This may be long for a stupid question… and it’s not really one question… but it seems like a safe first post kind of place! It has just been on my mind a lot the last few months.
I was recently doing a review of my workplace’s management system and used personal life examples to demonstrate why the management system is (/would of been) effective. Instead of convincing anyone else, I convinced myself my life would be better off if I had a personal management system.
I’ve googled high and low and found nothing that I could draw on. The amount of self-help and motivational books I waded through though… that was impressive. I find it particularly interesting that it doesn’t seem present regardless of culture, even for procedure-heavy ones like Japan and Korea (at least in business) or more direct/rigid like Germany. Life just happens and you muddle through.
After putting pen to paper, I realised many “deficiencies” in my own life. I don’t have a records “policy”—my files are on hard drives, NAS’s, couple of clouds and a drive in a bank deposit box. I have no idea how many copies of my tax returns are floating around out there. I used to track expenses, but when I wanted to see my cashflow I realised I had no data for the last 2-3 years. I recently had to run out and buy some cleaning supplies because I ran out—that sums up my inventory system. That’s a major barrier to cooking at home. I’m not sure what I have for emergency supplies either. I certainly don’t plan (schedule or monitor) activities in my life at all. Risk management? I think my household insurance auto-renewed but not 100% sure.
Yet, I’d be considered decently organized among my peers. That seems terrifying.
Life isn’t a project, or a company, but I think the “management system” approach would be beneficial because;
It engages system 2 thinking, resulting in (presumably) better plans
It allows optimization though sharing and iteration (assuming some common approaches develop)
It helps communicating and being held accountable, least for a certain set of relationships
It helps manage change, like the move from portable drives to cloud storage, or changing insurance coverage
It increases transactional memory, where you can put trust into a system to avoid having to keep a mental maps (of files, of money, of contingencies)
It allows outsourcing since the process is relatively well defined, such as to (virtual) assistants or maid services (I believe it’d be a net economic boom)
It can help be pro-active, like staying in touch at regular intervals—both prompting and prioritizing (more to do with how you approach life)
However, my prior is that almost no one does this. The most I’ve seen are individual components—some people run very good household budgets. It just doesn’t exist as an overall framework.
Why? Is it because it doesn’t work and/or isn’t a suitable approach? A lack of definition to “life” to structure around/optimize towards? Is it more emotional, not giving up control and flexibility? Not taught/not socially acceptable? Does System 1 not bother with it, leading to failure?
--
I’ve spent some time working on this but it’s tough and I’m really not sure the effort would be worthwhile. The trigger to take it seriously was a long chain of events that led to a life achievement list. It’s still in brainstorming mode, but getting huge and it seems to me that I need to put a lot more effort into optimizing for it.
Just to be clear, a lot of the answers I have gotten in person have been along the lines of “pick what you want and focus on it”. I think it misses what I’m trying to convey—how do you manage everything you don’t focus on? Why do you do things a certain way? I want to know what to do with my copy of my taxes next time I file. I want to do it because I should and I want to know why I should. The system offers an imperative, built on the foundation of having thought it out and deciding “this is how it should be”.
You might be interested in the book Getting Things Done. It was written before smartphones and cloud syncing calendars but it can easily be adapted to To-Do lists and managing your life in the modern age.
A basic summary is thus: Every action you need to do but haven’t yet done is an open loop in your mind. You have to keep thinking about it until you do it, and close the loop. However, lots of things can’t be done except at specific times and places. You can maintain seperate to-do lists for things that can be done anywhere (Call a friend to schedule a movie, tie your shoe, etc.), and things that need you to be at your desk, at work, or at a grocery store. Storing all the myriad things that you need to do in life in your head is stressful and difficult to successfully accomplish. If you offload this information to contextual to-do lists, you can forget about the open loop and rely on your general system to remind you if it only if you can actually do something about it. This allows you focus on things you’re doing in the moment, without worrying that you’re forgetting a bunch of things you still need to do.
You might be interested in the book Getting Things Done.
Much appreciated, I’ll take a look!
This allows you focus on things you’re doing in the moment, without worrying that you’re forgetting a bunch of things you still need to do.
