[HN Gopher] Johnny.Decimal - A system to organise your life
___________________________________________________________________
Johnny.Decimal - A system to organise your life
Author : debone
Score : 530 points
Date : 2025-02-21 14:52 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (johnnydecimal.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (johnnydecimal.com)
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Decimal_Classification
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I think _having_ a system is more important than which system it
| is. I don 't see much benefit to limiting your hierarchy to 3
| levels. Putting metadata like creation time in filenames is
| _probably_ the wrong thing to do, since it 's redundant, although
| it's mighty tempting-and I do it all the time.
| tsumnia wrote:
| I will say that I have a few hierarchies I use regularly that
| go beyond 3 levels, and they are annoying to work with. There
| are times where I will copy the entire sub-directory to my
| desktop just to reduced how many levels I'm working from. Then
| once I'm done, I'll copy the files back into their little "box"
| and delete the desktop version.
| WillAdams wrote:
| That sort of thing really makes me miss the Miller Column
| Filebrowser on my NeXT Cube (and wish that Apple's
| implementation were more like to it --- it just doesn't
| "feel" right to me when I use it on my MacBook).
| cloudfudge wrote:
| Allowing the filesystem to track creation time means you have
| to worry about how you move the data around and whether the
| tools you're using preserve it properly. A folder named
| 20250221-nyc-trip is a coarse but very durable way to store
| that.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| 20250221-nyc-trip is not a creation time, it's an identifier
| of the subject. they're both dates but they're different
| things.
| zerkten wrote:
| Agree. The benefit of posts like these is that someone has
| documented their system and iterated on it. You can then steal
| ideas that work for you.
|
| As a not very organized person, and having struggled with
| getting personal systems running, guides like this help quite a
| bit. I've only improved by taking bits that stick for me
| (https://www.hanselman.com/blog/one-email-rule-have-a-
| separat...). Anytime I tried a whole system, it failed to get
| going at all causing me more stress.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I have found that after multiple migrations from one computer
| to another, some of my file creation dates are incorrect. I
| don't use JD but I do have a lot of stuff in yearly folders and
| some of it's clearly wrong. Like I _know_ that I started one of
| my graphic novels in 2012 but some of the first few pages have
| dates in 2014 and 2019. Did a computer migration change the
| dates? Did some edit I did later on save it as a new file? I
| don 't know. I just know the date's way off.
|
| I agree that the choice to have _any_ system is important.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| Totally agree. Consider the simple act of copying a file.
| Will it retain the original date or start fresh? There is a
| correct answer, but maybe it depends on the operating system,
| or the program you're using to do the copy. But I don't care.
| "Ain't nobody got time for that." When I want to know the
| creation date or if I just want a unique name I add a the
| date as a suffix; 022125. It also helps that it's much easier
| to see at a glance.
| charleshan wrote:
| 250221 is probably a better format for your needs ;)
| vander_elst wrote:
| Previous discussions:
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36308366
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37506640
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398027
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _Johnny Decimal: A System to Organize Projects (2015)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37506640 - Sept 2023 (118
| comments)
|
| _Johnny Decimal_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36308366 - June 2023 (193
| comments)
|
| _Johnny.Decimal - A System to Organize Projects_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36300472 - June 2023 (1
| comment)
|
| _Johnny*Decimal_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33683874 - Nov 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Johnny.Decimal_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398027 - Dec 2020 (187
| comments)
|
| _Johnny.Decimal - A system to organise projects_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13770827 - March 2017 (2
| comments)
| awestley wrote:
| I see this pop up every few years. I wish I had the follow though
| to do this.
| RationPhantoms wrote:
| Can I ask what benefit it provides? I'm genuinely curious what
| it could potentially provide.
| ashu1461 wrote:
| I think it is for power users who document a lot, just think
| of it as a better way to organise your documentation. I think
| the secret behind good documentation is the effort which will
| go daily to maintain it vs following a specific system.
|
| If you are putting in daily effort you will automatically
| find a system which suits your needs.
| zerkten wrote:
| It's therapy for a lot of people. The act of organizing helps
| them deal with information. That act of organizing and
| storing can help with recall for me but not as much as
| writing something down on paper does. The number of times
| people pull info out of these systems is questionable.
|
| An argument people use is that these systems help you later
| in life. I find these systems really hard to adopt and also
| find it difficult to work with people who expose these
| systems outwardly.
| emacsen wrote:
| I originally started with Johnny.Decimal for my life and after
| giving it a big try, switched to PARA.
|
| J.D is fine (maybe even great) if your categories are relatively
| static, such as a small business, but as an individual, I found
| it very restrictive and challenging to remember. Moreover, while
| the decimals are cool, I found them somewhat irrelevant if I was
| the only one referencing them.
|
| J.D is optimized for retrieval, where what I needed was optimized
| storage, and then occasional retrial.
|
| To each their own of course, and using _any_ system is better
| than none.
| pendingU wrote:
| I'm always impressed by systems like this, but I've personally
| never understood the point.
|
| I'd be curious to learn from others what the benefits of this
| kind of archiving are for them? And if the time cost is worth it.
|
| For me, I feel like I treat most of my documents as very temporal
| things. I need them for a certain period of time, but then after
| that, they can be list to the ether. I have never really had a
| need to reference old content, plans, documents, etc.
|
| The only old things I ever need to reference are old code
| projects and writings. But even that I can usually manage with
| just a single folder for the project.
|
| Everytime I get a new computer, I just start fresh. Keeping only
| a very small amount of files backed up in cloud services. Which
| as I mentioned are just a very small collection of code projects
| and writings. Am I crazy? Haha.
| 42lux wrote:
| You will understand when you get into your 50-60s.
| ocharles wrote:
| Because of the volume of documents, or because of some
| cognitive change at that age?
| raintrees wrote:
| Both, for me. Memory not as sharp as it used to be, and
| more to be organized.
| 42lux wrote:
| Volume is a factor but it's more about melancholia and
| being able to recall the years of your life.
| esafak wrote:
| My parents are way older than that and never worried about
| such things.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| I have a cloud folder where I store pretty much all data I care
| about, both for work and personal life (with exceptions like
| photos and videos, for space reasons). It used to be a huge
| mess and I often had a hard time finding a specific thing. I
| switched to J.D a few years ago - or rather to a modification
| of it, it's not strict: I do have a few "out of category"
| folders that were difficult to neatly categorize, for example -
| but the principles are there. And now I find it much easier to
| locate stuff.
|
| In my case, though, looking for specific documents from several
| years ago is very common. Maybe if you don't have that need and
| can find things just fine with your current setup, J.D would do
| nothing for you.
| lardissone wrote:
| I tried many organization systems, including Johnny Decimal like
| PARA. And none of them worked for me. As an ADHD person, I've
| found the best way for me is not put effort in organizing at all.
| For that reason I've found tools like Logseq/Tana/Reflect does a
| great job. I just write in the journal and tag items accordingly
| if required, then if I need to write some long form document, I
| create specific pages for it. Then search and backlinks are
| everything I need. My brain works better searching than browsing.
| niteshpant wrote:
| > As an ADHD person, I've found the best way for me is not put
| effort in organizing at all
|
| Agreed - I looked at the website for a hot second, got
| overwhelmed and immediately closed it
|
| Consistency is key for a good organization system.
| Unfortunately, consistency in such manners of life isnt our
| forte
| doomnuts wrote:
| Preach brother
| kossTKR wrote:
| Exactly. Intricate systems are pure noise for me, a simple MD
| file opened in a texteditor like Sublime is enough, or as you
| say just a simple taggable system or really just a bunch of
| files in folder - as long as you have great search you'll find
| stuff in no time and forget most as you should.
|
| I personnaly just have a huge file with various notes, text,
| todos or whatever for each year divided into days, then i can
| just scroll up through days, or search to find out what i did
| and what day - some days have nothing, some have lots. Some
| topics / projects get their own file.
| asystole wrote:
| This is why I love Capacities. It's object oriented with
| properties and tags. No folders.
| mohaba wrote:
| What is?
| asystole wrote:
| capacities.io
| skoskie wrote:
| This product looks awesome and the mobile app looks
| exceptional. But if it's not self-hosted and in some kind
| of standard format,you're SOL _when_ the company shuts
| down. Even though you can export your data, where are you
| supposed import it to?
|
| Here are some possible alternatives:
| https://selfh.st/alternatives/notion/
| asystole wrote:
| Trust me, I do understand all that. My personal set of
| trade-offs is such that I really can't be bothered with
| self-hosting.
|
| Capacities has one-click export of all of your objects
| (notes/pages) with a sensible folder structure that
| produces markdown with frontmatter and includes all media
| attachments. That's good enough for me.
| mdaniel wrote:
| They must be overcome by the HN hug of death or
| something, because their isEmailVerified endpoint is
| 429-ing, preventing signups. With that level of
| execution, who could trust them with your most intimate
| knowledge?
| airstrike wrote:
| > We believe that everybody should have access to tools for
| building knowledge. Therefore, the core product of Capacities
| is and will remain free. Read our promise
|
| Wow, I'm sold.
| lardissone wrote:
| I just tried it, looks good. But TBH, I miss outlining. I
| would like they offer a way to have an outlining mode (with
| collapsing ability). Thanks for the recommendation.
| asystole wrote:
| https://capacities.io/tutorials/outliner-mode
| lardissone wrote:
| Tried that, but I would like outliner mode to be the
| default. Instead of writing a `-` at the beginning of the
| line.
|
| Anyway, I'll give a better try. Thanks.
| bicx wrote:
| I don't have ADHD (that I know of) and still love Logseq. For
| me, it's the perfect mix of notetaking, journaling, outlining,
| task tracking, and lightweight hierarchy/linking.
|
| I find that if I have to organize or categorize entries in a
| system, entries just don't get logged at all.
| lardissone wrote:
| I'm trying a lot of tools, but I end up using Logseq. It's
| amazing.
|
| Only bad thing is their mobile app, it's so bad.
