I did a PhD on personal information management
and how you organize yourself and your data.
My focus is on personal information management
because when it comes to multiple people,
it gets way more complicated and I cannot deliver that.
But I have certain tips and tricks, of course,
for multi-person environment as well. So my focus is on
personal information management.
My focus is on methods and not so much on tools.
And my third focus is on developing new methods
and therefore developing new tools
in order to use my own newly developed methods
because they are not out there yet.
So I've created a lot of open source software to
organize myself basically, and I'm very open about it,
If you visit the Etherpad... From this, you find another link
and I blog about it.
You'll find everything I do on my blog karl-voit.at.
to an Etherpad I created
with all additional notes on my talk here
and links to blog articles that deal with the topic
I'm talking about today.
Half an hour isn't very much to me
because I have so much content to talk about.
I have a 40-hour lecture on
personal information management,
and this itself is a summary.
So it's very hard for me to focus on
something specific for a short time like that.
But I thought about it. I thought that I will
start with a demotivation talk
so that you stop using things and methods
you were probably using until now,
because I know for sure they won't work,
they don't help you.
And there is great research that backs this opinion.
Certain things are based on research I'm talking about.
Certain things are based on my personal experience,
or my own research, if you like.
Okay, so first of all, whoever has heard
of the vocabulary problem?
No, perfect, perfect.
Then you all learned something new,
which is a very fundamental issue that we all suffer from.
So first, vocabulary problem.
but we still continue to do it otherwise, unfortunately.
This is based on a famous research from the 80s.
Most of the things i'm talking about is decades old
Therefore, there is much need to change things,
to create new methods, to create new tools,
and to get rid of how the computer
is actually working for us.
One of the basic things the vocabulary problem teaches us...
No, let's begin otherwise.
How was this vocabulary problem researched?
Imagine you're a group of participants
in a groundbreaking research test in the 80s.
Just imagine some 80s hits from the charts back then
to get down to the situation.
There was no Windows 95,
there was no Windows actually and so forth.
So it's groundbreaking personal information management
or information management research,
actually, before the personal computer began
its successful rise. Still, nobody has learned
from this research yet, not so much, actually.
So, you're a group of participants,
you're sitting around a round table...
So this needs to be a rather large round table.
And you're sitting here, here, here.
So you all can see to the middle of this round table.
And here, a physical item is placed.
For example, let's take that.
This one is taken and put on the table.
And without talking, you were asked to write down
the first word that comes to your mind
what you would think would be the perfect name for this thing.
whatever this is. Actually,
this is a stupid example
because it's on the more obvious side.
There are better examples than that,
but let's stick to that for the sake of example.
So you're sitting around, you're writing down your first word,
imagine yourself: what you would write for naming this thing, okay?
So then when this round is over,
please forget about the word you have written down,
because it doesn't count for some reason.
Now you are asked to write down the second best name
you have for this thing. Okay? The first one is done.
Now you have to find an alternative name.
You write down this second term.
Sometimes it's a word, sometimes it's a phrase, whatever.
Again, imagine this name, okay?
Second round. This is done in four rounds,
four or five or whatever rounds ,
so that you have a list of names prioritized
as you were thinking about these terms.
The first term is that which came to your mind first,
and so forth. Then those lists
are being collected by the researcher,
and he tried to get one term for that thing
which is in common for you all people.
The more people, the more difficult, of course.
And then you would be very astonished
that you need to go down in this list
three or more layers, three, four layers
in order to find one word which is in common for you all.
For example, somebody would have named this water,
another person would have named this water bottle,
another one bottle, another vessel, and so forth.
Again, this is a very stupid example because it's on
the more obvious side, but you get the idea. Yes?
Excuse me?
Imagine anything, any physical object...
yeah, or this one, yeah, wallet, paper wallet, money...
Whatever, yeah. Payment. Whatever it... It actually doesn't
matter that much, as long as it's not 100% obvious, you get
to a number which is astonishingly high of those levels you
have to find in order to find one common term we agree upon
that that's a name for that thing. So what does this have to do
with information management? You might ask yourself.
Well, actually, this vocabulary problem is very
inconvenient for us all when it comes to naming menu items,
naming files, naming folders. naming stuff for whatever
purpose. So if you need to come up with a file name, you run
into the vocabulary problem. If you're programming a
software tool and you have to name some menu items, you will
run into this vocabulary problem and so forth.
This is because everybody of you
has a different so-called mental model--
the way you think about the world,
which is influenced by your history, by your culture,
by your experience, by how's your day going and so forth:
multiple things that influence how you see the world.
