Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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I keep a pretty simple hierarchy for filing messages. I have a couple of top level folders, and dozens of sub folders. For example, I use:
Now each of these folders can have many folders. I also happen to use this as my categorization system for tasks, and similarly, folders in My Documents folder. I basically call this my Productivity Namespace. This namespace also happens to be my ClearContext Topics which allow me to file messages to my folders with a few keystrokes.
However, there are two “special” folders: Reference and Expire. Due to the powerful search software that we have nowadays, when something doesn’t fit into my Productivity Namespace, I simply file it in Reference. This is the “one day I might need this”. However, if I know that some bit of reference info will become obsolete in a few weeks or a few months I place it in “Expire”. Expire has an AutoArchive rule that deletes items in there after 6 months. This gives me enough time to keep it around in case I need it but eventually it goes away, unlike Reference which stays around forever.
With most search tools you can do a search like this:
<search phrase> folder:<folder name>
which is handy for scoping the search to a particular namepsace of mine.