| h14h wrote:
| I've tried a number of KMS's and repeatly bounce off and
| wind up back in Google Keep. Annoying mobile apps is
| usually the #1 reason.
|
| I would love it if one of these KMS companies would give up
| trying to create a mobile app w/ feature parity, and expend
| energy making something way simpler. All I really want is a
| solid UX for:
|
| 1. Quickly capturing multi-modal thoughts 2. Easily
| surfacing specofic KMS items
|
| Thinking of my experience with Obsidian mobile... I don't
| want markdown, I don't want finicky two-way sync that
| randomly deletes directories, I don't want an entire file
| tree to tediously navigate.
|
| I just want to be able to hatily jam a thought into the
| system, and to find specific items in the system, both as
| quickly as humanly possible.
| smeej wrote:
| If the mobile app could handle PDF reading/highlighting
| like the desktop app can, and _especially_ if it could
| reflow PDFs like KOreader can, I would never use another
| tool for information management.
|
| I have loads of epub books that I want to read on my
| Android eInk reader (Boox Note 2 Color). I can convert them
| to PDF no problem, if that's the only option, but man I
| wish I could read them right in Logseq on Android. I've
| tried various syncing solutions to export KOreader
| highlights, and it's just not nearly as good. Even tried
| buying a ChromeOS tablet so I could run Linux Logseq on it,
| but the form factor sucks compared to the Boox.
| a1ff00 wrote:
| After years of searching for an organizational solution myself,
| switching between countless applications, numerous
| applications, and a concoufany of feedback, insights and ideas
| from xyz influencer, this is exactly the same path i've settled
| on, despite not being diagnosed with ADHD myself -- though, the
| signs are all there.
|
| A structure loosely connected to past notes via a weekly
| 'cleaning/review' process in my "PKS", where I'll /search/ for
| tags, filenames, file contents and loosely link things
| together.
|
| It's saved me _countless_ hours, but more importantly its
| drastically reduced analysis paralysis and kept me focused on
| the most important thing -- writing.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| > concoufany
|
| cacophany?
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cacophony
| jonaias wrote:
| You might want to take a look
| athttps://www.limitless.ai/#pendant
|
| We've received great feedback from ADHD users about how it has
| helped them throughout their lives
| lardissone wrote:
| I'm still waiting for shipping to my country. Pre-ordered on
| Oct/23 :(
| egglemonsoup wrote:
| That's a very compelling pitch. I don't have the budget yet
| but it's something I'll be keeping my eye on as yall launch
| and reviews start coming out!
| multjoy wrote:
| And if I don't want my conversation recorded? How do I know
| if I am being recorded?
| znpy wrote:
| most stuff don't work, and don't stand the test of time.
|
| anyway, here is what's has been working for me:
|
| for physical stuff (documents, printouts etc): a dumb file
| organizer box, one of those where you can hang those hanging
| manila folders. and of course a few such folders. I bought
| fifty such folders some years ago, have used about half so far?
|
| for digital stuff: a simple mediawiki installation. it's hosted
| at home and it's not accessible from the public internet. the
| visual editor makes it low-friction to edit, the categories
| system works well enough, a page can belong to more than one
| category and there's always a search function that works well
| enough.
|
| the nice thing about mediawiki is that you can upload and embed
| images, you can link to other systems (like files in nextcloud)
| and you can upload whole files and link to them from various
| pages.
| bluechair wrote:
| I really appreciate what Johnny Decimal is trying to solve -
| we're all struggling with digital organization and the appeal of
| a clean, simple system is undeniable.
|
| Having implemented similar approaches across several teams, I can
| say it works beautifully for personal projects or well-defined
| small team efforts. But here's the challenge: most real-world
| information refuses to fit into single categories. A technical
| spec might be simultaneously system architecture, compliance
| documentation, etc. While the Johnny Decimal strength is its
| rigid simplicity, that's also its weakness when facing actual
| organizational complexity.
|
| Rather than fighting these natural interconnections, I've found
| more success embracing them - using approaches that allow
| documents to exist in multiple contexts while maintaining the
| Johnny Decimal core goal of findability/searcability. The
| solution to chaos might not be enforcing a decimal hierarchy, but
| rather building systems that match how information actually flows
| in modern organizations.
| raintrees wrote:
| For me, that is the value of tags. No need to have duplicates
| to have items represented in multiple categories, yet each
| appropriate category gets a nod about the particular item.
| satiric wrote:
| I tried this with my personal Google drive and am not really
| using the numbers. It's just a little extra work to set up. I
| don't see much of a benefit to it personally, but if you do then
| great. The important thing is to have a system you like
| SvenL wrote:
| It's pretty amazing that there are such systems. Everytime I try
| something like this I fail following it just a few weeks later. I
| just relay on search, I have one mailbox, one download folder and
| that's it. If I look for something I have just 2 searchboxes, one
| in finder and one in outlook.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I probably need real-life shelves and boxes for organization. But
| I think I failed strategically because I brought too many I do
| not enjoy about into my life. Juggling 6 pieces of shit is not
| fun however good I'm doing it.
|
| I'll buy those shelves and boxes and just grit my teeth for
| another 15 years, and then it should be a lot better.
| edding4500 wrote:
| So basically a Zettelkasten?
| Tomte wrote:
| No. It has practically nothing to do with Zettelkasten. For
| starters, Johnny Decimal says nothing about links.
| edding4500 wrote:
| Uh, you are right, that was a silly comment I made.
| lokimedes wrote:
| I love the ADHD meets ASD of this one! As long as it requires
| self-control, and long-term memory, it is DOA for me.
|
| Oh the curse of knowing what one requires, but always having it
| out of reach due to misfiring dopamine regulators/receptors.
| ashu1461 wrote:
| I think with any documentation, specially something like life
| tracker tracker, it is a daily effort to maintain it, clean it,
| figure out which sections are outdated.
|
| I make sure that with every new article which is added into my
| documentation, I go through some past pages and organise / clean
| them up. This also helps in revision of some of the past insights
| which were collated.
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| I've been using this for the past 18 months, and it works really
| well. I'll write 19.01 on my calendar now instead of "review
| finances". I don't maintain the index on a regular basis yet, and
| so far I haven't needed an index.
|
| Yes, I used to think tags were so neat, but I was fooling myself.
| shoknawe wrote:
| Joplin might be a good vehicle for the implementation of
| Johnny.Decimal.
| drcongo wrote:
| Previously: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=johnnydecimal.com
| krunck wrote:
| Does it support symlinks? Because there is always stuff I want in
| two different places.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Just a general observation as someone nearing 50. I'm honestly
| very curious to see if someone has had a different experience
| than me. I'm am, to put it mildly, not an "organized person". I
| have tried a million different systems throughout my life - GTD,
| Inbox Zero, spreadsheets, etc. etc.
|
| To be honest, I don't believe that any of these "organization
| systems" really help people that have problems being organized in
| the first place. I think it's just a fundamentally different way
| of how I'm wired. My general conclusion is that trying to "fight"
| my natural way of doing things is always going to be a losing
| battle, and that instead I just need to figure out ways to handle
| my general messiness and get it to work for me. I mean, I can
| certainly be organized for sizable stretches of time, but
| whenever I start getting pressed for time, or stressed, or lose
| my motivation for some other reason, it always reverts to the
| mean.
|
| I'd honestly be really interested to hear if anyone has ever
| changed from being a "unorganized person" to an "organized
| person", because it my few decades of life I've never seen it be
| successfully accomplished.
| ejoso wrote:
| Similar age. Similar realization.
| ziddoap wrote:
| I agree with your take. I think someone who can/will get
| organized will do so regardless of which system they use.
| Someone who can't/won't get organized isn't going to no matter
| what system is proposed.
|
| The benefits of these organization systems, in my experience,
| come into play when there are multiple people involved (e.g. a
| workplace, shared storage, etc.), so that everyone can be
| organized in the same way rather than having a bunch of
| competing organization systems created by each person.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| IME having a personal system can be invaluable. It HAS to be
| something that resonates for you subjectively and personally
| -- it could be a system someone else has created (bullet
| journal, PARA, whatever) but if it's going to work, and
| stick, has to become "yours" to some degree.
| ziddoap wrote:
| I definitely agree when it comes to personal storage.
| Making the system (whatever it is) "yours" is the key.
|
| But when dealing with shared storage, if everyone makes the
| system "theirs" to some degree, you end up with a
| disorganized mess. Which is where a rigorously defined
| system (this, something else, something custom) is required
| to keep any sanity.
| dominicrose wrote:
| I'm not organized by default but I can live or work with
| organized people. It's possible to fit in and participate in
| the organization.
|
| I tend to let my brain organize my life for me. The end result
| is that I don't do many different things but I do the things I
| care about.
|
| However, A 4-colour pen and a small spiral notebook with a grid
| can help. The paper and colours allows you to be much more
| creative than just using an ordered sequence of words or some
| more complex but still limited note taking system.
| superxpro12 wrote:
| Im kind of like you. My answer to this is what I call
| "breadcrumbs". I leave them everywhere, and rely on fast
| searching tools.
|
| In onenote, I make sure things have unique keywords I can
| search for.
|
| I use "Everything" or "Fsearch" to find files on my harddrive.
| It even indexes my onedrive.
|
| Emails? Git gud with searching boolean queries. From:fred AND
| body:football
|
| I've similarly tried various organization methods and I cant
| seem to maintain them. Focusing on easy search has been my way
| forward.
| slightwinder wrote:
| They don't need to help everyone, nor solve all problems. Just
| helping some people to solve some problems is progress.
| Organization is a spectrum, some parts are more organized, some
| less. And those systems, tools, whatever, can be a guideline
| finding your way.
|
| I don't know whether I'm a person with an organized nature
| (it's probably more on the messy side), but I know that
| understanding how those tools and systems work, and when, did
| help me to organize my life a bit better. For me, the main
| problem is always that I need to have reason for using
| something and stay with it. Just reading a book and blindly
| following what it says is not really my thing. But when I find
| a demand, knowing about those tools and systems did help me to
| implement solutions for myself which stuck.