I think this is a large part of it, but it seems like a subset of what I’m thinking about. This is a great answer if someone came up to you and asked “how do you get things done?”, and it is a pretty broad planning approach. Even better, those who use a similar system can talk about their approach, ideally sharing ideas and “best practices”. Even when I googled the book, I got thousands of hits that would help me—tools, blogs, reviews. To use corporate speak, this would be a set of policies, processes and guidance… complete with workflows. It fits perfectly (this comment pending me actually reading the book!).
what I struggle with is that there doesn’t seem to be anything above this. Most companies have some sort of management system that would give context to the process.
To give a corporate example applied to real life, most people don’t really evaluate risk in their own life. Here at LW and such we talk about existential risk, but I’d still guess that very few have disaster supplies or plans for much more likely events (this is from recent talks triggered by http://www.shakeout.org/ ). My wife and I talked casually over dinner about earthquakes and realised this is a non-trivial problem that probably should be taken seriously. Getting home, walking long distances, bridges, what to do if our apartment isn’t structurally sound or flooded, where to meet/wait if communication is impossible, what to do in winter with no heat.
The same applies to a lot of other risks—robbery, fire, financial, accidents, sickness...
Each of those can be dealt with tasks that would be governed by the GTD process, so I think it’s a big part (it is either done or not!), but I feel like there is this missing umbrella that binds these things together. There seems to be a lot of social gains to it as well. Talking about disasters with our friends would lead to some pressure on them to prepare, as well as share how we would do it and possibly find shared solutions.
Example above could be replaced with less extreme examples, like how you store your files/pictures/etc or do your household budget.
To give a corporate example applied to real life, most people don’t really evaluate risk in their own life. Here at LW and such we talk about existential risk, but I’d still guess that very few have disaster supplies or plans for much more likely events (this is from recent talks triggered by http://www.shakeout.org/ ). My wife and I talked casually over dinner about earthquakes and realised this is a non-trivial problem that probably should be taken seriously. Getting home, walking long distances, bridges, what to do if our apartment isn’t structurally sound or flooded, where to meet/wait if communication is impossible, what to do in winter with no heat.
Interesting! Did you make any further progress? I personally see a great deal of value in this kind of risk identification. A lot of risks are not easily solved (eg: just buy insurance!) or properly quantified (eg: accident insurance protects me from income loss!).
I’ll share my system in case it’s helpful as a reference point.
Mint.com does a great job of tracking expenses, if you primarily use a credit card. (Which you should for the 1% discount on everything, unless you have bad self-control issues with money). It also lets you set budgets, which are fine for rough estimates but it’s strength is in recording all your transactions and I just use Excel for planning out a yearly budget. For tax record keeping, all my pay stubs and tax-deductible donations go in a ‘Fiscal Year 2014-2015’ folder on my computer, which I keep backed up on google drive and on a hard drive every two weeks.
I’ve had great success with google calendar for managing my schedule, since it syncs with my phone and I get alerts 15min before an event happens. (For example, the biweekly backups are on here as an event, as are yearly ‘time to set a budget’ reminders, work schedules, gym visits, etc). A tip if you’re overloaded with work and constantly busy is to block in some relaxation or ‘hang out with friends’ time so that those do not get pushed to the wayside.
For notes and to-do lists, I carry a small notebook and pen in my back pocket, which works well for me. (I use something similar to the getting things done method for the lists).
A lot of household supplies and food are totally fine to get as ‘just in time’ inventory, and they just go on the to-do list when I run out of the stored supplies (toilet paper, etc). The exception of course is a plunger, a fire extinguisher, and a first aid kit, which you should always have on hand. Every weekend I usually go on a grocery/supplies trip, do laundry, and clean the apartment.
For emergency preparedness, it’s not something you have to constantly think about—you could take a day this weekend and figure out how much food and water you’d need for 3 weeks of power outage, go buy that, and forget about it. You might also want a ‘go bag’ in case you need to make a flight quickly.
I also feel like I’m fairly organized compared to my peers, but I don’t actually know what their personal management systems look like. In general though, a lot of life is take-it-as-you-go, and I would not feel comfortable with a system that I can’t afford to totally ignore if I need to.
I have a similar vision to this but since my life ran smoothly for a couple of months, I did not put my thoughts onto paper.
Generally it seems that any organisation system is highly personal as there are many individual kinks to be worked out such that there is almost no way to have a holistic system apply to everyone. Also, the vast majority of people are not interested in these kind of things, I think.
