My Attempt with the Routliffe Fernandez Method
So, someone mentioned this ‘Routliffe Fernandez’ approach a while back. Heard it was some way to untangle project notes, supposed to be good for messy projects with lots of little pieces. I had this one project, just a complete disaster zone file-wise, thought I’d give it a shot. Nothing really official online, just word of mouth, really.
First thing, I grabbed all my notes. We’re talking digital files, scanned papers, random text snippets, emails, the whole lot. The idea, as I understood it, was not to categorize upfront like you normally would. Instead, you just dump everything into one big pile.
Getting Started
So I did that. Made a massive folder on my computer. Dragged everything in. Felt weird, honestly. Like making the mess bigger before cleaning it. The next step was supposed to be about identifying ‘anchors’. These weren’t keywords exactly, more like core concepts or recurring names or problems. You’re meant to just read through stuff randomly, spot these anchors, and tag them loosely.
- Dumped all files into one ‘Chaos Folder’.
- Started reading through randomly, no specific order.
- Pulled out recurring themes or names – these were my ‘anchors’.
- Used simple text tags right in the filenames, like [AnchorName]_*. Very basic stuff.
The Actual Process
This took ages. Seriously, just wading through. The ‘Routliffe Fernandez’ idea, or my interpretation of it, was slow. You’re not building an index, you’re kind of… feeling your way through the information. After a few days of this tagging, I was supposed to see connections naturally emerge between files with the same tags.
Did it work? Well, sort of. I did start seeing some links I hadn’t noticed before. Like how a comment in an old email thread connected to a requirement in a document I’d forgotten about. The tagging helped pull those together when I searched for the anchor tags.
What I Found
But man, it was clunky. Renaming files like that isn’t great for version control, obviously. And searching tags in filenames is primitive. It felt like using a hammer for a screwdriver’s job sometimes. It wasn’t a magic bullet. It mostly forced me to actually re-read everything properly, which is probably where the real benefit came from, not the system itself.
It also didn’t scale well. Fine for maybe a hundred files. But thousands? Forget it. You’d need proper software, not just filename tags. I think this Routliffe Fernandez thing, if it’s even a real documented thing, is probably more of a mindset – forcing deep re-engagement – rather than a practical system for large amounts of data.
In the end, I organized the project using more standard tools. But the initial ‘deep dive’ forced by this method did help clear some fog. So, mixed results. Probably wouldn’t do it exactly like that again, but the principle of really digging back into the raw material, that part stuck with me.
