Go Chronological

For many years I tried to come up with a clever system to organize my digital life.

I explored systems with folder structures, categories, labels, and nomenclature. Now, I’m convinced that the simplest and most effective approach is also the least ambitious one. Go chronological.

Forget about building complex structures that should work now and in ten years. Just store everything by year. Inside each year, create a handful of buckets using whatever grouping makes sense at the time. Taxes, pictures, projects, information, things that matter at the moment. Usually you end up with five to twenty buckets.

Life changes, and this approach deals with that naturally. You do not need a future proof system. Each year stands on its own and can use its own categories. Time provides the only stable axis.

At first, retrieval sounds inefficient. In practice it works surprisingly well. Most of the time you know the year. Once you have that, finding the right bucket is either straightforward or a matter of a few clicks. Within one year, misclassification isn’t an issue. Even if you need to check a couple of nearby years and the buckets look slightly different, it is still no big deal. The approach trades classification purity with simplicity.

Searching across many years can be less convenient, but this happens rarely. And when it does, full text search exists.

Archiving is trivial. A year is done, you close it, and you move on.

Truly long lasting projects can live outside of this structure, but they should be the exception. Recurring administrative topics do not qualify.

There is also something quietly profound in all of this. Even in a long career, you will likely end up with sixty to eighty yearly folders. That is a small enough number to manage without much effort. Your life is actually short.

With 2026 around the corner, it is time to create a new folder and start bucketing again.