The phrase “run your life / yourself / your family like a business” sometimes pops up but does not take the principle very far.
Also the whole thing is overwhelming. When I tried to do stuff like track my budget I ran into the problem that I would need to type in every damn receipt I got. Or be content with knowing that I spent any given sum at a grocery store, but then I wouldn’t know on what products. When I buy some food on the go I needed to take note. When I get digital receipts the date on the receipt did not match the date the money disappeared from my account. And so on. The whole thing was not to be trusted and instead of helping me it bothered me, so I abandoned it for casually taking a look at my accounts and estimating how long it could last.
Generally it seems that any organisation system is highly personal as there are many individual kinks to be worked out such that there is almost no way to have a holistic system apply to everyone. Also, the vast majority of people are not interested in these kind of things, I think.
This seems very true to me and now seems like the largest factor. That combined with it being a horrendous amount of work, although I believe that may be because there is no foundation to draw on.
Also the whole thing is overwhelming. When I tried to do stuff like track my budget I ran into the problem that I would need to type in every damn receipt I got. (...) so I abandoned it for casually taking a look at my accounts and estimating how long it could last.
I can relate to this very well. I did write down every expense for almost 4 years but it was just too much work. It was never really useful either, which is surprising given everything I’ve read about budgets/etc. It may of helped get my wife and I on the same page, however, so I don’t regret doing it.
I’d argue that this is the reason for having an overall umbrella. Why did we attempt to do this? Because we should? Because we wanted a specific answer? Does it require that kind of data? Most people who run a budget (including old me, before I got lazy!) did it because… we did. I liked the data. But it didn’t feed into anything, didn’t answer any important questions and didn’t seem to influence my behavior.
On the other hand, if I needed to know if I can save enough in time to travel to Europe for 4 weeks… that’s important to know! But it has nothing to do with a traditional budget (just cashflow), which I can do in ~15 minutes a month, if I organised myself to do it. (1)
Back to the overall umbrella/management system—the “why” should sit at the top. I do it because I need to plan for certain things, which cascades down to having a “budget” to a certain level of detail. Instead we seem to do it from the bottom up, resulting in making “perfect systems”. The idea drives it rather than the actual need. There is no “good enough” in that approach. It’s “cool”, not effective. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to define. A management system is meant to be effective, whereas we pick up a lot of good and cool ideas and try them out.
I actually have a story about that. The year was 2006 and I was heavily motivated to change my lifestyle. I’d just moved in with my then GF. We decided that we would track all our expenses (this was a good idea at this stage in the relationship, since we decided to merge finances more than normal), but further breakdown our grocery bills into nutritional groups. I have a nice table of how much I spent on meat, dairy, vegetables, grains, sweets… Talk about a lot of work. Interestingly enough, I got $29.55 in bottle returns. Anyway, I had the data but it did nothing. 50% of my food budget was still eating out. I still ate the same. Great idea, tremendous amount of work, accomplished very little.
(1) It’d be a four component thing—cash float, credit cards, direct withdrawals and paycheck.
Why should there be a general management system? To prevent fires.
Time and time again I meet people that operate constantly on the “kill any fire” mode instead of letting a couple of them burn down by themself and preventing any further fires from happening. This means instead of paying bills when they are so urgent that they are more important than looking for a better insurance right now people should set up a policy of paying bills in given intervals. Or setting up auto-pay.
What an exhausting way to live like that. I don’t care about bills and where to put them. And there are a thousand more issues that I need to have cleared up in my life, like what to wear or where to get my food from, none of which I deeply care about or is my main focus in life. Or in any way my area of expertise. Which makes me wonder in how many ways I live life like that: Putting out fires instead of preventing them in the first place.
Since none of those areas—paying bills, doing taxes, getting food and so on—are my area of expertise or something I deeply care about I am very willing to compromise: Not getting the optimal result in exchange for something extremely easy to use that I do not have to think about. I have never seen something like that.
I’m a big believer in Agile; professionally I’ve found that minimal management and especially minimal process works best. I use Trello to keep track of things that I need to do at some point in the future, or want to spend some time on (in a manner similar to the Getting Things Done advice, if I’m understanding that correctly), and that’s plenty.
If you do something more complex, remember to reevaluate your processes regularly, and prune any that aren’t pulling their weight.