Therefore filenames in general is a very bad thing for a
multi-person environment to rely on, for many reasons.
Same holds for folder names, same holds for folder
structures, hierarchies. That's not helpful as long as we
don't agree on the same cognitive model. It means one person
[who] hopefully knows what he or she is doing decides on one
strict hierarchy without...
with a non, how do you say...
without contradictions, without duplications and so forth.
And everybody else has to follow. So it's a
dictatorship of information management. This is the only
way a hierarchy is able to work.
And it's even worse than that.
Because when you create a file hierarchy
or a folder hierarchy in your mail browser or bookmarks,
whatever, now, and you revisit your files,
folder structures, whatever,
in let's say three months, three years from now,
you yourself has developed a different mental model
of the world. So you're not even able to follow
your own past mental model in your future,
because your world changes, your situation changes,
you work in a different job, you meet new people,
you have learned further things and so forth.
Therefore, even for one person, this thing is a hard problem.
Now imagine working with a group of people like here,
we are working in the same company, and you decide how a
file is named, and how the folder structure looks like,
which is perfectly fine for you now.
And then imagine him in three years
looking for the same information:
the chances that he will follow your current mental model
for navigation and for filename retrieval is almost zero.
Okay, so don't rely on hierarchical structures.
I don't say don't rely on navigation.
I never said that, because there's basically
two things to retrieve information,
navigation and search. We need both, because they help us in
different situations in a different kind.
Most people tend to prefer navigation
when it comes to local files
and most people tend to rely on search
when it comes to non-local files.
Within a company, a LAN file server,
it's a mixture. Most of the people don't know
how to search for files in a local company,
but it's a different problem.
Therefore we have tools like that we've seen before,
which helps you indexing local files and so forth,
which is very important. So the vocabulary problem...
I think it's very important to be aware of that problem
because this actually explains many situations
where people disagree on how something should be named
or something should be put in a specific folder and so forth.
That's the vocabulary problem in combination with
the knowledge of having different mental or cognitive models.
Sometimes it's a mental model
and sometimes it's a cognitive model.
This depends on the lecture.
Okay. The next thing...
Who knows what desktop metaphor is? A few people. I think
everybody of you will know when I explain it. Let's go
back to the 50s of the last century, for example, where the
first file systems have been developed for (back then)
modern computers. So actually, first file systems
or the concept of file systems for general purpose computers
have been developed in the 50s and 60s
and they were meant to deal with probably
dozens of files for one person, not more. They were
meant to deal with only a fraction of the whole computer
system for one person because they were time-shared
systems and so forth. So typically I had,
I don't know, 27 files. That was it, basically, back then,
for two reasons. First reason, the technology was not very
advanced back then, so therefore they had to stick with
things like a limited processing capacity and so forth in
order to come up with something to store files.
Therefore they came up with a strict hierarchy of folders
and files as we know it, and as we all still use it these days.
The second reason was that, and this was actually more
the focus a couple of decades later in the 70s, when the
desktop metaphor was used... The desktop metaphor was
actually a brilliant idea back then,
because the desktop metaphor was introduced
when computers learned how to visualize information,
how to draw icons, how to visualize a folder,
and in order to allow people that have not studied
mathematics or physics, because computer science wasn't
there yet, so people like secretaries or whatever,
non-tech people... In order to allow them to use something
complicated like a computer, they introduced the desktop
metaphor, which is a brilliant trick because it took the
things you have learned from the physical world, the real
world, and allowed it to use such a complicated machine like
a computer without learning too much. Okay, desktop. Physical
desktop. When we are talking in German, when we're talking
about a desktop, everybody knows instantly i'm talking
about a computer. That's not that case in native
English-speaking countries. If you talk to an American
and you talk about your desktop, yeah...
First of all, without the right context,
the other person doesn't know that you're talking
about your computer desktop or your physical desktop
where you write stuff with your hands and so forth.
But taking this knowledge from the physical world
and putting it into a graphical user interface
allowed that people instantly know that...
Okay, I had to learn the basics about mouse movement
and mouse handling. Okay. Given that and keyboard usage, okay,
given that... But with this information,
you probably would naturally assume
if I have a document which is represented by an icon and a name
and I move that to the printer, then this document gets printed.
Before that, that was actually quite complicated to do so.
People back then already had something like a local network.
It took some time that the general public would work
with a network of computers, but in the institution
where the graphical user interface was developed,
they already had a LAN, a local network, an intranet,
whatever you name it.
When people wanted to move a file to a different person,
they had a representation of their team members
and they moved the file with the mouse to the other computers.
They dragged and dropped it there
and the file was transferred to the other person's inbox.
