why i ditched folders

confession: i have a folder on my desktop called "stuff to organize later." it's been there for 4 years.

i'm not gonna organize it. you know it. i know it. the folder knows it.

folders are a lie we tell ourselves

here's the thing about folders: they assume you know what category something belongs to at the moment you create it. and that you'll remember that category later when you need to find it.

that's two assumptions. both wrong.

when i write a note about a conversation with sarah about the q3 launch at the coffee shop, where does it go? is it a work note? a sarah note? a q3 note? a coffee shop note?

the answer is yes. it's all of those. and folders make you pick one.

the organizing tax

every folder system has a maintenance cost. you create it, feel productive, and then slowly watch it decay into chaos.

you make a folder called "important." everything goes in there. now nothing is important.

you make subfolders. work/projects/q3/marketing/drafts/final/final-v2/actually-final. you hate yourself.

you give up and start putting everything in one folder again. the circle of life.

how jottie handles this

jottie doesn't have folders. on purpose.

instead, it has search that actually works. you type what you're looking for and it finds notes about that concept, even if you never used that exact word.

sarah. q3 launch. coffee shop. all of those would find the same note. because the note is about all of those things.

auto-tagging pulls out people, places, dates, and topics automatically. you don't have to decide where something goes. you just write it.

but what about organization??

look, i get it. some people genuinely enjoy organizing things. those people probably don't need jottie.

jottie is for the rest of us. the people who write notes and then forget they exist. the people who search "that thing from the meeting" and hope for the best.

the dirty secret of productivity is that organization is often procrastination in disguise. you feel productive moving things into folders. but did you actually do anything?

the real point

notes are for capturing thoughts. that's it. if you spend more time organizing notes than writing them, something is wrong.

jottie lets you dump your brain into text and trusts that you'll find it later. because you will. that's what search is for.

your notes don't need a filing system. they need to be searchable.

rip to my "stuff to organize later" folder. you were real ones.