Look into quantified self stuff, for management tracking ability.
some tracking I find useful:
Pocketbook
RescueTime
Fitbit (other activity trackers exist) for sleep tracking, to help estimate time left in the 168 hour week.
Keeping lists in an easy to check location.
Each year I have a home folder for that year. any project started or worked on in that year has a folder for it. Keep nesting folders limited, sometimes nesting happens, clutter happens too, try not to clutter the home folder for that year. So far this works well for me.
This may be long for a stupid question… and it’s not really one question… but it seems like a safe first post kind of place! It has just been on my mind a lot the last few months.
I was recently doing a review of my workplace’s management system and used personal life examples to demonstrate why the management system is (/would of been) effective. Instead of convincing anyone else, I convinced myself my life would be better off if I had a personal management system.
I’ve googled high and low and found nothing that I could draw on. The amount of self-help and motivational books I waded through though… that was impressive. I find it particularly interesting that it doesn’t seem present regardless of culture, even for procedure-heavy ones like Japan and Korea (at least in business) or more direct/rigid like Germany. Life just happens and you muddle through.
After putting pen to paper, I realised many “deficiencies” in my own life. I don’t have a records “policy”—my files are on hard drives, NAS’s, couple of clouds and a drive in a bank deposit box. I have no idea how many copies of my tax returns are floating around out there. I used to track expenses, but when I wanted to see my cashflow I realised I had no data for the last 2-3 years. I recently had to run out and buy some cleaning supplies because I ran out—that sums up my inventory system. That’s a major barrier to cooking at home. I’m not sure what I have for emergency supplies either. I certainly don’t plan (schedule or monitor) activities in my life at all. Risk management? I think my household insurance auto-renewed but not 100% sure.
Yet, I’d be considered decently organized among my peers. That seems terrifying.
Life isn’t a project, or a company, but I think the “management system” approach would be beneficial because;
It engages system 2 thinking, resulting in (presumably) better plans
It allows optimization though sharing and iteration (assuming some common approaches develop)
It helps communicating and being held accountable, least for a certain set of relationships
It helps manage change, like the move from portable drives to cloud storage, or changing insurance coverage
It increases transactional memory, where you can put trust into a system to avoid having to keep a mental maps (of files, of money, of contingencies)
It allows outsourcing since the process is relatively well defined, such as to (virtual) assistants or maid services (I believe it’d be a net economic boom)
It can help be pro-active, like staying in touch at regular intervals—both prompting and prioritizing (more to do with how you approach life)
However, my prior is that almost no one does this. The most I’ve seen are individual components—some people run very good household budgets. It just doesn’t exist as an overall framework.
Why? Is it because it doesn’t work and/or isn’t a suitable approach? A lack of definition to “life” to structure around/optimize towards? Is it more emotional, not giving up control and flexibility? Not taught/not socially acceptable? Does System 1 not bother with it, leading to failure?
--
I’ve spent some time working on this but it’s tough and I’m really not sure the effort would be worthwhile. The trigger to take it seriously was a long chain of events that led to a life achievement list. It’s still in brainstorming mode, but getting huge and it seems to me that I need to put a lot more effort into optimizing for it.
Just to be clear, a lot of the answers I have gotten in person have been along the lines of “pick what you want and focus on it”. I think it misses what I’m trying to convey—how do you manage everything you don’t focus on? Why do you do things a certain way? I want to know what to do with my copy of my taxes next time I file. I want to do it because I should and I want to know why I should. The system offers an imperative, built on the foundation of having thought it out and deciding “this is how it should be”.
You might be interested in the book Getting Things Done. It was written before smartphones and cloud syncing calendars but it can easily be adapted to To-Do lists and managing your life in the modern age.
A basic summary is thus: Every action you need to do but haven’t yet done is an open loop in your mind. You have to keep thinking about it until you do it, and close the loop. However, lots of things can’t be done except at specific times and places. You can maintain seperate to-do lists for things that can be done anywhere (Call a friend to schedule a movie, tie your shoe, etc.), and things that need you to be at your desk, at work, or at a grocery store. Storing all the myriad things that you need to do in life in your head is stressful and difficult to successfully accomplish. If you offload this information to contextual to-do lists, you can forget about the open loop and rely on your general system to remind you if it only if you can actually do something about it. This allows you focus on things you’re doing in the moment, without worrying that you’re forgetting a bunch of things you still need to do.
