How do I practice information hierarchy?

The most direct way to practice information hierarchy is through a focused exercise: Open a knowledge base, project folder, or bookmarks collection you actually use. Identify the top level (the broadest categories) and the leaf level (the individual items). Now look at the middle: are there intermediate levels that help you navigate from broad to specific? If the middle is missing — if you jump from 'Projects' directly to hundreds of files — design one intermediate layer. Create 5 to 10 subcategories based on how you actually look for things, not how things are formally classified.

Common pitfall: Building intermediate levels that reflect how the content is organized in theory rather than how you actually search for it. A folder called 'Q3 2025 Deliverables' makes sense to the person who created it during Q3 2025. Six months later, nobody navigates by quarter — they navigate by client, by project type, or by status. The intermediate layer only works if it matches the searcher's mental model at retrieval time, not the organizer's mental model at creation time.

This practice connects to Phase 14 (Hierarchy and Nesting) — building it as a repeatable habit compounds over time.