That was a very natural process,
which completely changed the way we are using computers
from the situation before, so that normal people without
technical knowledge are able to work with computers.
Brilliant idea. But--and now comes the interesting part--
when you overcome this how to work with computer situation,
the fact that the desktop metaphor was brought in from the
physical world is actually a very, very limiting
and bad idea. Why? Because, for example, one thing
(like this one) in the physical world
can only have exactly one specific location.
In the virtual world, on my computer, when I have a
file, there is nothing that actually says it's forbidden
to have one specific file in two locations,
or even 20 locations, wherever I need this stupid file.
For example, the file representing somehow my to-do list,
I can imagine hundreds of places where I want to have a
representation of my to-do list in the file system.
Still, we're using file systems with strict hierarchies of
files with very bad workarounds in order to have files in
multiple locations. We're still using strict hierarchies
on the local computer. When we are talking about your
notebook, whatever it is,
whatever operating system it runs,
it's actually a window to the very, very past,
and nothing, I'm afraid, nothing is going to change that.
The only thing that we have developed meanwhile
was systems like we've seen before, where we have a web browser
and within that web browser window,
there is rarely a strict hierarchy.
When you shop at the local market to buy a new digital camera
MediaMarket, Saturn, whatever they are called, you know
that you have to go to the digital camera section in the market.
There's one spot, there's one place, there you see,
I don't know, 50 different cameras and you can choose one.
If you are shopping for a digital camera in the virtual world,
in your web browser, you don't even realize that actually
the very same camera could pop up in many different locations:
for example, catch of the day, or office supplies, or
children's stuff, or outdoor equipment, or digital cameras--
the same camera. Doesn't matter. It's very natural for us
to assume to find the same very digital camera in multiple
spaces, multiple spots. Unfortunately, the Internet has
solved that to great extent. This comes with a cost of
course, because we provide data to other companies, there
is no secrecy, there is no privacy and so forth. So this is why
my personal research still focuses to improve the local
computer. Most of the stuff I'm doing is with open source,
most of the workflows I'm dealing with is with local file
management, that's my specialty. I try to improve the
situation because there we have a really great gap between
what we know is bad and what we know is possible.
What else do I have? For the same reasons, hierarchies,
any hierarchy won't work with collecting stuff.
It helps a little bit if you have the same mental model
or a similar mental model,
or if the mental model is written down
and you need to learn it in companies. Sometimes it is like that.
Then a hierarchy may work or may provide a good workaround,
because navigation is still a good idea in addition to
search. I, for example, have developed a mixture between
navigation and search. I called it tag trees. My method
for managing file deals with tags, tagging. When I
attach tags to files, I generate from a given set of files
a navigation hierarchy. which consists of tags.
Imagine you have a folder, a file folder directory, where you see
only tags. You go to the folder, let's say sports, and then
within sports, you go to the folder, let's say hardware, and
in this sports hardware folder, you find all the files that
have at least the tags sports and hardware--in any
combination. You for example can move to hardware and
then sports, and you find the same set of files and so forth.
So this is basically the idea behind tag trees
and it's a mixture between search and navigation.
From my research, I know that people are very delighted
to use such a system. If you're interested in that,
follow the link, read the articles, see the demo.
I have a 45-minute talk about that
from the Graz Linuxdays as well online if you want to
get familiar with my file management method I'm personally
using and developing.
It's very important. Tagging is something very
complicated. Most people don't realize that actually
there are many, many ways to use tagging
that doesn't help you at all.
Actually, it worsens the situation in some cases.
For example, if you have a system like that and then you start
adding arbitrary tags to it... For example,
you have an invoice and then you begin with, in my opinion,
very good tags like "invoice" and then probably not
the client or customer or whatever,
and then you start listing, for what this invoice,
all the items and so forth. So you start adding
labels and more labels. So in my opinion, that's the basic
idea, but there are many more rules for that. I have a longer
article on how to tag, and I think everybody using tagging
concept should read that. One of the basic things is you
need to limit yourself
to a so-called controlled vocabulary.
So it's a defined set of tags, which is, yeah,
predefined. And sometimes it's 20, sometimes it's 50,
sometimes it's probably hundreds of tags,
but not more. The less, the better.
With that trick, each and every tag
helps you way more to re-find information.
Of course it's not the only thing,
you need to go through the whole list,
it would be too long to mention everything here for now,
but for that I've added the Jump page on the WorkLab pad.
One thing...
I've once read a book which is very, very great to read.
It's from David Weinberger.
It's called Everything is Miscellaneous.
I highly recommend everybody to read it.
It's really, really great, for multiple reasons.