I am working through GTD myself and will post a more extended summary in language different from the book.
Much appreciated, I’ll take a look!
I think this is a large part of it, but it seems like a subset of what I’m thinking about. This is a great answer if someone came up to you and asked “how do you get things done?”, and it is a pretty broad planning approach. Even better, those who use a similar system can talk about their approach, ideally sharing ideas and “best practices”. Even when I googled the book, I got thousands of hits that would help me—tools, blogs, reviews. To use corporate speak, this would be a set of policies, processes and guidance… complete with workflows. It fits perfectly (this comment pending me actually reading the book!).
what I struggle with is that there doesn’t seem to be anything above this. Most companies have some sort of management system that would give context to the process.
To give a corporate example applied to real life, most people don’t really evaluate risk in their own life. Here at LW and such we talk about existential risk, but I’d still guess that very few have disaster supplies or plans for much more likely events (this is from recent talks triggered by http://www.shakeout.org/ ). My wife and I talked casually over dinner about earthquakes and realised this is a non-trivial problem that probably should be taken seriously. Getting home, walking long distances, bridges, what to do if our apartment isn’t structurally sound or flooded, where to meet/wait if communication is impossible, what to do in winter with no heat.
The same applies to a lot of other risks—robbery, fire, financial, accidents, sickness...
Each of those can be dealt with tasks that would be governed by the GTD process, so I think it’s a big part (it is either done or not!), but I feel like there is this missing umbrella that binds these things together. There seems to be a lot of social gains to it as well. Talking about disasters with our friends would lead to some pressure on them to prepare, as well as share how we would do it and possibly find shared solutions.
Example above could be replaced with less extreme examples, like how you store your files/pictures/etc or do your household budget.
I have started working on something like that a while ago.
Interesting! Did you make any further progress? I personally see a great deal of value in this kind of risk identification. A lot of risks are not easily solved (eg: just buy insurance!) or properly quantified (eg: accident insurance protects me from income loss!).
No progress, I dropped the ball because of smooth sailing in my life. Which is exactly why I should prepare for things getting worse.
But seeing as people gave upvotes, there seems to be interest. I might pick the ball up again.
I’ll share my system in case it’s helpful as a reference point.
Mint.com does a great job of tracking expenses, if you primarily use a credit card. (Which you should for the 1% discount on everything, unless you have bad self-control issues with money). It also lets you set budgets, which are fine for rough estimates but it’s strength is in recording all your transactions and I just use Excel for planning out a yearly budget. For tax record keeping, all my pay stubs and tax-deductible donations go in a ‘Fiscal Year 2014-2015’ folder on my computer, which I keep backed up on google drive and on a hard drive every two weeks.
I’ve had great success with google calendar for managing my schedule, since it syncs with my phone and I get alerts 15min before an event happens. (For example, the biweekly backups are on here as an event, as are yearly ‘time to set a budget’ reminders, work schedules, gym visits, etc). A tip if you’re overloaded with work and constantly busy is to block in some relaxation or ‘hang out with friends’ time so that those do not get pushed to the wayside.
For notes and to-do lists, I carry a small notebook and pen in my back pocket, which works well for me. (I use something similar to the getting things done method for the lists).
A lot of household supplies and food are totally fine to get as ‘just in time’ inventory, and they just go on the to-do list when I run out of the stored supplies (toilet paper, etc). The exception of course is a plunger, a fire extinguisher, and a first aid kit, which you should always have on hand. Every weekend I usually go on a grocery/supplies trip, do laundry, and clean the apartment.
For emergency preparedness, it’s not something you have to constantly think about—you could take a day this weekend and figure out how much food and water you’d need for 3 weeks of power outage, go buy that, and forget about it. You might also want a ‘go bag’ in case you need to make a flight quickly.
I also feel like I’m fairly organized compared to my peers, but I don’t actually know what their personal management systems look like. In general though, a lot of life is take-it-as-you-go, and I would not feel comfortable with a system that I can’t afford to totally ignore if I need to.
I have a similar vision to this but since my life ran smoothly for a couple of months, I did not put my thoughts onto paper.
Generally it seems that any organisation system is highly personal as there are many individual kinks to be worked out such that there is almost no way to have a holistic system apply to everyone. Also, the vast majority of people are not interested in these kind of things, I think.