|
| It's a bit like not needing all the buttons in a car in the
| beginning, until it's cold, you want it warm, and you realize
| that heating might be a good thing for you. You will not know
| that there is heating in a car, without reading the manual, but
| if you need it, the knowledge about it will help you find your
| solution.
| robofanatic wrote:
| as long as you don't get harshly "punished" or judged for being
| unorganized by others above you in the food chain then you are
| fine.
| mo_42 wrote:
| I wouldn't say that I was a very chaotic person but after
| moving several times it felt like it takes longer to find some
| special tool than buy it new. So I created a little program to
| keep track of all my stuff [1]. It took quite a while to put
| everything in there but it helps me to check for a tool if a
| friend asks for something. Also, I like to be aware of what I
| own and what I should give away because I don't need it
| anymore.
|
| [1] https://github.com/mo42/inven
| smeej wrote:
| The one logistical change I made that solved this for me was
| that whenever I have to look for something, as soon as I find
| it, it gets moved to wherever the first place I looked for it
| was. I take that as an indication that my brain's default
| sorting system thinks it belongs there.
|
| I also have a tendency to go through everything I own once
| every couple of years and get rid of anything a past version
| of me thought a future version of me might want to do, but
| future me does not want to do, though, so the total amount of
| "stuff" I have is pretty manageable to start out with.
| iyn wrote:
| Brilliant idea (moving the found item to the location you
| first looked at)! If you ever write a blog post about your
| org system/such tricks I'd happily read it :)
| smeej wrote:
| I don't know if there's more to it than these two sides
| of the same coin, but every time I move house, when I
| pull something out of the box and go to put it "away,"
| wherever it's going to stay from then on, I close my eyes
| for a second and think, "If all I knew was that I had
| already unpacked this, but I couldn't remember where I'd
| put it, where would I go look for it first?" and then I
| go put it there and that becomes its home.
| mcgrath_sh wrote:
| Check out Dana K. White. She uses this principle along
| with 5 other "rules" to declutter. Has really helped me
| get my space in order.
| smeej wrote:
| I just spent fully 15 minutes trying to find anywhere
| there's a simple list of what the 5 rules are. Couldn't
| get AI search bots to pull it up for me either.
|
| I don't know whether I'm more worried for her, that her
| work is somehow disorganized enough for this not to be
| screaming obvious, repeatedly, throughout her blog, or
| worried for the state of my ability to search the
| internet anymore, when I used to find it to easy to find
| specific things like lists of rules online.
|
| Still haven't actually found the list, but I'm done
| trying.
| bongoman42 wrote:
| In a similar boat and I'll add another point. Any new system
| leads to a temporary increase in focus and productivity. Then
| it steadily drops off. What this told me is that new systems,
| as long as they don't have a steep entry ramp are good to get
| that temporary boost. Just don't expect it to last for months.
| Also, I found a fair number of high performing people are
| unorganized, but they often have secretaries and coaches who
| are themselves organized to get things done for them. But if
| you are not at a point where you can afford one, you have to
| learn to get these things yourselves.
| skolskoly wrote:
| >Any new system leads to a temporary increase in focus and
| productivity.
|
| I used to try to be very organized and adopt different
| systems to do so. Unfortunately due to the variety of things
| I do, I ended up creating the XKCD "you now have 14 competing
| standards" problem. My efforts to impose order only created
| more chaos. I have since just created a big monolithic txt
| file for notes, and a directory sorted by date modified.
| Delete old things, rename new things appropriately, and then
| use proper search tools like Voidtools Everything. When a
| project is complete, that's when I start organizing it,
| because that's when I know what it should look like. I don't
| understand how people can work with inconsistent and
| constantly changing structure.
| niam wrote:
| The closest I've come is in using an "outliner". I don't have
| it in me to impose structure on notes.
|
| I like how logseq works, where you don't need to name your
| files. You just write into the "today" log about whatever. Then
| if you someday want to create a page on a particular topic, the
| system combs through your past daylogs for incidences of that
| phrase and throws a reference to it into the doc for you.
|
| There's no necessary starting structure besides the incidental
| chronology of when you elect to write. But it's useful to me in
| the same ways I think structure/organization is meant to
| afford.
|
| Obsidian works similarly, but its unit of information is a
| document, vs logseq which uses bullet points. I tend to prefer
| the latter since even prose is too structured for me when I
| need to quickly jot things.
| smeej wrote:
| Seconding Logseq, though I think the move to database
| structure is going to ruin it for me. I'm one of those people
| for whom Notion is counterintuitive to the point of being
| completely unusable, and all I can suss out about this switch
| is that it's going to make Logseq more like Notion.
|
| Every time the Johnny.Decimal system resurfaces on HN,
| though, I'll admit to spending a couple weeks revisiting the
| task of finally systematizing the decades of old files stored
| on my hard drive, until I remember that I haven't _looked
| for_ any of them in many years, never mind opened them, so it
| 's probably not worth any effort after all.
| niam wrote:
| I've not been terribly worried about them running SQLite in
| the background as long as their sync with the filesystem is
| seamless, which they've highlighted is the goal.
|
| Unless there's another set of reasons you're worried about
| it?
| smeej wrote:
| Instead of being the one product I've ever found in this
| niche that actually is intuitive to the way my mind
| approaches storing information, tasks, etc., now I have
| to try to fit my brain around whatever structure they
| build into their database. It's a completely different
| experience, interacting with something where I have to
| change to fit it, rather than its already fitting me.
|
| If my brain worked like a database, I'd already be using
| one of the dozens of products that depended on a database
| structure. I don't doubt that this will be more
| mainstream because of the decision, but it will ruin what
| made the product useful _for me._
| cldwalker wrote:
| > I'm one of those people for whom Notion is
| counterintuitive to the point of being completely unusable
|
| Most of the existing workflows remain the same and the DB
| version opens up many more workflows. Would recommend
| trying it out if you haven't already with
| https://test.logseq.com/ and
| https://github.com/logseq/docs/blob/feat/db/db-version.md.
| If you have tried it out, please give us feedback :)
| smeej wrote:
| I've played with it enough to know I don't intend to move
| forward with it. It takes so many of the things that were
| intuitive and functional for me, adds a ton of stuff I
| don't want and wouldn't use, and ruins what made me love
| the product so much.
|
| For example, I like just popping "TODO" on the front of a
| line, but the database version adds a bunch of stuff I
| don't want. I don't want to have a drop-down list pop up
| with distracting icons that don't even have a cohesive
| color scheme. I don't want to have to move my cursor down
| a list. I just want to click where it says TODO and have
| it change to DOING and then change back when I click it
| again, and then change to DONE when I click the box. I
| don't want tags on the ends of my lines. I like having
| the status right at the front, not singled out as just
| one more property, but just _there,_ where I would put
| them if I were writing things down without software. I
| don 't want to have to set properties, and I don't even
| _use_ tags as a separate thing to be attached to my
| blocks, certainly not right-aligned.
|
| What made Logseq elegant in its simplicity is absolutely
| ruined for me with the database version. It is the most
| concerted effort I've ever seen to destroy the best parts
| of the product to make it into something entirely
| different.
|
| And it's fine that you're going to do it anyway. I'm just
| disappointed I'll be stuck sitting on a version that
| never moves forward, because there was SO much room for
| improvement, especially on mobile, which now won't ever
| happen to the product I actually love.
| morning-coffee wrote:
| Similar age, slightly different experience.
|
| I haven't tried a bunch of different systems, but I admit to
| liking the principles behind this Johnny.Decimal system and
| might give it a whirl.
|
| I used to get frustrated that all of the information I'd carted
| along over the years wasn't "organized". I realized a couple
| things: - I really didn't need most of the
| stuff I thought I did. So I cull/delete and generally try to
| minimize what is kept from the start. - For the stuff I
| do want forever, I use "Archive" for mail and a similar concept
| for files. One folder per year and the entirety of that year's
| activities dumped there. I'll use search over this when needed.
| - Each year I start somewhat fresh, carrying over current areas
| still active from the previous year while archiving the rest. I
| then re-evaluate and try to simplify the current "working
| index" for the current year and its generally easy to find
| thing within that narrowed context.
|
| My analogy is that life is an immutable log of records ongoing
| in chronological order... so a folder for each chronological
| year. Then index in each year as you see fit... the
| index/categories/areas for each year don't have to be the same
| as prior years... they likely won't if life is interesting and
| changing!
| emacsen wrote:
| I'm in my mid-40s and have severe ADHD and I've tried many many
| techniques and systems over the years. Over the last ~15 years
| I've come to evolve a set of systems that work for me.
|
| I'm starting (in my "ample free time") to document them and in
| a series blog posts help people find systems that will work for
| them. My experience is that the best systems are the ones that
| have five characteristics:
|
| 1. They're simple
|
| No complex patterns, no "we'll solve everything"
|
| 2. They require little or no task switching in the middle
|
| This breaks my ADHD concentration.
|
| 3. They're forgiving if you fall off the wagon
|
| You will always have bad days and need to restart. The system
| must make it easy.
|
| 4. The system must be very general, maybe even "too simple" but
| easy to customize.
|
| There is a natural desire, especially in ADHD people, to over
| complicate, so the system must allow you to be as simple as
| possible, but then let you customize later.
|
| 5. They don't require any specialized tool (especially not an
| online tool). No system should be invariably tied to a specific
| piece of software or hardware. These may be excellent
| augmentations, but they should never be requirements.
|
| Am I an "organized" person? No, but I'm far better organized
| than I was. Tasks rarely get missed now. I'm far more
| productive than I was (and I have stats to back up my
| assertion). I can almost always retrieve documents I need
| relatively quickly.
|
| These systems won't change who you are, but they will assist
| you in being better at being who you are.
| istjohn wrote:
| I just wrote a sibling comment echoing essentially the same
| philosophy, although you've elucidated the principles in more
| detail. As I wrote, my system is basically use a paper filing
| system (don't overthink it, just alphabetically ordered,
| labeled manila files), Google Calendar, Google Drive, and
| Obsidian on my phone for miscellaneous note-taking.
