Don't Take My Folders Away! Organizing for GTD

Is the title of a research study by William Jones, Ammy Jiranida Phuwanartnurak, Rajdeep Gill, and Harry Bruce that explores the way people organize information in support of projects ("teach a course,' "plan a wedding", etc.) 

The folder structures to organize project information – especially electronic documents and other files – frequently resembled a “divide and conquer” problem decomposition with subfolders corresponding to major components (subprojects) of the project. Folders were clearly more than simply a means to one end: Organizing for later retrieval. Folders were information in their own right – representing, for example, a person’s evolving understanding of a project and its components. Unfortunately, folders are often “overloaded” with information.

Reminds of me of my personal research project at the N-TEN Conference in Denver in 2001 where I interviewed folks in the nonprofit technology field about how they organized the folders on their hard drives.  Okay,  I was in a bar called Blue Martini with colleagues, but managed to leverage the research into an article on information coping skills.

I found this research paper via Christian Crumlish's notes on Social Information architecture, sorting and tagging.  You can Rashhmi Sinha's slides here.  Now, all we need is the audio and flickr streams.