You learn about the history,
you learn about many things
that doesn't make any sense at all
when it comes to organizing things.
One of the ideas which was mentioned in the book
is the orders of order.
There are three orders of orders
according to David Weinberger. The first order of order,
and I don't remember the actual names, so please pardon me if
they differ from the book.
I say the first one is physical order.
The best example for that is a library.
You have a set of books and you need to order them.
The only thing you can order books
is with one common property.
For example, you order your books according to
the first name or the last name of the author.
You order your books according to the title.
You order your books according to their size
or you order your books according to
color of the cover, for example. Most book shops have the
issue that people come to the bookstore,
I want to buy this book, I can't remember the name,
but it was green, which is a very frequent thing.
Actually, it would be a very clever idea
for that situations to have all books ordered by cover,
by the color of the cover.
Of course, you can only have,
for one set of physical items, you can only have one order.
And if you order them in one way,
you're not ordering them in a million other ways
for different purposes, for different cognitive models,
for different situations for the retrieval.
Therefore, ordering things in one order,
like in a strict hierarchy of files and folders,
is not a very good idea.
It's actually the worst workaround you can think of
when you have limited technical knowledge, like
developing a file system almost 100 years ago.
Not quite that much, but you get the idea, okay?
So only one order of things is a bad idea
because you have different situations
to retrieve. This one gets backed up by a very great
example also in the book. I love this example
because it gives you a very, very great image
of the whole problem in your head.
Imagine you're inviting people to eat with you at
your home.
Then you have the situation in your kitchen
with the dishes. You have a certain order
of your dishes in your cupboard.
So the dishes are in a certain order,
the glasses in a certain order
and the forks are in one place,
the knives are in one place and so forth.
That's one order. Then you prepare your table
for your guests. And what do you do?
You open the cupboard and you take out the dishes,
you take out the forks and the knives
and you arrange then the same items
in a completely different order on the table.
Because everybody got one fork, one plate, one glass or two,
whatever, and so forth. You get the idea.
The same things in the cupboard,
the same things on the table, different order.
And the one order is not worse or better than the other,
you just need them in a different situation.
The same holds true with your information,
if you think about it. The next one is,
your friends came over, you had a great evening,
you ate your lunch, and then what comes next
with the dishes and so forth,
they need to go to the dishwasher.
You take those dishes from the table
and you put them in your dishwasher.
And guess what? You have yet a third order of things.
Because for this situation, it's important that,
for example, the more dirty things are on the front,
everything should get a splash of water and so forth.
So the same things, three different kinds of orders.
Everyone is perfectly fine for itself.
But you need to be aware, the same stuff,
different orders, different purposes.
The same holds true, as already mentioned, for your information.
But we're not aware of that
because we're still following physical order:
one file, one folder, one path to retrieve,
which I need to remember,
which is sometimes okay, sometimes not.
It gets worse when you have
more mental models, more people,
or your personal model develops further in the future.
You get the basic idea. So, to conclude this example,
the second order of order is,
in terms of books, an index card. So a library doesn't have
only the books in the shelves, they have index cards. Of
course, these days it's in the computer, but you have, let's
say, 30-40 years ago, they still had physical
things with different paper-based index cards. One was
sorted by the author, one was sorted by the title, one was
sorted by, I don't know, Verlag, what's the publisher, and
so forth. You get the idea.
So the more item structure you want to have
the order for retrieval,
the more cupboards you need, the more index cards you need.
This is a workaround for that problem. It's a good idea,
probably not the end of the story.
What is the third order of order?
The third order is no order. This option is very interesting
because this was introduced by computers. For example, he
said, whatever you do, you still have the file system for
navigation, as far as I understood it. But if you need to look
up a certain thing where you only know, I don't know,
the type of invoice and, for example, the amount,
search is your friend.
This is a specific search based on specific purpose,
patterns and values and properties of a document
you need to maintain. This goes further.
Full text search. No order at all.
Whatever you search, and it might be
a sentence in a book,
could be found by a search engine
because the whole content gets indexed,
and relying on your search query
and relying on the way those search results
are visualized and processed and ordered,
you are able to retrieve information.
No order. The content defines
how you find the information.
We need to learn to profit from that
when we are using computers.
So-called modern computers don't help us with that.
We're still using strict file systems.
This won't change at all.
The only thing we developed in the meantime
are interfaces in a web browser,
unfortunately, because they come with a different price
we need to pay. Most people ignore this price.
That's another different topic.
No, I mean privacy issues, security issues,
surveillance issues and so forth.
So this is really an issue
and most people are not beginning to understand
what's related to that.
