--- title: Desk Files slug: desk-files description: Today I learned how my desk files have been organizing themselves. tags: [workflow] image: https://davidawindham.com/wp-content/themes/daw/img/opengraph_image.jpg hide_table_of_contents: true --- Today I learned how my desk files have been organizing themselves. Every so often I take a little time to do some cleanup. This morning was one of those times because my schedule eased up just enough to let me clean up my documents Over the years I developed a naming convention and a workflow that just kinda sticks for every project. I keep a file titled _notes📝.md at the root of every project folder that contains my working notes information I need for the project. It's much quicker than referring back to other documents and emails on the project because I juggle projects regularly. And now that I plug my directories into a local RAG[^1] I can retrieve information on them quickly. Unlike some folks, I'm actually very pretty pleased with Apple's Siri and I'm looking forward to further integration mainly because I like using the native apps like Reminder and Calender for organization[^2]. At the very top level of my organization hierarchy are two files I use daily. They're title _desk💻.md and _desk🖥️.md. The emojis indicate the device but I can work on either of them on my desktop, laptop, phone, or tablet. These two files are literally my scratch-pad notebook and are filled with various notes on configurations, links, text chats, reminders, and so on. The way they're organized has been an entirely organic process since the start date on the first is now almost 15 years old. Over the years, the process of adding and deleting info has kinda created it's own structure based on what is most re-used. The basic formatting of Markdown allows me to create collapsible headers for various topics. What's interesting is that this section of my website[^3] is doing the exact same over time and the headers have started to match up with [docs](/docs),[notes](/notes), [posts](/posts) & [lists](/lists). It always takes me a bit to clean em up because I'm a digital hoarder given how cheap the space is. I try to go quality over quantity but it's not that easy. Sometimes even my off the hip responses to text threads seem valuable until I read them some years later. I saved this one though... I had written my local house rep to ask if Medicaid cuts were part of the budget and that I had some concerns for my community. I just hope I don't need it later for a 'told you so' letter[^4]. ![](/img/sheri_biggs_medicaid_response.jpg)


--- [^1]: Retrieval-augmented generation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrieval-augmented_generation [^2]: _Slow Thinking_ - https://davidawindham.com/slow-thinking/ [^3]: _A Second Brain_ - https://davidawindham.com/a-second-brain/ [^4]: Sheri Biggs - https://sheribiggs.house.gov