Alright, let me tell you about this thing I tried called ‘santari’. It wasn’t some fancy tech project, more like a personal experiment I cooked up a while back when things felt a bit out of control.
Getting Started
So, picture this: my digital life was a mess. Files everywhere – desktop, downloads folder, random cloud storage spots I barely remembered signing up for. Finding anything was becoming a real chore. I felt like I was drowning in digital junk. I figured I needed a system, something really basic to just get a handle on things. I ended up calling my little plan ‘santari’. Don’t ask me why, it just popped into my head. Sounded simple, felt right at the time.
The Actual Doing Part
First thing I did was just look. I mean, really look at the chaos. Opened up all the folders, peered into the dusty corners of my hard drive. It was worse than I thought. Honestly, a bit embarrassing.
Then, I decided on the core idea for ‘santari’: radical simplicity. I thought, okay, let’s try just three main folders at the top level:
- Work
- Personal
- Archive
That was it. No complicated sub-sub-subfolders. Anything current goes into Work or Personal. Anything old or done with, but maybe needed someday? Straight into Archive. Anything else? Delete.
The big cleanup started next. This took way longer than I expected. Weekends, evenings… just dragging and dropping, trying to make quick decisions. Should this go? Keep? Where does it fit? Found a lot of old stuff – photos from years ago, half-finished projects I’d completely forgotten about. Got distracted quite a bit, went down memory lane more than once.
I tried hard to be ruthless, really channel that ‘santari’ spirit. If I hadn’t touched it in a year, did I really need it cluttering up my main space? Mostly, it went into Archive. Deleting felt scary, but I forced myself to get rid of obvious junk – installers for software I don’t use, duplicate files, blurry photos.
The whole point was to keep it low-tech. No special software, no fancy tagging systems. Just basic folders. That felt like part of the ‘santari’ philosophy – simple tools, simple system.
So, What Happened?
Well, setting it up felt pretty good, I won’t lie. For a week or two, things looked clean. My desktop was clear, finding recent files was easier. Felt like I’d actually achieved something.
But then… life happens, right? New files started piling up. Downloads folder got messy again. That ‘Archive’ folder? It just became a slightly more organized dumping ground for things I was afraid to delete. Maintaining the ‘santari’ discipline was the hard part.
It wasn’t a total failure. It forced me to confront the mess and do a major clear-out, which was definitely needed. But the super-simple structure maybe wasn’t flexible enough for how I actually work and live. Projects overlap, things don’t always fit neatly into ‘Work’ or ‘Personal’.
In the end, ‘santari’ didn’t stick perfectly. My system now is kind of a hybrid. Some of the ‘santari’ structure remains, but there’s still a bit of controlled chaos. I rely more on my computer’s search function now than I’d like to admit. What I really learned wasn’t about the perfect folder structure. It was more about habits. The system doesn’t matter as much as the discipline to actually use it consistently. So yeah, ‘santari’. It was an experience.
