Andy Matuschak keeps his notes in public, and the system is worth studying if you’ve ever built a folder structure and watched it decay.
The instinct most people have is to design the taxonomy up front: folders by topic, by project, by year. Then they use it, and reality bends the structure. Notes get duplicated across folders. The “Misc” bucket swallows everything. Six months in, the hierarchy describes how you thought you’d work, not how you actually do.
Matuschak’s approach is the opposite. The structure emerges from use. Notes link to each other freely; the important ones surface through backlinks and frequency; the dead ones quietly sink. There’s no master folder because the master folder would be wrong within a week.
The lesson isn’t “use backlinks.” It’s that the right structure for your work is usually something you discover by doing the work, not something you can specify before it. Any tool that forces you to commit to a taxonomy up front is asking you to predict the shape of your own thinking. You won’t.
This is the same reason ActionAmp doesn’t ask you to design your project tree before you start. Capture first. Let the structure reveal itself. Triage what emerges. The taxonomy is the output, not the input.