Most people do not even have the background knowledge
to understand why I try to explain those negative things,
unfortunately. Okay, and basically that's it.
If you want to read more about stuff like that,
which I wrote and which I linked from the Internet and so forth,
please visit this Etherpad which links to my Etherpad,
where I put a lot of links for those topics
and then you find articles and then you can learn more.
Probably you want to try my file tags method.
That's the name of this file management method.
Of course the focus of my tools
is personal information management,
so that might not be suited for groups of people,
although I also introduced the file tags method for
a company with 30 people and it worked as well,
if you do it right. And be aware of all those things
most people are not aware.
The vocabulary problem,
it's difficult to come up with terms,
because whatever makes sense in your head,
doesn't necessarily make sense in your head.
Whatever makes sense in your head now,
doesn't necessarily make sense in your head in a year or so.
Cognitive models, desktop metaphor,
we need to get more advanced patterns like that,
because I always say it's like
running a marathon with your hands in handcuffs
or with the, what's the name?
Crutches. Crutches are great if you have a bad leg,
but if you overcome this bad luck,
they're really, really an obstacle.
Whatever I see when I see people using computers,
I always see people using crutches
without no further reason.
And the order of orders.
Sometimes it makes really, really sense
to ignore order at all.
That's one option we have
and one option we need to be aware of.
Thank you very much.
Questions. Of course, if you have time for questions. Yeah.
Are you working with operating system developers? No. No,
I'm not working with operating system designers,
whatever, because it's impossible to find them or to
identify them. If you take Linux, that's probably
thousands of people whom should I talk to and what is the
motivation for them to change?
Because when they change, it scares away people
because people assume that it's working like Windows,
it's working like macOS.
What's the motivation for Apple to change?
And I'd say it's really impossible
to find the person from Apple
because of their secrecy and so forth.
I talked to people at Google
when I still was working for the university,
which were working for Google Docs.
Back then it was Google Drive,
which back then was called Google Docs.
I discussed topics with them.
They have so many things you need to follow
without being able to introduce new topics at all.
For example, Gmail. One of the developers I was talking to
was working... and this was a luck, a very, very great luck for me
to find that person to discuss with.
Gmail once had tags for their emails
and they were following the trail
where there is no order.
Everything you do in Gmail was based on tags.
A new email was tagged with unread and inbox
and you have stored searches
where you see all your emails labeled with INBOX
and then you have a different view
with INBOX and UNREAD and so forth. You get the idea.
It was great. He told me they actually reverted that idea
and reintroduced a hierarchy later on.
I was asking that person, why did you do that?
Because you had a situation
which was actually better than now
because you throw away this idea of a hierarchy and so forth.
He said they got
thousands and thousands of customer complaints
because people were not educated enough to deal with the situation.
They assumed some hierarchies and so forth.
They had to reword this great concept.
Once again, they renamed tags with labels or categories.
The difference between categories and labels
is that you have many different items,
each with many tags, and if you deal with categories,
one item can only have one category.
That's a mapping to a strict physical hierarchy,
or a strict hierarchy.
Categories, by definitions, are only one per item
and so forth. So actually, our scholar systems
is very bad in this and we can deal with that.
I don't want to continue
because it's already his time,
but I'm here for questions in the lunch break.
Okay, yeah, the Dewey decimal system and so forth.
Yeah, we can...
[audience]: I have a question. You were mentioning how to
collect the files with tags. And I was wondering
what tools we use to... Could you give us an example of a tool
to order files with tags and we can search for it?
[Karl]: You want an example from me where you can apply tags to files?
You have my file tags. I don't know if in Windows you got...
Oh yeah, Windows 10 has, at least Windows 10.
I think they introduced it with NTFS in the prior version,
but Windows 10 had first viable tools for that.
I think they took it to Windows 11 as well,
but I didn't look into Windows 11.
I have a very nice article about native file tagging
in NTFS on Windows, which you can find in my link list.
It's very long but it's very fun to read,
especially for people having a little bit of background
with information retrieval because they fucked up everything.
It's basically useless. It's so stupid.
It's actually a joke, a very bad joke.
But we've learned to laugh at bad jokes from Microsoft decisions.
I have a long list.
I can talk about bad design decisions by Microsoft.
But particular, file tagging native in NTFS
is a file system feature,
but you need to have user UI in the system
in order to use it.
Everything is really really stupid.
If you want to have a good laugh for
probably half an hour,
read my article about native windows file tagging.
It was really fun to learn about this myself
and fortunately, nobody is using it anyway.
Okay. So thank you, I'm here in the lunch break,
just talk to me, you know the drill.