|
| I'm eager to learn more about your systems. Where's your
| blog?
| emacsen wrote:
| My blog is at https://blog.emacsen.net but I haven't
| written much.
|
| The problem I have is that writing the why is harder than
| the what.
|
| For example, I use a modified Cycle System, but some of my
| modifications are around how many tasks I do a day, and how
| I categorize which tasks I do.
|
| As an example, understanding task limits and why you should
| use them is important. As I write out my thoughts about
| them, it feels boring.
|
| Then I put the blog down and don't pick it up again. Maybe
| I should do it anyway.
| Moru wrote:
| I would love to read a continuation of this blog. I don't
| have an ADHD diagnose or even a suspicion of one but
| these problems of organizing everyone has. It's just
| easier or harder to get to grips with them. We need more
| different views of how minds work so we can find the one
| that resonates. Short posts that solve one problem is
| perfect so one can get one step in the right direction at
| a time.
| pjerem wrote:
| May I ask your blog URL ? Or add it in your profile :)
| emacsen wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43134892
|
| https://blog.emacsen.net
| Multiplayer wrote:
| I implemented Johnny Decimal about 5 years ago in Google
| Drive. The cool thing about it is it's just always there.
| It's pretty much set and forget it.
|
| I'll forget about it (because ADHD?) and when I open up
| drive, there it is! :). And I'll use it.
|
| It's a small investment upfront.
| ryanstorm wrote:
| Your principles mirror my own, which have been developed and
| refined over the last ten years (I'm 34 now). There have been
| periods of overcomplicating things, but they've mostly
| reached a natural state that works for me.
|
| Maybe interesting is the evolution of my system:
|
| * 2015 and prior: Sticky notes, calendars, notebooks, sheets
| of paper, chaos
|
| * 2016-2019: I found the bullet journal method and
| implemented the most basic form found here:
| https://bulletjournal.com/blogs/faq (collections, future log,
| monthly log, daily log) and never really evolved from that
| utilitarian mode.
|
| * 2019-2025: I signed up for Notion and ported my bullet
| journal system there. I miss the physical version, but prefer
| the easy access and easy editing in the online version. In
| addition to Notion, I heavily use Google Calendar, and also
| Google Keep as a quicker-access and catch-all of smaller
| notes. I use Notion for life admin and Obsidian for work
| notes and files.
|
| OP's Johnny.Decimal system caught my attention since I've
| been interested in a consistent and proven way to organize
| the files on my laptop, SSDs, Drive, as well as all my
| physical docs. I could also see it being a nice way to
| organize my Notion and Obsidian, but I also tend to rely on
| search and backlinking as others have commented about for
| their own systems.
| emacsen wrote:
| I think these systems like Obsidian are great for notes.
|
| PARA also (and for me primarily) helps with things like
| documents I get from other places which I then scan in.
|
| Yes, I could probably use a specialized program for this,
| but this way it's all just files.
| Appsmith wrote:
| This is centered around PARA and free for now. Would love
| your feedback!
|
| https://thoughtscape.app/
| emacsen wrote:
| I'm probably the wrong person to ask about this, but you
| asked!
|
| What you are building is essentially what Tiago Forte
| calls a "Second Brain". He has an entire book around
| Second Brain, as well as the one on PARA.
|
| Ironically, I've found myself using Second Brain less
| since using PARA because PARA ends up solving my needs
| without it.
|
| As an example, this week I received a letter from the tax
| authority where I live. I took the letter, scanned it,
| and placed it in my PARA/2 Areas/TAXES/2023 folder (since
| it was in relation to my 2023 taxes). I used a
| descriptive filename that included what the letter was
| about and the date.
|
| I didn't need second brain to process the tax letter-
| what was important is that it was stored quickly and
| easily, and that I can retrieve it later if need be. I
| also don't need any complex tagging or keyword systems-
| the folder and filename help me find the relevant
| documents, and it takes no more time than adding lots of
| keywords. I know because I've tried more complex systems,
| and they ended up being more trouble than they were
| worth.
|
| But more importantly, I'm not tied to any specific
| service or software. I'd never use a program that
| requires me to upload my most sensitive data to a third
| party service. It would put my data at risk and it would
| also mean that if the company were to change its business
| model (like Notion did) or had a breakin, or went out of
| business, my data would be at risk.
|
| That's why I don't advocate for Second Brain services
| that do this, even ones with lots of cool features.
|
| I would love automated integrated voice notes (vs what I
| do now which requires a bit of cut and paste) but the
| benefits don't outweigh the extremely high cost to me.
|
| Sorry!
| disqard wrote:
| > They're forgiving if you fall off the wagon
|
| Some (not all) of my personal systems are unforgiving in this
| regard.
|
| Thank you for pointing out this "Best Practice" explicitly!
| TOGoS wrote:
| I have similar inner battles.
|
| I think the key is to come up with a system that takes your
| natural tendencies into account. Result might not be perfect
| but it will be less of a disaster than if you had no system at
| all.
|
| Things like 'slow recycle bin' (where you throw stuff that you
| probably won't need to look at again, but you might) help with
| this.
|
| e.g.
|
| I have a lot of 6-quart sterilite bins where I keep various
| tools/components/junk. Most of them contain specific things and
| are labeled accordingly. There are also some that are labeled
| "random crap from my pockets". Not ideal to have "random crap"
| bins but at least I know which ones they are, and the option is
| open to go through and better-organize them later.
|
| I have periods where I carefully curate my digital photos and
| archive them using a specific file structure. Sometimes I don't
| keep up, so as a backup, I dump all the raw photos to a big
| hard drive and generate manifest files with filenames, sizes,
| and bitprint hashes that I keep in Git. This part is of course
| somewhat automated or it would never happen at all.
| skydhash wrote:
| Did so, but mostly due to increasing responsibility and general
| laziness. If it's something in my ecosystem (either digital or
| real life) I'm strongly against spending much energy to finding
| stuff and redo things. I'm not against messiness, but things
| should either be highly visible or arranged in a way that
| minimize thinking. And if something can be automated, I will do
| so if the manual way is cumbersome enough.
|
| I try not to burden my memory with remembering trivia. So I
| note them down, bookmark them in some ways that will resurface
| contextually. Which is why I never took on with a particular
| method for all aspects in my life, but will gladly use it
| within a specific context.
| hemloc_io wrote:
| I had to get organized in college because I was doing a lot of
| additional coursework and still working. Previously I was
| completely disorganized in terms of planning.
|
| Honestly the best way to do it isn't even a "system" it's to
| take the most lightweight level of organization and applying it
| to things you use.
|
| For me the main organizational tool is just google calendar,
| using an all day event to denote due dates/trip
| planning/reminders, but even a daily note with what you're
| looking to do and important dates could be useful.
|
| All these """systems""" have never caught on for me. It takes a
| lot of time to understand to the system and adjust instead of
| building a habit of surfacing information.
|
| Get the system out of the way and just start putting stuff
| down. I get a ton of stuff done now that I couldn't without
| organizing things particularly when it comes to planning trips
| or work.
| adastra22 wrote:
| You may have ADHD. Medication helps. A personal support system
| (the people in your life) helps more.
| istjohn wrote:
| My brother claims to have achieved that transformation with
| GTD. My personal experience is that complex rigid systems like
| GTD require high initial investments in effort and can be
| brittle. They are sort of like doing a total rewrite of a
| codebase. My biggest wins have come from making small
| incremental changes.
|
| The biggest win I ever made was getting a small filing cabinet
| (a banker box works, too) and putting it, a stack of manilla
| folders, and a marker next to my desk. Then, when I get a piece
| of mail or have a piece of paper, I file it in the appropriate
| folder, making a new one if need be. If you have a huge,
| chaotic pile of papers somewhere, try this. Take that pile and
| throw it in a box somewhere. Don't try to organize it. You now
| have a Pile-Of-Papers-In-a-Box. From now on, instead of putting
| new items on the POPIB, file them in your new proper file
| system. And if you need to dig something out of the POPIB, when
| you're done with it, file it away instead of returning it to
| the POPIB. Soon, the POPIB will shrink to a pile of mostly
| trash that you can store in a shoebox in the back of a closet.
|
| My biggest loss was trying to digitize my home office with a
| fancy Fujitsu scanner, Google Drive, and Airtable. It turned
| out to be a bigger project than I anticipated, and I
| prematurely abandoned my trusty analog system. Soon, AI will
| make this trivial, but for the time being, I'm sticking to
| paper. I also prefer the user experience of physical paper, at
| least until I can hand over all the paper shuffling to an AI.
|
| Other small gains I've made are using Obsidian on my phone for
| notes and using Google Calendar religiously for all
| appointments and scheduled activities.
|
| Filing cabinets, digital calendars, note taking apps--these are
| all simple, obvious things, but I think being organized is all
| about acquiring a handful of these small habits and sticking to
| them. If your system is simple enough to become reflexive,
| you'll be more likely to stick to it under stress.
| ghaff wrote:
| >And if you need to dig something out of the POPIB, when
| you're done with it, file it away instead of returning it to
| the POPIB. Soon, the POPIB will shrink to a pile of mostly
| trash that you can store in a shoebox in the back of a
| closet.
|
| It's also the case that you may legitimately need something
| out of the POPIB sometime over the next 12 months. Assuming
| you've been smart about it (I did have an old doc I needed a
| while ago but I had actually kept it in my fire box because
| it seemed like something I might need) if something is a few
| years old, it can probably go in the trash.
|
| The problem with scanning is that there's work involved and
| if you don't do a decent job with metadata, it's going to be
| pretty much useless anyway. For a lot of people, file cabinet
| with folders is probably a good system unless they really are
| on-the-go or have multiple residences a lot of the time.
| ipsento606 wrote:
| For me, part of the tension stems from being unwilling to
| design a system crappy enough that I will actually stick to.
|
| To take a trivial example, say your problem is that you leave
| clothes all over your bedroom floor, so you decide to set up a
| system to solve that.
