The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 4th Edition

3.3. Organizing Resources

Organizing systems arrange resources according to many different principles. In libraries, museums, businesses, government agencies and other long-lived institutions, organizing principles are typically documented as cataloging rules, information management policies, or other explicit and systematic procedures so that different people can apply them consistently over time. In contrast, the principles for arranging resources in personal or small-scale organizing systems are usually informal and often inconsistent or conflicting.

Property

In this book we use property in a generic and ordinary sense as a synonym for feature or “characteristic.” Many cognitive and computer scientists are more precise in defining these terms and reserve property for binary predicates (e.g., something is red or not, round or not). If multiple values are possible, the property is called an attribute, “dimension,” or “variable.” Feature is used in data science and machine learning contexts for both “raw” or observable variables and “latent” ones, extracted or constructed from the original set.56[CogSci]

For most types of resources, any number of principles could be used as the basis for their organization depending on the answers to the “why?” (§2.3), “how much?” (§2.4), and “how?” (§2.6) questions posed in Chapter 2.

A simple principle for organizing resources is colocation —putting all the resources in the same location: in the same container, on the same shelf, or in the same email ...