Karl Voit has a couple of nice posts in which he discusses his key binding and file hierarchy strategies. If you’re like me, these things develop in an organic—a nice way of saying haphazard—way. They just evolve over time without a lot of thought or planning. Voit, of course, is an expert on this sort of thing so he has spent some time planning them out in a way that optimizes his workflow.
The main ways he optimizes is key binding layout is to put most of his own bindings under a single prefix. Combined with which-key, this makes it easy for him to find even infrequently used bindings. He also makes use of hydras as a sort of automatic cheat sheet for things like Dired.
Because most things I do involve Org mode in one way or another, a lot of my files live in a directory called org. The only serious subdirectory of org is blog, which contains the local copy of all my blog posts for Irreal. That directory contains just short of 3,000 files so it could probably benefit from being broken into subdirectories by, say, year.
I have additional directories for things like pictures, comics, tax forms, and source code repositories. Voit’s layout is much more thought out. He keeps most things in an archive directory that is further broken down by year and a few other specialized categories.
Voit says that research shows people would rather browse their directories than use a search tool to find files and to some extent his directory structure reflects that. I prefer to put things in broad categories and use a search tool to find what I need. Apple has Spotlight, which makes that pretty easy but I mostly depend counsel-rg and Emacs to find my files. Oddly, that approach is something I learned (or more precisely, adapted) from Voit.
It’s worth reading both his posts and mining those ideas that fit in with your own workflow. They both have a lot of good ideas.