|
| The naive approach is to design a system like "If it's too
| dirty to wear again, put it in the laundry basket, coded by
| light or dark. If it's clean, decide if it should go on a
| hanger or in a drawer. If it needs a hanger, hang it up, being
| careful to select the right kind of hanger for the right kind
| of clothing. If it needs to go in a drawer..."
|
| That's the system I want to design because that's how I want my
| life to be.
|
| It would feel very unnatural to design a system like "pile all
| clothes on the chair in the corner and worry about them later",
| because I don't want my life to be like that, and I don't want
| to believe that that's the only kind of system I might have a
| chance of sticking to.
|
| But that _is_ the only kind of system I 'll stick to. And
| ultimately, it's much better to have all your clothes piled on
| the chair in the corner rather than strewn all over the bedroom
| floor.
| haliskerbas wrote:
| I'm like you and I've slowly started to embrace it. Sometimes
| that means three laundry baskets. One for clean one for dirty
| and one for wear again. And then iterating on top of that!
| BigGreenJorts wrote:
| I did the third laundry basket for a bit. I think it's
| missing what's _peak_ about the chair which is that I can
| still sorta see what 's in the pile. I'm trying to find a
| coat hook esque system.
| bialpio wrote:
| When I saw Simone Giertz's build, I immediately wished
| she'd start selling those.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H175G8NH2Cg - "A chair
| built for your half-dirty clothes". I'd love this to be
| my "3rd basket".
| 4k93n2 wrote:
| wont everything be wrinkled when you take it back out of
| wear-again basket?!
|
| i just tend to order most things on hangers with the most
| newly washed things to the right, then every time i wear
| something and put it back it goes a bit closer to the left.
| then when im putting on a wash i know that its all the
| things on the very left that need to be washed.
|
| another useful way to keep track of things is to hang up
| anything thats newly washed with the hook of the hanger
| facing towards you, then hang it up the normal way once you
| worn it. and i still order the newly washed things from
| right to left as well since theres the odd thing i dont
| wear that often which can go musty if its just sitting
| there for months, so when im putting on a wash sometimes i
| check the very left side of the newly washed things as well
| lostlogin wrote:
| > wont everything be wrinkled when you take it back out
| of wear-again basket?!
|
| Yup. But when it's t-shirt and shorts, or t-shirt and
| jeans, I don't care. I don't really have any other
| clothes. I have a jumper somewhere and a cycling top.
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| > wont everything be wrinkled when you take it back out
| of wear-again basket?!
|
| Throw it into the dryer while you take a shower. Problem
| solved!
| cautious-fly wrote:
| In terms of organising files over the years I have found that
| nothing beats good file names and file search.
| y33t wrote:
| The best system I've come up with is to timestamp all my notes
| and sort them chronologically in a filing cabinet. You can link
| to notes by their timestamp, create indexes, calendars, weekly
| or daily todos etc, as necessary. The idea is that a note can
| be whatever you want or need it to be in that moment. Just make
| it addressable. Timestamps also give temporal context to
| correlate with emails, phone calls, or any other logged
| activity.
|
| I found that trying to organize my notes one way or another
| introduced more work and cognitive load than it saved. Just
| timestamp it and let the rest happen naturally. Wu wei?
|
| It's similar to a zettlekasten I guess, but without the effort.
| hodanli wrote:
| it is more similar to logseq's journey. you can give it a
| try.
| jrootabega wrote:
| There is no voluntary system which can't be sabotaged by your
| own feelings. Performance anxiety, overthinking, fear of
| success, etc. And if you let things pile up without processing
| them, that becomes another snowballing reason to avoid the
| system. One's thoughts and feelings ABOUT the system seem to
| have no way to be processed BY the system, so one just avoids
| all of it. There is also sometimes an expectation that a system
| will do the hard work for you, instead of just telling you what
| you should be putting hard work into in a certain time slice.
|
| I am not betting my life that there is no one who is
| psychologically incapable of working with certain systems
| without intractable distress. But I doubt it.
| marttt wrote:
| These two older HN comments might relate to your lines of
| thinking. I found both of these very insightful when I got
| stuck with trying out all sorts of rigid systems, outliners,
| zettelkasten etc:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17893139
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8807252
| flessner wrote:
| I have been an extraordinarily unorganized university student
| until the begining of this year - I am still not fully
| organized, but doing a lot better.
|
| What helped me was looking at the "atomic concepts"
|
| * What do I need to get done? (Tasks)
|
| * When will I work on what? (Calendar)
|
| * How do I keep information around? (Notes)
|
| My "evergreen" information (like lecture notes, book notes) was
| happily living in Obsidian the past years, so criteria three
| was already "satisfied". I never found a true "system", so most
| of my notes are in a Zettelkasten-esque style.
|
| I was stunned to discover that I didn't have a proper solution
| for "Tasks" or "Calendar". As an immediate fix I simply bought
| a DIN A6 notebook and a pen. Eventually, I started using the
| Apple Calendar with a Shortcut that could tally up the time for
| me - it was insightful. I went from >20 hours of social media a
| week to nothing (except HN) within a month.
|
| I am still experimenting, currently I am trying to move the
| "Tasks" into a "daily note" in Obsidian. I have also tried to
| do some "Journaling", but I found it to not be effective. What
| I have found to be absolutely necessary though is having a
| dedicated time in the morning and evening to review everything,
| plan the day, defer tasks etc.
| aeontech wrote:
| I'm curious about the shortcut to tally up the time - how
| does that work? Could you share it somewhere?
| scrapcode wrote:
| Same. A very simplified version of bullet journaling does quite
| a bit for me to track tasks. I basically just use three bullets
| ( - for information, * for an item requiring action, and > to
| indicate i need to keep moving that task forward).
| tikhonj wrote:
| I am pretty ADD. For me, moving to a system using org-mode
| helped _a lot_. It didn 't make me an "organized" person
| (hah!), but it has repeatedly kept me from losing track of
| important things _and_ has given me a place to take tasks
| /reminders/notes/etc off my mind. Being able to write something
| down and trust that it will surface back when I need it has
| reduced my mental load and general anxiety.
|
| I haven't been super organized or consistent in _how_ I use
| org-mode--org-mode is great at letting me discover my own
| workflow and adapt the tool to what I need rather than adapting
| myself to the tool--and I 've gone through periods where I lost
| the habit, but, overall, it's been a concrete improvement to my
| life. I've found that seeing it as a _tool_ rather than a
| "system" made a big difference for me. I've never liked
| productivity systems (especially at work), but having a tool I
| can use _in whatever ways helps me_ is a qualitatively
| different--and better!--thing.
| puffybuf wrote:
| I love org-mode with emacs. I use it to organize my notes /
| game hacks / todo / pretty much anything using a tree
| structure. You can use drawers to hide things like sample
| code.
| updatedprocess wrote:
| How does this transfer to mobile when you're out and about?
| _emacsomancer_ wrote:
| termux on android can run emacs
|
| (for making it more usable, see:
| https://babbagefiles.xyz/termux-extra-keys-emacs-org-
| roam-no... )
| tikhonj wrote:
| I use Orgzly on Android. It isn't _amazing_ , but it's
| pretty good; I just wait on more complicated and bulk
| operations until I get back to a computer.
| arnonejoe wrote:
| Same. My file system gets "cleaned up" every two years when I
| buy a new macbook.
| wink wrote:
| I challenge the "organized person" thing already.
|
| I'm very organized in some areas and make the biggest mess in
| others.
|
| Also what does "unorganized" even mean? I usually don't forget
| work TODOs but I regularly forget non-work TODOs. One has me
| have a text file open on the same computer, and in the other
| area stuff comes up left and right, and if I have my phone to
| jot it down it doesn't mean I will look at my phone on time...
| pillefitz wrote:
| I just use MS ToDo synced across all devices with GTD. My
| "Waiting For" bucket currently contains around 20 items, most
| of them with reminders to follow up on the status. No way I
| would keep on top of it without a structured system.
| tonymet wrote:
| the process of trying to organize is helpful, even if the
| organization system itself fails. I think people resent
| organizing because they expect magic to happen once they try.
| but like exercise, learning, playing music, cooking -- it's the
| practice of the habit that develops results . Everything great
| takes repetition
| monroewalker wrote:
| The best approach I've found so far is to just have a single
| master "event log" where I dump everything that I want to save
| by default. I have specific places to put things but if I can't
| be bothered to decide where or am not sure it'll just go to the
| event log. I'm using Notion for this where each entry is its
| own page in a "database" list. Adding a new page is trivial
| though through the site or app. I have an iOS shortcut setup
| too to open the entry creation
| GarnetFloride wrote:
| I love exploring different organizational systems.
|
| Getting Things Done is good for project management but falls
| down for organizing.
|
| Marie Kondo is good at organizing and deciding if something is
| worth keeping or not, but has issues with scale.
|
| Covey/Daytimer was good for time management but didn't do
| project management all that well.
|
| Jamie Hynaman has a massive wall of transparent boxes for
| organizing materials for his shop but all the hammers are in
| one box and you have to go to that box to get the hammer
| whenever you need one.
|
| Adam Savage's system puts his most needed tools right around
| each workstation but it's expensive as he had multiple copies
| of many tools.
|
| Kitchens use mise en place to prep and organize the ingredients
| for cooking so they can 100-200 plates out to table a day.
|
| There's PARA, and Zettlekasten for organizing information.
|
| There are, all told, tens of thousands of rules for writers.
|
| In the end I see them all as tools for solving problems and not
| all of them work for all problems and that's okay, if I can
| find a tool to make solving a problem I am currently working on
| easier, that's wonderful or I make something myself.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Adam Savage's system puts his most needed tools right around
| each workstation but it's expensive as he had multiple copies
| of many tools.
|
| It's a tradeoff. For travel, I obviously don't have multiple
| passports or high-value items. But it's absolutely worth
| having some extra cords and toiletries so I have dedicated
| travel kits for those sorts of items. Not perfect or absolute
| but being able to more or less grab a couple kits and throw
| them in my luggage works for a lot of purposes.
