I’m all-in on iCloud storage for actively used stuff. (I have a 200GB account, but that’s only because I have 90GB of photos in the cloud.) In terms of organization, what’s been working pretty stably for me – I’m an academic/college prof – is based on the following elements:
- For current projects: For things that have a beginning and end (as in GTD “projects”), I use hierarchically organized folders, with 6 top-level folders that correspond to my GTD “areas of responsibility”
- In my case: 01 RES (for research publications, etc); 02 TCH (for teaching matters); 03 DPT (for departmental admin); etc.
- BTW: I use same names in my folders in OmniFocus
- Subfolders for each project, often starting with the three-letter code for the project folders (e.g., for a course “TCH 2018-19 Digital Ethics” or an article “RES 2019 Autonomy Gaps and Social Exclusion”
- Sometimes sub-folder codes get added, to separate research projects “RES PRJ…” from research speaking engagements “RES SPK…”
- This makes it easy to take advantage of auto-completion when search with Spotlight
- For reference & resources: Two big buckets of tagged items, one for PDFs of published materials (journal articles, books, scans)
- Reference resources are often used in multiple projects, so this lets me avoid having multiple copies in each project folder. For example, there are texts that I use every year in a course I teach, so I will tag them with “digitalethics:week3” and then, any annotation I do to those files is always to one and the same file.
- Another example, a journal article PDF might get the tags “transparency” and “algorithms”, and then I may create a smart folder (saved search) using HoudahSpot or the Finder that I save in the relevant project folder.
- All my reference tags are colored Orange; I reserve other colors for other sets of tags (Blue for personal; Green for projects; Purple for teaching-related - these are also the colors of my Calendars in the Calendars app)
- Sometimes, I’ll make an alias of a file (⌘L) and move to alias to a project folder (but this doesn’t work yet for iOS)
- Hat tip to the Aleh “Macademic” Cherp: Managing project files and good old file folders ; it’s from 2011 (so “OpenMeta” tagging), but his principles are rock-solid.
- For inboxes/collection: I chuck stuff into an “Action” folder (like David Sparks does) for sorting “later” (always a challenge to keep these from becoming rats nests, as with any inbox); Desktop might work too.
- Sometimes I use Hazel & tags to sort this quickly. E.g., for a (very) frequently used reference tag, Hazel watches for any PDF with the “transparency” tag and move it to the bucket of publications.
- I’m working on now & to-do’s for the day/week: this is basically a way of making sure I have a quick way to see what I need to work on today.
- Key tags: “2grade” or “2read” and then “0today” - all of which have a Red color label. In the sidebar of Files app (on my iPad) and the Finder (macOS), these are manually sorted to the top.
- If there is a project folder that I’m working on, I will often add “0today” to the folder (so that the whole folders shows up)
- In other cases, I move a specific tag to the top of the sidebar (often I’ll do this with course readings: “digitalethics:week3”).
- As with inboxes, the trick is to review this regularly, to make sure these lists are current. But it’s sort of like packing your bag before you go into the office.
- For archiving I use a top-level “zzzArchive” folder into which I dump completed projects.
Hope this is useful!