The phrase “run your life / yourself / your family like a business” sometimes pops up but does not take the principle very far.
Also the whole thing is overwhelming. When I tried to do stuff like track my budget I ran into the problem that I would need to type in every damn receipt I got. Or be content with knowing that I spent any given sum at a grocery store, but then I wouldn’t know on what products. When I buy some food on the go I needed to take note. When I get digital receipts the date on the receipt did not match the date the money disappeared from my account. And so on. The whole thing was not to be trusted and instead of helping me it bothered me, so I abandoned it for casually taking a look at my accounts and estimating how long it could last.
This seems very true to me and now seems like the largest factor. That combined with it being a horrendous amount of work, although I believe that may be because there is no foundation to draw on.
I can relate to this very well. I did write down every expense for almost 4 years but it was just too much work. It was never really useful either, which is surprising given everything I’ve read about budgets/etc. It may of helped get my wife and I on the same page, however, so I don’t regret doing it.
I’d argue that this is the reason for having an overall umbrella. Why did we attempt to do this? Because we should? Because we wanted a specific answer? Does it require that kind of data? Most people who run a budget (including old me, before I got lazy!) did it because… we did. I liked the data. But it didn’t feed into anything, didn’t answer any important questions and didn’t seem to influence my behavior.
On the other hand, if I needed to know if I can save enough in time to travel to Europe for 4 weeks… that’s important to know! But it has nothing to do with a traditional budget (just cashflow), which I can do in ~15 minutes a month, if I organised myself to do it. (1)
Back to the overall umbrella/management system—the “why” should sit at the top. I do it because I need to plan for certain things, which cascades down to having a “budget” to a certain level of detail. Instead we seem to do it from the bottom up, resulting in making “perfect systems”. The idea drives it rather than the actual need. There is no “good enough” in that approach. It’s “cool”, not effective. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to define. A management system is meant to be effective, whereas we pick up a lot of good and cool ideas and try them out.
I actually have a story about that. The year was 2006 and I was heavily motivated to change my lifestyle. I’d just moved in with my then GF. We decided that we would track all our expenses (this was a good idea at this stage in the relationship, since we decided to merge finances more than normal), but further breakdown our grocery bills into nutritional groups. I have a nice table of how much I spent on meat, dairy, vegetables, grains, sweets… Talk about a lot of work. Interestingly enough, I got $29.55 in bottle returns. Anyway, I had the data but it did nothing. 50% of my food budget was still eating out. I still ate the same. Great idea, tremendous amount of work, accomplished very little.
(1) It’d be a four component thing—cash float, credit cards, direct withdrawals and paycheck.
Why should there be a general management system? To prevent fires.
Time and time again I meet people that operate constantly on the “kill any fire” mode instead of letting a couple of them burn down by themself and preventing any further fires from happening. This means instead of paying bills when they are so urgent that they are more important than looking for a better insurance right now people should set up a policy of paying bills in given intervals. Or setting up auto-pay.
What an exhausting way to live like that. I don’t care about bills and where to put them. And there are a thousand more issues that I need to have cleared up in my life, like what to wear or where to get my food from, none of which I deeply care about or is my main focus in life. Or in any way my area of expertise. Which makes me wonder in how many ways I live life like that: Putting out fires instead of preventing them in the first place.
Since none of those areas—paying bills, doing taxes, getting food and so on—are my area of expertise or something I deeply care about I am very willing to compromise: Not getting the optimal result in exchange for something extremely easy to use that I do not have to think about. I have never seen something like that.
Nitpick: would have or would’ve, not would of.
I’m a big believer in Agile; professionally I’ve found that minimal management and especially minimal process works best. I use Trello to keep track of things that I need to do at some point in the future, or want to spend some time on (in a manner similar to the Getting Things Done advice, if I’m understanding that correctly), and that’s plenty.
If you do something more complex, remember to reevaluate your processes regularly, and prune any that aren’t pulling their weight.
Look into quantified self stuff, for management tracking ability. some tracking I find useful: Pocketbook RescueTime Fitbit (other activity trackers exist) for sleep tracking, to help estimate time left in the 168 hour week. Keeping lists in an easy to check location. Each year I have a home folder for that year. any project started or worked on in that year has a folder for it. Keep nesting folders limited, sometimes nesting happens, clutter happens too, try not to clutter the home folder for that year. So far this works well for me.