| ghaff wrote:
| I found GTD had a few basic concepts I try--sometimes even
| successfully--to follow. But I've basically never been an
| "organizational system" person.
| hnthrowaway0315 wrote:
| I agree. I tried a few times but they never stick. I admit
| that my life would receive a positive buff if I stick to one
| of the systems, but I just don't have the heart.
| pillefitz wrote:
| Why is that? GTD for me was the only system that stuck. Set
| it up once and have it synced across all devices (I use MS
| ToDo, as it's free, comes pre installed ony work computer
| and doesn't have many fancy features).
|
| The secret is to set up a weekly reminder to review tasks.
| a-saleh wrote:
| There is some level of organization you have to achieve to be
| at least somewhat successful.
|
| I think these sort of more complex systems are there to help
| you if your problem is being overwhelmed, or if you have need
| to have things classified and under control.
|
| If your problem is the baseline fact that sticking to any sort
| of system is hard ... haha, same, and then you need a system
| that is simple.
|
| I currently live by my google-calendar. Alerts in advance,
| trying to put everything there, to a point I
| https://sectograph.com/ as my watchface on my smartwatch, just
| so that I won't forget what I need to do today.
|
| Also, writing out my daily todo-list in a ~private-ish channel
| I have on friend's discord suprisingly works better just having
| a todolist. Because my friends see that and that makes my brain
| actually care :)
|
| So, yeah, "just need to figure out ways to handle my general
| messiness and get it to work" is right on the money.
|
| It is like with that Bullet Journal thing. You see the
| elaborate ones from people that love their melticulous
| templates. But when I used it for a month or so successfully,
| it was just about the simple bulet-points, sometimes with
| dates, review once a day. I stopped because I lost the
| notebook, so ... oversharing on discord it is - I probably am
| procrastinating there anyway :D
| anktor wrote:
| Recently I have been thinking about this, because I feel I have
| managed to become way more organized than I ever thought it was
| possible.
|
| What is working for me right now is noting everything in a
| calendar so I cannot forget it or as TODO in a somewhat heavy
| personalized Obsidian configuration.
|
| A few years ago (5-6 aprox) I started copying my older co-
| workers habits to see myself improve. Physical notebooks were
| soon discarded because I never remember where I wrote down
| things.
|
| I used a TODO plugin in sublime which worked for several
| months, until I felt I needed screenshots so I moved to
| OneNote. After a while I became frustrated with not being able
| to customize it enough, so I started trying out different
| things. I saw a coworker using Obsidian, watched a couple long
| YouTube videos to learn how to customize, and I'm never going
| back.
|
| My team this week told me they are impressed with how much info
| I write down and it was a very proud moment for me!
| ra wrote:
| I'm the same - just turned 50.
|
| The lightbulb moment for me was when I found out my HBDI [1]
| profile - my thinking preferences are heavily skewed toward
| analytical and experimental, and away from practical /
| relational.
|
| My management team compliment me by being a) orgasnised and b)
| relationship focused.
|
| [1] https://www.thinkherrmann.com/hbdi
| kisonecat wrote:
| I wouldn't say I'm organized, but org-mode is the only tool
| I've ever really used to keep track of what I am doing. I've
| been using org-mode for >= 15 years.
| eawgewag wrote:
| I'm a big fan of the Jibun Techo system of planners. I have a
| yearly planner that I get a new one every year that handles all
| of my every day things. I move the "LIFE" book around to each
| new year which holds things that matter on a yearly/longer than
| yearly basis.
|
| This system is beautifully not tied to any software or thing
| that I have to manage. It's helped me ensure that my basic
| yearly needs are always handled
| kenada wrote:
| I'm in my mid-40s. I've been practicing GTD for about a decade.
| My system used to be fairly elaborate in the beginning, but now
| it's fairly simple. However, I don't view it as an
| organizational system. It's a tool for me to be confident that
| I'm doing the right thing right now.
|
| For organizing reference material, I have a drawer with files
| for physical things and cloud storage and notes for digital
| things. I label it by topic as it seems appropriate/obvious. I
| review my reference material annually, deleting or destroying
| anything that's not still needed.
|
| In practice, I don't actually engage with my system much. I
| review it weekly to clear out any next actions I did. It's
| there as a backstop (i.e., I use deadlines as appropriate in
| OmniFocus) and to help keep me aware of my hard and soft
| landscapes.
|
| (I lost my weekly review habit for a while, and that was bad
| for me and my system. I'm glad I've reestablished it.)
|
| If (for example) I decide to hack on nixpkgs stuff tonight, I
| don't need a task for that. I may capture one to resume later,
| but what's important is that I know what I'm not doing, and I'm
| fine with that. If it turns out I'm not, then that's a sign I
| need to renegotiate or delegate some of those things.
| tomcam wrote:
| I'm well past 60 and seem to have something approximating bad
| ADHD. I became financially very successful by being fairly
| obsessed with one thing at a time: software and services
| companies, real estate, etc. For many years, this meant leaving
| extra things like guitar practice to the middle of the night.
| My goal since before marriage was to balance my primary jobs
| out with family time, which also means caring for handicapped
| family members. I succeeded. I have never been able to balance
| work, life, and health altogether, unfortunately. So I'm
| diabetic and overweight.
|
| I too tried many forms of organization and always ended up
| abandoning them. What has worked with me was being very focused
| on the main project and using all kinds of gross little ad hoc
| ways to keep it going.
|
| There is a second version of me for day each day's tasks and
| requirements. That person was revolutionized by phones that
| understand voice input. I use the one from Apple but I think
| it's utterly horrible. However, it is still good enough for me
| to use about 15 alarms per day that say things like "set an
| alarm to Get the boys' laundry at 4 PM". I have daily alarms to
| remind me to do things like feed the chickens, and monthly
| alarms to do things like pay bills or change batteries. I have
| an annual calendar entry with a master list of things I need to
| do every month or year.
|
| So the long-term project me is pretty good at planning things
| in my head and a couple of lists in the source code or source
| code repos. The short term is completely interrupt-driven.
|
| I am not recommending this system for everyone, or anyone at
| all. All I can say is that it works well for me, even though it
| is aesthetically brutal.
| plagiarist wrote:
| Setting constant reminders is a good life hack. Sometimes I
| wonder if I might be better at life with a haptic tap on the
| wrist every ten minutes, like just a nudge to think if I am
| doing what I want to do.
| thfuran wrote:
| The real trick would be for it to be able to tell whether
| what you're doing is what you want to be doing so it
| doesn't interrupt you when you already are.
| BakirKreso wrote:
| You can use a thumb counter (a small clicker on your
| thumb) to count how many times you were able to get
| yourself back on track
| treetalker wrote:
| I have an Apple Watch app that does this! It's called Tap
| Me Every X Minutes.[1] (I'm not the creator, no
| affiliation, just a happy user.)
|
| Every so often I'll decide to track/log my time and
| activities every 15 minutes over a few days, just to keep
| tabs on where my time and energy are really going. This app
| fits the bill: it's silent and unobtrusive to others and
| it's never failed to perform properly for me. I just wish
| it had an option to display a countdown timer for the
| upcoming tap.
|
| [1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tap-me-every-x-
| minutes/id15116...
| bamboozled wrote:
| Similar situation, my cure is to do less and slow down. For
| example after a day on the slopes I make a habit of just
| putting all my stuff away carefully. To do this I need more
| time (do less) and slow things down.
| xivzgrev wrote:
| Thanks for sharing.
|
| When you said, " I mean, I can certainly be organized for
| sizable stretches of time, but whenever I start getting pressed
| for time, or stressed, or lose my motivation for some other
| reason, it always reverts to the mean.", I wanted to share my
| experience.
|
| I'd consider myself a somewhat organized person. But I only
| stick with a particular system for a few months at most.
|
| I find what's most helpful to me is to keep writing down top of
| mind stuff and focus on getting it done. Sometimes that's in a
| text doc, sometimes it's in a bullet list, sometimes in a
| spreadsheet. Just whatever feels right in the moment.
|
| Also I have a wide gap between my professional life and
| personal life. I almost never miss commitments at work. In
| personal I'm always intending to do stuff and not getting it
| done. More competing priorities / less urgency.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I'm roughly the same. Here's what I do.
|
| I go to Staples and buy some bankers boxes. These are cardboard
| boxes that come in a flat pack and you fold the flaps in and
| make a box. It's sized to hold file folders, but I don't use
| file folders.
|
| I write the year on the side and top of the box. Every imporant
| piece of paper, paid bill, receipt, credit card and bank
| statements, anything I want to hang on to goes into the box.
| That's it. No other organization. On January 1, I start a new
| box, and I put the old box on a shelf.
|
| If I need something (which is much more rare than you might
| expect) I go through the box and find it. It's in roughly
| chronological order and generally doesn't take more than a few
| minutes.
|
| After 5 years the oldest box goes in the shredder.
|
| OK there are a few exceptions. Stuff I need to save longer than
| that (car titles, etc.) goes in a fireproof document safe. But
| all the common stuff goes in the box.
| wingerlang wrote:
| Similar here, documents goes into the documents drawer.
| Digital documents has been going into
| /Dropbox/docs/$current_year (without much organization within
| them). New year, new folder.
| atoav wrote:
| I am an unorganized person who has a job that requires a
| certain amount of organization to allow me to stay on top of
| what I am doing and gives me very little time to do said
| organization.
|
| The following things work for me:
|
| 1. Whenever you leave a project you leave with it all the info
| to quickly get started again. If it is physical that can be a
| paper note, if it is digital thats a readme note (or a note
| directly in the thing). This is not just for documentation, it
| means the shelved project requires zero mental capacity as
| everything I need to remember is shelved as well.
|
| 2. Lists for ephemeral todos. There are so many ways of
| organizing to do lists, the only thing that worked for me over
| long and intense periods was a little notebook where every
| Monday of a week I write down what needs to be done in
| principle. This typically just contains urgent things and the
| occasional lkng term project.
|
| 3. Digital Calendar: everything that is an appointment or some
| preparation for an appointment goes in here. Appointments do
| not land in the todos unless they are majorly crucial ones.
