Re: One vs many directories

[Texas Cyberthal]

Hi Jean,

> Navigating does not necessarily contribute to production. Productivity may 
> say what it wants but it may not reach those who are actually more productive 
> without using the navigation. So studies may not tell us what is more 
> productive, such may only tell what is currently used within the subject of 
> being productive.

Outside 10 Bins, navigation is often negatively productive.  Whenever
the user navigates bad tree structure without correcting it on the
fly, he suffers profitless friction.  That's why Treefactor combines
with JiT sorting to make navigation and sorting a single activity.

Frankly I was surprised people prefer navigation despite being
generally so bad at tree structure.  In the absence of good structure
and tools, search is much better.

I agree, email should be database-centric.  Manually organizing emails
into folders (or worse, trees) is therefore wrong except in tiny
doses.

> Take care of duplicates. When marketing contact database is growing fast, 
> some times 1000 people per day or more. People have same names. Often one 
> cannot even know what is first and what is last name. You may know it for 
> your country, in other countries is not so. Then those people engage in a 
> course on distance. They are sending me images and files as results of their 
> course assignments. I have to file the files in proper folder. Because names 
> are not always unique I better file it under unique IDs, and keep separate 
> symlinks with names of people to such unique IDs whereby symlinks can be 
> automatically updated.

This is clearly a CRM database use case.  In this situation, the CRM
should define the unique ID, and then Textmind should accept it.  You
can still use the directory tree, though.  Just file it under
~/Surname-given-name/ID-number/~ for the non-unique name.  Recursively
searching ~/1-Textmind/2-Linked/7-Name/2-Flat/~ for a directory named
~/ID-number/~ will find the target even if his name changes slightly.
So you can save time by not inputting every scrap of text and files
into the CRM.