Folders Kill Creativity (Anne-Laure Le Cunff)

Author: Anne-Laure Le Cunff (Ness Labs) URL: https://www.mentalnodes.com/folders-kill-creativity Shared via: her April 24, 2020 tweet One-line: A short note from Le Cunff’s public “Mental Nodes” garden arguing that the folder, a habit inherited from computer operating systems, is the wrong shape for creative thinking.

Summary

The note is a compact list of objections to folder-based organization, written at the height of the 2020 networked-note-taking wave.

• Folders force a single category. They assume every piece of content belongs in exactly one definable bucket, and they force you to make that call for everything you save.
• Copies are not the same idea. Duplicating a note so it can live in two folders creates separate entities rather than one idea that is reachable from several places. She contrasts this with the brain, which would be absurdly inefficient if every idea had to be duplicated for every region that uses it.
• Folders hide redundancy. Seeing the same idea resurface is valuable, because recurrence is how new patterns get noticed, but folders bury those repetitions where you never compare them.
• Folders impose artificial hierarchy. Because folders nest inside folders, creating anything means positioning it inside a rigid tree before you know how it relates to everything else.

The implied alternative is a linked, non-hierarchical graph of notes, the design idea behind tools like Roam Research and Obsidian. Her conclusion is blunt: folders work against creativity.

Full text

Archived privately against link rot: ../attachments/folders-kill-creativity/folders-kill-creativity.md (short note, about 200 words).

Connections

• Quick note on why I… (tweet) — the tweet Kyle saved, which links this note.
• Anne-Laure Le Cunff — author; the note lives on her public Mental Nodes site.
• Tools For Thought and Personal Knowledge Management — the broader movement this note is part of.
• Zettelkasten and Evergreen Notes — the link-first, folder-free note systems her argument points toward.
• Roam Research and Obsidian — the bidirectional-link tools that turned this critique into product design.