|
| 4. Travel stuff: most of the travel info will be in the
| calendar as well, for notes/tickets I add them either in the
| calendar or in my obsidian notes
|
| 5.Knowledgebase: everything that has long form relevance is
| either in my password manager (surprisingly good for storing
| info like your tax ID) or into the obsidian notebook
|
| That is roughly it.
| albert_e wrote:
| I am in same camp.
|
| I recently read the book Meditations for Mortals by Oliver
| Burkeman.
|
| Resonates a lot with my experience and struggle with trying to
| stay productive.
|
| I may not have learnt any new skills from this book but at
| least feel a tad bit more at peace with things as they as and
| as they unfold.
| h4ny wrote:
| Just personal experience, read with a grain of salt.
|
| I don't consider myself an organised person (my calendar is
| chaotic, I don't clean out my inbox and use it as a pseudo to-
| do list with priorities, I don't have enough time and energy
| and constantly feel like I'm being a shit friend/family/mentor,
| etc.) but everyone I have worked with see me as a very
| organised person: I document every piece of my work in detail
| that others can understand, I have good estimates on tasks I'm
| assigned and very rarely miss deadline, I remember when
| important events are without needing a calendar and am always
| on time.
|
| The thing is, GTD doesn't work for me. I have also worked with
| many mangers who tried to shove the framework du jour onto
| everyone and never had any success with it despite putting in a
| lot of effort into "meeting expectations".
|
| The cynical me now thinks that people who tells everyone
| certain system work is because:
|
| 1. Someone published a popular book that managed to sell well
| from the business section.
|
| 2. It just happened to work for some people. Even 2 out of 10
| people you meet talk about it is enough to make you think about
| it, now imagine 6 out of 10 managers you meet knows about that
| system.
|
| 3. Most managers I have met (whose jobs are to get others to
| get things done) don't really have time to understand you, that
| includes most of them who say they care about my career (they
| didn't, they cared about their own careers more than mine). If
| there is something existing they can manage you with they'll
| use it because when it doesn't work it's either your problem or
| the framework's problem, not theirs.
|
| 4. (Cynical opinion) It's mostly just a facade for people who
| have authority over you (especially the ones who are
| technically less capable but somehow moved up) to show their
| bosses they are doing _something_. Like the new lead designer
| who decided to change the company brand color or the new head
| of department who thinks that changing the department's name is
| going to invigorate everyone's passion to do better work.
|
| One thing that I have learned from the people who are smart and
| productive is that they have actually spent time to
| continuously develop and refine a system that works for them
| over time. They also try new things and just move on if it
| doesn't.
|
| You probably have met a lot of amazing people if you have
| mostly been working with others so far. Just think about what
| the people you truly admire professionally do -- I'd bet that
| they don't talk about GTD and even if they do it's just an
| introduction to something remotely similar to what they do and
| have refined over time.
|
| I know it can be difficult at work sometimes when (whether you
| know at that moment or not) people are offloading their
| responsibilities and pressure onto you (it's particularly bad
| if you are a very responsible person). However, if you believe
| that you usually have a reasonable amount of time to get things
| done, just ask yourself if you have done your job well and and
| delivered things on time. If you have, then the problem
| probably isn't you or GTD or some other framework that doesn't
| work for you.
| jvidalv wrote:
| A few weeks ago, during a one-on-one with my manager, I had an
| interesting realization about this topic.
|
| I understood that my chaotic nature isn't due to a lack of
| organization--it's because I thrive in chaos. I can function
| well without strict structure because I don't need it to stay
| effective.
|
| My manager, on the other hand, is the complete opposite. She
| needs everything documented and noted, not because she's
| inherently more organized, but because the absence of structure
| creates anxiety and discomfort for her.
|
| She actually complimented me on my ability to navigate
| uncertainty, to adapt without needing full control, and still
| feel capable and at ease.
|
| It felt like an epiphany, shifting the way I perceive this
| entire topic.
| dddw wrote:
| Interesting I am in the same situation. There are are little
| fires around me I just have to make sure they dont grow
| bigger. May I ask what role you fullfill? I`m sysops/cloud
| engineer.
| paufernandez wrote:
| You hit a very important point, the discomfort that orderly
| people experience (I am that kind of person). I believe that
| to be innate.
|
| At the same time, a disorganized person is still more
| effective in an organized environment, but probably he hasn't
| realized this by himself because he doesn't have the internal
| drive to be organized in the first place.
|
| You could say being organized is Nature's way of setting us
| up for success in complex and very demanding situations.
| jmorenoamor wrote:
| I am on the same boat, passed 40 and after trying everything, I
| peaked with Obsidian. Just MD files and a lightweight notes IDE
| farley13 wrote:
| You have many great replies about specific methods - but I
| found the most important tip wasn't where I was looking. Tools,
| software, books, methods all can come later. The most important
| part for me was creating the time for cleanup and organization.
| Physically and mentally.
|
| Jumping from thing to thing without time set aside for "stop,
| reflect, adjust" makes it very challenging to make changes. I
| realized that you don't become organized if you don't spend
| time on it. Picking up physical messes. Thinking about what was
| important in your day vs what you got done. How the week went.
| Writing it down.
|
| I found it was only after I started consistently putting time
| aside to catchup, think and adjust that I started being able to
| consider if any particular methods would be helpful. Parts of
| GTD have helped me (capture first) - but the aha moment really
| came before that.
|
| If you want to be organized, put time into reflecting and
| adjusting (eg. organizing) the critical parts of your life.
| Once a day, every day. Maybe more than once a day. Then use one
| of those to reflect on the week. Not reading about it or
| endlessly sorting the books on your shelf, but focusing
| intently on stuff you'll remember 20 years from now.
| fmbb wrote:
| The problem everyone are trying to solve is "I have too much to
| do".
|
| All these solutions are band-aids akin to sticking a queue in
| your backend to try and cope with constant overload.
|
| The simplest way to get organized I think is to say "no" more
| often, and stop caring about crap.
|
| GTD has one good idea, and that is that first step "can you do
| it in under five minutes, do it now" or however it's written.
| The rest is procrastination.
| jerieljan wrote:
| After seeing this and the stories after this comment, I... can
| relate to this.
|
| I went from being unorganized to somewhat organized, then went
| back and now it's a case of "I'll keep things organized when it
| makes sense, but the rest is up to my memory, the natural way
| of doing things and wherever I left it."
|
| I'm just going to try the next thing, see and adopt whatever
| works, but if it doesn't, I'll just stick to whatever does.
|
| At the end of the day, it's up to our brains on whether to use
| systems or not and if they fit our needs or if it doesn't.
| ccppurcell wrote:
| I think you're right and I have a few systems I've implemented
| that work with me not against me. For example I organise my
| kitchen drawers by putting things in higher drawers if I use
| them a lot and lower if I don't. If I "mess up" it doesn't
| matter: things I use more will naturally rise to the top.
| Similarly spices, I return the spices to the cupboard at the
| front of the shelf and a natural ordering by usage develops
| over time.
|
| In software terms the closest is that I switched to kiss
| launcher on my phone. It just shows you the apps in the order
| you used them, plus one horizontal line of faves and one
| vertical line of widgets. It can also learn what you do but I
| prefer the basic ordering. I use zoxide in the terminal for
| navigation and on the desktop I just press Super and search for
| everything.
| jliptzin wrote:
| I'm the same way. I just send myself emails when I need to save
| or keep track of something. I throw in some keywords that I'll
| know I'll search for in the future if/when I need to reference
| back. This works 95%+ of the time. For physical documents I
| need to save, I'll just keep it in a stack and periodically
| throw them in my scanner and save them in one PDF file and put
| it in a google drive folder for searching (using AI or
| otherwise) later. Most of these documents I never need again
| anyway, but at least they're there.
|
| I know the organization people are probably horrified by all
| this, but I know myself well enough by now to know that I just
| won't stick to any system more complicated than this. The most
| important thing is that all that stuff is there, somewhere, if
| I really need it. I am essentially saving the effort up-front
| that I will 100% have to do in exchange for a little more
| effort later down the line which I probably won't have to do
| because I usually never need any of that stuff anyway.
| exe34 wrote:
| I gave up. find and grep work really well together, so that's
| what I use now. I try to add keywords to filenames of important
| files so I have a chance of finding them again. I do the search
| incrementally, e.g. find ./ | grep -i insurance. then if
| there's a load of stuff, I'll try to narrow it down with
| further greps or with -v.
| andai wrote:
| >can handle GTD occasionally but reverts to chaos
|
| Same. So I ended up "inventing" what I call miniGTD.
|
| My system got so big and unwieldy, that I threw it away, and
| just wrote down the most important stuff from memory.
|
| Then I realized that I can just do that every morning. Fill
| half a page with the most relevant goals and their associated
| Next Actions. And that's the whole system.
|
| Here's a screenshot: https://files.catbox.moe/jq0u8z.png
|
| It certainly doesn't meet David Allen's criterion of 100%-ing
| it. But it gives you 80% of the bang for under 20% of the buck!
|
| Rewriting from memory works as a natural filter for priority
| and urgency. Stuff might slip through the cracks, so when I'm
| done writing, I just turn to the previous day's page to see if
| I forgot anything.
|
| ---
|
| Also, you might want to read Leo Babauta's Zen to Done (ZTD),
| which fixes most of the issues I've had with GTD. I ended up
| reinventing most of ZTD on my own, and then smacked myself when
| I finally read the book, because I had downloaded it 15 years
| earlier and failed to read it ...
|
| ...Also also worth mentioning Scott Young's Weekly/Daily Goals
| (ZTD has this too) and Cal Newport's system (based entirely
| around the calendar). They would make David Allen cringe, but
| they work really well for a lot of people!
| react_nodejs wrote:
| So are you selling several file explorer folders for $15? ;D
| diimdeep wrote:
| no, he is selling lifestyle
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| As a system, this makes sense and I love it. As a personal
| practice it's completely impractical for all but a narrow band of
| the population. And when those people need to collaborate with
| others, good luck getting everyone else to follow the system.
