zy.month
zy.yesterday
zz.today
zz.tomorrow

And a command “sweep”, which tucks everything that is not supposed to be in my $HOME into zz.today. I have burn, doc, host.frank(1), inbox.*, usr, wiki and www. Everything except host.frank and burn and pub(2) are a link into usr, and that’s backed up across the network. All the above day directories are links into host.frank/ATTIC/%Y/%Y.m/%Y.m.d/.

I also have a gtdlink app that runs at 4am and relinks the zz.today, etc directories into the host.$HOSTNAME/ATTIC hierarchy, thus pushing back today to yesterday. Any files in zz.today (which used to be tomorrow) are then moved to $HOME and images and desktop files (reminder web links, mostly) launched. Thus I can drag in reminders to any date in the future and they appear in my $HOME on that day, and are launched, sitting and ready for me on my desktop when I sit down.

Oh, I also “collapse” inbox.* projects when they are done. So I might have a inbox.virginvoices.rewrite. When I’m done, I rename it simply virginvoices.rewrite, and it hits the temporal stream and is swept up.

There are a handful of other refinements (I mark the directories yellow, or if the day of the week is Saturday or Sunday, red), but that’s the basic idea. Every so often I whack at host.$HOSTNAME/ATTIC to keep the size down, but it’s basically a trailing (and leading) queue I pass through in realtime, sweeping up downloads and temporary files in case I want to locate (often literally locate, a la updatedb) them.

1 – Each computer on my network has a $HOME/host.$HOSTNAME for all users, frank just happens to be my current primary desktop. It’s the local file section, but the name is also handy to know where you are.

2 – burn and pub are basically links to my home file server, and are inbound and filed media, respectively.