How do you organize things?

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Organization is a skill I just never learned. I was about 40 before I heard of someone having a list of their file folders. For me, a mess with a corner of everything showing works pretty well, as does a pile of things left in chronological order. When I do try to organize, I can't predict if I'll be looking for something based on its function, colour, material, or size.

Now, I want to organize a large collection of ideas within a field, and this seems even more obscure. Any tips?

Sure. The basic system goes from general to specific. For example, you may have four over arching categories and then each categories have subcategories, and so on. For example, you might be organizing policy and you have bin for environmental policy, health policy, educational policy, etc. Those are then sub-divided by statutes, regulations, court decisions, and research. Those then can be further divided into land, ocean, and wildlife, in the case of environmental policy. You could also decide land, ocean, and wildlife take precedent over statutes, regulations, court decisions, and research if you think in terms of land, ocean, and wildlife categories.

You are simply setting up information structures.

Likewise, file names follow that so sorting on names arranges files in a logical way. So I might have enviro-statutes-ocean-CZMA-1984. You can also develop coding prefixes for file names, but that can be trickier if you don't know how all possible levels of information you need.

You can also map all this out on a piece of paper before you begin. You can play with some different structures. Something that reflects your hierarchy of information works the best as it is more intuitive for you. If you are designing for others, then their input can help as it will have to fit a workflow.

I have ADHD so how can anyone expect me to organise things?

I tend to put things in piles, though my piles end up a mess. They are "Semi organized". I have been known to have piles of things cluttering up the place but drawes and cupboards with hardly anything in them! The problem is when I do put things away I want everything to be precise, so they never end up put away. But when I really have to I just grab everything and shove them in draws and cupboards and think "I will sort them again". I am not happy about doing that but I have done it.

So I am a mix of organized and messy at the same time.

When I have been in a work enviroment, I am very clean and tidy. Yet at home somehow I find it difficult? I don't know why. Is quite a contrast.

Badly. Every system I develop collapses before long.

How do I well, I don't and If I'd try i'd never stick to it lol.

I don't.

So far, we have only 20% of us feeling confident about organizing, but not giving the details I seek. I am familiar with the general process; it is the actual deciding I find a challenge. Do you never struggle with where to put things?
On a related issue, I wonder if creative workers are usually messy, because otherwise novel combinations of ideas just don't form.
In "A Writer's Time" Atchity gives the usual advice about putting each idea on a single index card, but then he says that shuffling them into the right order for a book takes about as much time as reading the book quickly. He says nothing about deciding which is the right order out of an infinite number of ways to approach a subject.
I see a new method in use involving keywords as labels to help a computer search. Perhaps this method would let me link each idea to several others for exploration of the field? How are keywords chosen?

best i seem able to do is just put stuff into like piles.

I have made so many attempts to organize and they fail, ultimately, due to the issue you are addressing, dear_one. Too many things I’m trying to organize fall into too many categories. I suspect the answer is to cross-reference everything.

So a physical file folder would have in it items that clearly belong there, plus a sheet of paper cross-referencing related documents in other files.

But that would be a tremendous amount of work.

For actual paper documents, I basically have slush piles which eventually slide into each other. I am planning to organize them. (HA!)

For really important pieces of paper, like maps, I put them all, loose, in a box or drawer. All my maps of canoe routes are in one of two drawers.

Electronic documents are easier, of course, because one can search across files. I try to name files with enough key words that a reasonable search till turn them up.

Some documents can’t easily be made into electronic ones, such as canoe routes.

Aspies are probably not the best resource for tips on organization.

I heard of one professor who used a sheet of plywood for a desk. When it got too cluttered, he'd put a fresh sheet on top, so he could still get back to things where he remembered them. At last report, he had three layers.

An NT friend of mine was, I suspect, divorced from an Aspie. He had had his papers organized in piles, and had a meltdown when she moved them to do something with the baby. Often, the easiest place for me to find something is simply the same place I found it last time, however out of place it looks there.

Spatially and not more than 3 dimensions in every stationery area of relevance.
Less than 2 if it's ongoing and ever changing.


Anything else is not easy to recall and falls away faster.

So this habit of piling up and the utter dislike of displacing anything from the piles seem to make sense.

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Mine is the organized chaos method.