Locality

Think about your home, your desk, your kitchen. What are the things that you keep most easily accessible? It’s probably the things you need the most often. Those things that you need once a month you can keep inside a cupboard and those you need only once a year you can keep buried somewhere in the basement. In the same way you can organize your maps so that the things you need most often are most easily accessible and those you don’t need are moved out of the way.

Then you group items with a similar function together. If you have the salt here you probably don’t put the pepper on the other side of the room. The kitchen might have some non-food functions too. You might have pen and paper in the there so you can write down things for a shopping list whenever you see something is missing, or maybe you want to leave notes to other family members, and the kitchen table or the door of the fridge happens to act as the bulletin board in the house.

Say you have a storage room up in the attic, or outdoors, or down in basement or other side of the town and you want to take something there. You store them somewhere temporarily first. When you get enough stuff waiting or you cannot move in your lobby anymore you finally move them all the way to the final destination. The same way you can create temporary storages for your notes and ideas.

Sometimes you use a selection of items so often that you create a separate place for them. You have the salt and pepper on the table, even though you have a whole collection of other spices in the house. Similarly, if I was planning a trip to France I would probably keep some of the most relevant information about the country in my Trip-to-France map but keep the bulk of the country information somewhere else and just link to it.