reply to u/Silly_Captain2089 at https://reddit.com/r/NoteTaking/comments/1wldauj/do_you_actually_organize_notes_by_folders/
The missing secret and an affordability that disappeared roughly when folders moved to digital contexts was the time and effort that people used to put into indexing their work beyond just filing it away.
Tags and wiki-type cross linking has helped some of this problem, but it takes some time and effort to make it easier for you to find the things you're always looking for.
Back in the late 1600s famous philosopher John Locke wrote a short treatise about how to index notes in one's commonplace book so that you could write entries in linear order, but still find them under multiple indexed headwords and didn't need to copy them into multiple places (or folders in your case). Here's a copy from 1706 in English (the original was in French.) - Locke, John. 1706. A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books. London: Printed for J. Greenwood, bookseller. http://archive.org/details/b30540434.
The pinnacle of the practice was probably in the 1950s when there were multiple filing and indexing schemes available and in wide practice. - Duffield, David Walter, and Various. 1951. Progressive Indexing and Filing. 5th ed. New York, NY: Remington Rand Inc. http://archive.org/details/progressiveindex0000varo.
These seemingly "boring and dull" methods do require a miniscule amount of additional work, but if you're regularly using and especially reusing your notes for writing or other creative work, then the extra work pays for itself 100 times over in long-term creativity and usefulness.
Underling the boredom and seeming tediousness of this practice, in a note in his system entitled "Does Spirit hide in the filing cabinet?", Niklas Luhmann wrote: "People come [to look at his filing and indexing system], they see everything and nothing more than that, just like in porn movies; consequently, they leave disappointed." This is a telling story about the simplicity of the idea of well-kept notes (filed and indexed) in a zettelkasten, card catalog, filing cabinet, or commonplace book because you don't get to see the creativity of the end product without putting in the work.
As a crazy example of resultant creativity, I was able to use some notes I indexed five years ago on tools to link a passage from the Book of Matthew in the Bible to Henry David Thoreau's book Walden and Conway's Law on corporate structure. I can guarantee that without my notes being reasonably well-indexed and filed, this serendipitous bit of rather brilliant creativity would never have happened.
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—via 
Profile photo of Gabriel García Márquez at a 1970's version of a cartridge-based Smith-Corona electric typewriter. <br />
Potential variations of this typewriter are already in Richard Polt's collection of typers, but this particular photo is not as of 2026-09-19. 
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—via Suzanne Summers LaPierre, librarian at 
—via 
