I used to organize my Dropbox (service for hosting and backup of your personal files) a certain way. Until recently.
I had it organized by type of document. It was very easy to keep order like this. I just looked at the type of file, the file extension, and placed it in a folder accordingly. Text files went into a folder ‘TEXT’ with subfolders like ‘DOC’ or ‘DOCX’ for Word, ‘PPT’ for my powerpoint presentation files, ‘TXT’ for my text files with all kind of notes, and so on. For images I had a folder ‘IMAGE’ with subfolders of ‘JPG’, ‘PNG’ and.. well you get the idea. So neatly ordered and so easy to keep this system in place. I loved the order and simplicity of it! Whenever I came across a new file, it didn’t cost me much effort to put it in place.
But it had it’s downside. Projects started to fragment. While I was following a course, I had some material I wanted to save for later review. Pieces of video went into an entirely different folder than the text files. And even text files that were related got divided by the use of sub folders. I was wondering if ever again I was going to go back to review this course, was I going to find the fragmented pieces, or even remember they were there at all?
I came with a new way of ordering. To order by subject instead of file type. A main folder like ‘PERSONAL’ going with sub folders like ‘PLANNING’, ‘TECH’, ‘TRAVEL’, etc. Probably makes a lot more sense, you’ll think. But for me it was a real epiphany, because what started happening is that I found back files I hadn’t looked at for ages and that had great content. Old treasures, waiting to be found.
Deeper lesson learned
By sticking so well with my extensive structure, I had separated parts from each other, taking away their apparent correlation – it’s completeness. Bringing items back together according to their content and purpose, rather than just a label for it’s ‘outward’ form(at), made the usefulness and value of my personal resources so much greater. Not that the value was not in the individual parts (files in this case) already. But the way I had initially organised and segmented it took away much of it’s collective value.
This way of organizing can be applied to many things. What belongs together should ideally stay together. As a whole it can have it’s full potential, meaning and expression.
In our conquest of bringing structure and clarity in our (surrounding) chaos, we can end up fragmenting, segmenting and labeling. Coming to a point where the cohesion is gone and we have dissected information into safe container spaces, like placing amputated body parts into different compartments of a cabinet. A horrific burial of what was to be left living, leaving it as whole.
