Reorganizing

Not being able to find previous papers I’ve read and stored in pdf format is increasingly annoying me. I haven’t organized the files in the most logical way; rather it has evolved organically over time in what looks like a mess. When there were fewer files, and my memory was better, I could easily find what I needed. Also, prior to Covid, I separated my work-life and home-life. All my files were in a single location – on my desktop computer at work. But with a recent overseas sabbatical and then Covid (and working remotely), I now have multiple places where my files are saved.

 

My desktop contains copies of all the files from my various laptops over the years, but I haven’t made an organized effort to mesh them. No, I don’t store things on the cloud even though my university uses GoogleDrive. Instead, I have local files on various computers which I periodically back up. The inertia to change my ways – I’m not sure what to say about it, other than that I am a creature of (bad) habit. But I’m now sufficiently annoyed that I might do something about it. My current goal is to go through some of the folders every week and start to mesh everything into a single place, perhaps renaming some files so I can better search for them.

 

What I need to do is think of an overarching organizational system. I didn’t know what this would look like as a new faculty member. Also in my early pre-tenure years, I did not read as widely. Most of my papers were particular to the projects I was working on actively or grants that I was writing when considering future projects. But during my first sabbatical, I started to reach much more widely as I pondered new research directions and interests. And not just chemistry research or pedagogy. I read more widely in the sciences, history, philosophy, and psychology. My “future research project papers” folder (labelled “FutureResProjPapers” because that’s how I label folders) now has way too many files, and that’s the one that would be most practically useful as I plan ahead.

 

A starting point for reorganizing would be looking at all the subfolder names in my “Reading” folder. Actually, I have multiple such folders. There are some overlaps between the names so some can be consolidated. But I haven’t figured out what to do about papers that span multiple categories. In the past, I made copies and stuck them in different thematic folders, but I doubt I’ve done so consistently. I perhaps need a way to tag my files with an appropriate set of tags. Decisions, decisions! The whole business looms and just thinking about what I should do is giving me pangs of paralysis.

 

Are my desktops, both physical and virtual, a sign of my messy and disorganized mind? Maybe. I’m tempted to just “start fresh” with a clean slate. Are all those old papers important? Likely most of them are outdated now and less interesting. But it would take time for me to figure that out. If I could get an A.I. to read pdf files and churn out a summary, that might help. But would I trust it? I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t worry if I miss anything. If something is that important, it will come up again. And likely I can find the paper off the internet. So maybe I should just work on what I’m using actively (say the past one year) and just archive the rest in an “OldPapers” folder. That’s tempting.

 

What I should be doing right now is getting a move on this process. Instead I’m procrastinating by writing this blog post. Okay, I have to stop writing now and spend the next twenty minutes making some organizing headway.