I mentioned this briefly in my post about keysuite and contact tagging , but I wanted to emphasize this trick/practice on its own .

Someone somewhere in the world of user interface design decided that all lists should be in alphabetical order. This goes for folders windows, folders in outlook, categories in palm, tags in rojo , and labels in gmail . That was just to name a few.

When these lists get long, and stretch off the page, what happens when your most often accessed folder or tag begins with a ‘w’ or ‘z’? Well, you’re out of luck, and you have to scroll down the window each time to get to it.

My objection is that the Alphabetical order is placing these tags and folders based on rules other than your workflow.

To take back the order of list/tags/folders in your life, you need to look to special characters (!@#$%^&*_+). The characters when placed at the beginning of the word can overrided its alphabetical sorting, and move it to the top of a list.

A classic example for me is that I will put a ‘!’ in front of the most important folders so that they show up in the top:

• Rojo - I tag the feeds I read daily as “! Daily” rather than “Daily”
• gmail – I use the lable “! Todo” rather than “Todo” to label e-mails that require a task to be done.
• My GTD setup – I have a category tagged as “! Today” so that I can go through all my other contexts and add the “! Today” tag to the Next Actions that need to get done today (Keysuite allows for tasks to have multiple tags)

Hope that wasn’t super obvious! I used this concept years ago to put my folders in order in Windows. The most important got a lower number. Simple but effective, and it had the added benefit of making navigating with keyboard shortcuts easier.