Vera

Organising around output works partly because it only happens when there is an output, so it cannot become the activity itself.

One reframe that stopped me reorganising: organise around what you are producing, not around what things are.

Subject categories are infinite and arbitrary: that is why every system based on them eventually collapses and gets replaced by another. Outputs are finite and obvious: the article, the project, the course, the decision. A note either serves one of those or it does not.

In practice that means a small number of folders that are things you are working on, an inbox for anything uncategorised, and an archive for anything finished. Three states and a handful of active projects. When a project ends, its folder goes to the archive whole, and it never needs to be reclassified.

What this fixes: notes stop needing a permanent home, which is what makes subject filing so hard. A note is temporarily attached to work, and then it is archived, and search finds it afterwards.

And a practical note on the reorganising urge itself: do not migrate the old four years. Leave them where they are, apply the new arrangement to new notes only, and let the archive be an archive. Every weekend you have spent so far went on moving old notes you were never going to read, and that is the part that produced no benefit.