some personal AI system. Latter system must be able extract this data on demand.

[brslv]

Think of my question in a more generic terms. Here's another example in the context of software development. Do you have a place in your codebase for all of your controllers, another for all of the models etc? Or do you prefer to have users folder with controllers and models subfolders etc.?

[pier25]

The idea of folders rooted in the physical world is obsolete.

Use a system with tags so you don't have to chose one or the other.