[Design] Aged items--compare with "aged receivables"

[David Neeley]

Greetings! 
  
I've been thinking about the value of any given item of information, and how to apply human judgement to that item the least number of times. 
  
My thoughts went to the concept in accounting of "aged receivables"--the idea that the older a debt to you is, the less you are likely to receive it at all. 
  
Similarly, much of the information we get is of decaying use as time passes...and yet most classification schemes simply lump it into an original "importance bucket" and there it stays until a decision is made, usually by the human operator--to move it elsewhere. 
  
The result--HUGE folders that grow increasingly difficult to peruse for the things that are significant. 
  
Thus, I think there should be some kind of designations that can be assigned to various kinds of information that would at some future date move them automatically to a lower importance level. Whether this might mean putting it in some other information folder or merely moving it down in the display order, should likely be in the province of the user and the original configuration definitions. 
  
David