Folders are slowly going away

Over the past decade or so, and more noticeably in the past few years, younger users are ignoring the concepts of “files” and “folders” when it comes to saving their work on a computer.

A recent article in The Verge dug into this, and an early example in the article sums it up well. When helping students track down their files, it led to an interesting exchange:

She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question.

In a world of search, why worry about where a file lives?

Gmail Folders

I first noticed this in my own work back in 2009, when I advised readers to give up using folders/tags in Gmail. Why worry about it? You’ll spend dozens of hours a year carefully sorting your emails into folders and subfolders, and the time you save as a result will just be a fraction of that.

Roam and mymind

I’m noticing this in new tools as well. You know I love Roam Research, and it literally doesn’t have a way to save things in a traditional hierarchy. You link from one item to…