What is the ACEx Folder Structure?

The ACEx method by Nick Milo from Linking Your Thinking is a folder structure for digital notes that focuses on learning, remembering, and creating (in that order).¹

Milo is a YouTuber and online course creator, and this method helps him with what he calls note-making (deliberate sense-making) and organizing his “head spaces.”

ACE is an acronym for the three organizational spaces where it places things. These spaces each encode a different intentionality and organizing principle:

1. Atlas (for knowledge, to understand and learn, organized by “relatedness”)

2. Calendar (for time, to focus and remember/reflect, organized by “time”)

3. Efforts (for action, to act and create, organized by “importance”)

Unlike the PARA method, ACE also proposes organizational containers, i.e., nested folders inside the organizational spaces.

• Inside the Atlas space, we find various containers with different purposes

  • Maps contains all our index notes (or “Maps of Content”)

  • Notes contains a hierarchy of category folders such as Ideas, People, Sources, …

  • Utilities is for images, templates, …

• Inside the Calendar space, we have Logs and Notes

• Inside the Efforts space, we organize by important/actionability

  • On for active efforts

  • Ongoing for standards/ambient efforts

  • Simmering as a kind of “waiting for”

  • Sleeping as a kind of archive.

ACE is based on the various different ways we can potentially store and interact with knowledge. We can look ahead to create and act new things (Efforts), we can look back to remember and reflect (Calendar) or we can engage with our ideas in the here and now (Atlas).

Two things need to be mentioned here: First, Milo acknowledges that folder structures are individual but still attempts to create a truly universal system from which people can start. Second, while other organizational methods like Johnny Decimal or PARA have remained unchanged since their conception, Milo is still actively wrestling with his system. In early 2023, he still promoted an older version of his system called ACCESS. Then, later in that year, he publicly declared:

I believe I finally got there recently with the most universal folder system for PKM: ACE (Atlas, Calendar, Efforts). At least, it will likely be my folder system’s final form. I am extremely pleased with it and now I wake up at 3am calm and relieved before falling back asleep.

Still, in mid-2024, he is introducing the next version, called ACEx where x stands for eXtra. While several people have successfully adapted ACE, it is unclear how Milo’s thoughts will evolve here.

Knowledge Builders — a Fractal Productivity spin-off — will introduce you to yet another way to organize personal knowledge. It’s called the PEAKER method and was first revealed in the essay series Beyond PARA. The eXtra space Milo is adding looks a lot like the The Keep org space of the PEAKER method.

1. Unfortunately, there is no official blog post I can link to that introduces the method. However, Milo provides a public Obsidian vault, a more time-intensive but practical way to explore the method.

Milo officially calls his method the “ACE framework,” albeit the term “framework” might be misplaced here. Frameworks should be seen as interrelated collections of methods, as I explained in The Iceberg Of Accomplishment.