“Everything in its right place”
This method predates my CNC, been doing this for (oh geeze) 20+ years. I’m a windows computer programmer so in-mind organization easily transitions to computer directory/file structure. Even before Microsoft introduced “My Documents” was using a drive (D:) for my own personal documents.
At some point a D:\Projects\ started (for personal non-work projects). So I would have directories under there like “D:\Projects\2001 - Data Recovery”. Within that folder I would keep all files associated with that project, pictures, documents, whatever. So as the projects progresses from “research” to actually doing something everything associated with that project is in one place. Even plain text “.txt” files for notes, measurements, etc.
When I started using a CNC for my “Projects” (almost) nothing changed, I still just have folders collecting files. However now I seem to have more pictures of my completed projects. Well and as I have aged the percentage of projects that reached a “completed” stage has increased. There is a potential flaw in that I put dates on my project folders, which seems to only point out how long ago I started “thinking” about some projects.
My father in law is a (retired) weather scientist. He has notebooks for different subjects, not talking about work, everything else. The discipline and detail is shocking and impressive, but after watching Mr. Tornado I realized this is how organized people did things before computers.
There are now software products that do a lot of this for you. For work I use “Evernote”, and my kid is a big fan of Microsoft OneNote. But the concept is the same, a place to collect things that are related. Like having a place to keep all your CNC bits, only in the digital world.
But this only works if everything is in the right place, which age has taught me just does NOT work for some people.