AEVI field notes · Published 3 August 2026
Folders are work you perform for a future you who may never look.
Before you can save the thought, some tools ask you to predict the filing system your future self will understand.
Capture and classification compete
A thought arrives with a clock attached. The name, date, measurement or instruction is useful now, but saving it may require choosing a notebook, folder, page, tag and title. Every extra decision is a chance to postpone the capture or dump it into an inbox forever.
The problem is especially visible with practical notes. “Rob quoted £185 for Thursday” does not arrive knowing whether it belongs under Home, Finance, Calls, Projects or People.
Folders are excellent when the structure is real
Manual hierarchy is not obsolete. It works beautifully for shared projects, regulated records, repeatable processes and collections with stable boundaries. A tax return has a year. A client project has a name. A legal file has an owner.
The trouble begins when every stray detail is forced to pretend it belongs to one permanent category.
Automatic does not mean irreversible
A useful automatic system leaves the original note untouched, proposes titles and topics after saving, and allows corrections. It should tolerate overlap: one note can concern a person, a place, a task and a purchase without being squeezed into a single folder.
Automatic organisation should lower the price of capture, not take ownership away from the person who wrote the note.
A better question than “folders or AI?”
Ask how much organisation is necessary before the note becomes useful. For some work, the answer is a strict hierarchy. For everyday memory, the answer may be almost none at capture time—as long as retrieval later is strong and transparent.
The filing system should earn its keep. The person should not work for the filing system.