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About 10 years ago, setting up my first post-college, single household, I created a hierachical filing system for household information in my file cabinet, using those hanging folders which allow you to insert the tab at various places along the top. Major topics had tabs to the left, and tabs further to the right indicated sub-topics of those, etc.
Sounds nice in theory, right? I encountered several problems, though. The major one was that although you would think this indexing scheme would make it trival to find something (at least I did), it turns out that in many cases it made it harder, because just like Yahoo has cross-indexed topics, there's often more than one path that makes sense. So the path that made sense when you filed it last year might not make sense this year, either because you've gotten more related stuff, or you're just thinking differently. So you have to decide if it's time to re-organize, or just try to remember where it is, which goes against the whole point of the system?
Secondly, due to the effort involved in begining new paths or re-organizing old ones, it turned out to take an inordinate amount of time to maintain the system. It was a real-life physical example of the retrieval/update time tradeoff in database indexing. As a result, the stack of "to be filed later" paperwork grew to more than a foot at times. To continue the database analogy, now I had to do two searches: first the indexed search through the filed items (sometimes trying multiple paths), then a "table scan" through the unfiled stack.
Solution? Sorry, I never found one. I ended up getting married to someone older than myself, who had her own system that had worked for her for a longer time, so she just took over that area of household organization! ;-) I think she has retained some of the hierachical aspects of my system, but being an artist, she adds her own quirks like labelling the drawers with pictures rather than words. ("The financial papers are in the drawer with the picture of the lime dear, because money and limes are both green, obviously...")
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