|
| I recommend embracing the chaos instead. Enhance the tools for
| finding information, and make it easy to apply metadata.
|
| At a certain point you can get no further without demanding more
| personal discipline, but that point is way beyond what is
| prescribed here.
| pavlov wrote:
| A cousin of Johnny Mnemonic?
| galfarragem wrote:
| My take on "systems to organise your life". It may help somebody:
| https://github.com/slowernews/hamster-system
| bpev wrote:
| My filesystem organization has been based off of Johnny decimal
| for some years now. TBH, I don't know how much I specifically
| recommend it, since it did take quite a long time (years) for me
| to really figure out my organization and become comfortable. But
| now, because my system is now pretty set in my brain, the big
| benefit is that I can pretty much navigate to mostly any
| directory instantly from anywhere without too much thought, using
| scripts I wrote. (https://johnny.bpev.me/guide, which is really
| mainly
| https://github.com/bpevs/johnny_decimal/blob/main/source/she...).
| But it makes my filesystem feel much flatter and simpler to me.
|
| For example...
|
| - My latest large coding project spans from `22.00` - `22.20`
| (clients from `.01`, server from `.11`, libs from `.21`), and I
| can navigate to any of those directories from anywhere in my
| filesystem via `jd 22.10`. Or if I forget which one, `jd ls 22`.
|
| - For things like photos and completed music production projects,
| I organize in more of a date system, but that entire system is
| housed in the jd structure, so if I want to look at some photos,
| I can easily open `31.02` and navigate internally to that.
|
| Oh fwiw, I only use a few broad categories:
|
| - `10-19 Notes`
|
| - `20-29 Projects` (active projects, code and music mostly)
|
| - `30-39 Archives` (closed projects)
| hbarka wrote:
| In 2025 someone discovered the ancient Dewey Decimal system.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| This has existed before 2025
| f1shy wrote:
| It was sarcasm to make a point , in case you did not notice.
| kstrauser wrote:
| More like, someone realized a few years ago that you can make
| your own Dewey Decimal system and apply it to your own library.
| erganemic wrote:
| Off the top of my head, all PKMs make trade-offs on
| discoverability, portability, maintainability, and ease of
| recall. Broadly, "discoverability" is how likely you are to
| stumble on something you'd forgotten (just recently, I found a
| file in my "taxes" directory listing all the documents I needed
| last year, which was a big help, and which I did _not_ remember
| writing), "portability" is how resistant the system is to a
| company shutting down/project being abandoned, "maintainability"
| is how easy to keep your system consistent with its principles
| (including inserting a new note), and "ease of recall" is how
| easy it is to find something if you know you're looking for it.
|
| When thinking about a lifelong PKM, I feel like I value
| portability more than most; something highly tied to a particular
| company like Notion is right out for me, and I'm leery of stuff
| like Obsidian or even org-roam, since even if the entries in
| those systems are just text, I just know that someday the logic
| that ties them together will stop being developed/maintained and
| I'll have to migrate.
|
| I feel confident in directory structures and text files as long-
| term mediums though, and so JD is appealing to me, but its
| maintainability (specifically the cognitive load around inserting
| a new note) is such a stumbling block for actually creating
| content for it. Not to mention the primary thing it trades
| maintainability off for (ease of recall) is almost entirely
| solved by search functionality, leaving discoverability as the
| only benefit over just chucking everything in a flat "notes"
| directory.
|
| I do something PARA-adjacent now, and I might just commit to
| that, although denote is interesting as an Emacs user for a
| slightly more portable tagging- and search-based option.
| disqard wrote:
| You and I are in the same boat!
|
| I keep everything in a single folder, as plaintext Markdown
| files.
|
| Even if my own software breaks someday, I can always ingest
| these into a flavor-of-the-month indexer (though I think sqlite
| + fts plugin goes a _long_ way) and carry on.
| jppope wrote:
| I think this is definitely a cool system so not meaning to knock
| it, but I used to hyper-optimize all parts of my life and it was
| exhausting. So one day I just stopped. I started focusing on just
| being present, prioritizing, and trying to remember things that
| were important. I still take notes and have todo lists and stuff
| but they are similarly for being in the moment- just for the time
| right when I'm using them. I may have lost some things over the
| years but the removing the stress has made me better at all the
| things I was working on in general.
| Beestie wrote:
| Its a beautiful system but where my head explodes (and has been
| exploding for 4 decades) is over the following scenario.
|
| So in Johnny's system, I assign 21 to automobiles. My VW van gets
| 21.1, my Citron is 21.2, etc. and the insurance for each car gets
| a .8 so 21.1.8, 21.2.8, etc.
|
| And I assign 13 to Money. Insurance belongs under money so 13.5
| is insurance and life insurance gets 13.5.1, E&O insurance gets
| 13.5.2, etc.
|
| I also need a top folder for Medical for doc visits, vaxes, ER
| visits, Surgeries, the kids' allergies and stuff.
|
| So where all this is going is two months later, where is the
| health insurance policy? Is it under medical or under money? Is
| the car insurance under Automobiles or Insurance under Money?
|
| Back to my head exploding - this is my issue - I can never
| remember which branch of the tree to find a specific leaf? Does
| my annual car tax belong with the Money or with the Auto branch?
| If I want to see the tax for all the cars at the same time, I put
| it under Money - Taxes - Auto but when I need to know the last
| time I paid the tax on the VW, I will assume its filed under
| Auto-VW-Car Tax.
|
| This is why I can never find anything. All due respect to Johnny
| but I'm too retarded to use it properly.
| xixixao wrote:
| What you need is a tree where the items can be in multiple
| places.
|
| Bear does this really well with its hierarchical tags.
|
| Most filesystems can do this with hardlinks (but the UX mostly
| sucks).
| Beestie wrote:
| omigosh - genius idea - I need a Schrodinger's file system!
| WooHoo! The dumb insurance policy is wherever I look for it!
| :-)
| beAbU wrote:
| I had exactly this issue before, an I blame overthinking
| things. Trying to put in place a system where none is needed.
|
| I ended up with a box, in the box there are large plastic
| envelopes, and each envelope is labelled.
|
| I have:
|
| - "assets" (cars, warrantees, service records, purchase
| invoices etc)
|
| - "health" (all medical related things)
|
| - "insurance" (everything insurance related)
|
| - "guns" (I like guns... so licenses, legal paperwork, etc etc)
|
| The best thing is, this is a box. So worst case, even if I
| misfiled something, all I need to do is rifle through a box.
| The box is portable and universal, and if my wife needs
| something, I can easily guide her to where to find it.
| arbitrandomuser wrote:
| This! i prefer tags over folders for this reason. All notes go
| into single folder , no sub directories . Because a note can
| have multiple classifications a tree structure is not natural
| way to organize them. Add tags , if you have note taking
| program will show you all possible existing tags you it makes
| this easier.
| lblume wrote:
| Additionally, tags naturally form hierarchies in the form of
| trees (or ADGs), so any possible taxonomy should support
| that.
| benrutter wrote:
| I love tags until I actually use them, I always wind up using
| them inconsistently, or not at all for a specific file, and
| them bam, I can't find anything at all.
|
| The benefit of file structures is that things _have to_ have
| a place, you can 't not put something in a folder, so for car
| insurance, it might be in "insurance" or "cars" but it's
| definitely one or the other. With tags, it could be
| "insurance", "finance", "cars", "automobiles", "vehicles",
| "veihcles", etc.
|
| Any tips of how to funnel some strictness into tags so that
| they're actually usable?
| edgarvaldes wrote:
| Sometimes autocomplete works for me, so I avoid the "auto"
| vs "automobile" but it falls apart as soon as I realize I
| have "autombile" suggested and now I wonder what to do to
| re-tag files.
| mindwork wrote:
| symlinks or hardlinks might help with that, depending on your
| needs. With hardlinks you will see the same file in both
| locations, and if you change or remove the file it will be
| removed in the other directory as well
| mdaniel wrote:
| > or remove the file it will be removed in the other
| directory as well
|
| Your operating system must behave way different from mine.
| Hardlinks in both Linux and macOS are merely "named inodes"
| and only when _all_ references to the inode are removed is
| the storage actually subject to reuse
| gloomyday wrote:
| I've had this problem for a long time. My solution was to keep
| my organization as flat as possible. This means everything
| insurance-related would go to 13.
|
| A flat structure seems less organized, since you are "mixing"
| stuff, but as long as there isn't too much stuff inside, going
| through stuff one-by-one is faster than you think. If I do have
| a lot of stuff in a section, I either split into several
| sections in the top structure (so 13 is life insurance, 14 is
| other...), or go one level deeper (not preferred, but I do it
| when it's very clear and there is too much stuff, like photos,
| which btw sorting chronologically works best for me).
|
| It is really not much of an issue having 50 top sections. It
| makes the organization transparent, and indexing, sorting and
| going one-by-one remains easy.
| dubeye wrote:
| it's only going to be one of a few places though, and the key
| thing is you know where those places are and can get to them
| quickly
| jen729w wrote:
| Johnny here. This is the canonical example, and I quote it
| myself: is it `Insurance > Car` or `Car > Insurance`?
|
| In reality you just decide. One feels better to your brain. And
| you tend to remember that.
|
| It helps of course if you remain consistent. In the systems we
| design we've realised that most people want the _insurance_
| close to the _thing being insured_.
|
| So in our life admin system we have health, pet, home, motor,
| and travel insurance as IDs alongside your records for those
| things. Seems to suit most people.
|
| And don't forget you've got your index as a fallback. I don't
| remember most of these numbers but I just launched Bear, typed
| `insurance` in the search field, and there they are. Now in
| three clicks I can get to my home insurance which, turns out,
| is at `12.12`.
|
| https://share.icloud.com/photos/0afQRa-furBCpa9rOIc3r3Q7g
| tener wrote:
| > And you tend to remember that.
|
| Haha, nope. Different brains work differently. One day I
| genuinely prefer one, a week later another.
| ics wrote:
| I feel you; as a pretty happy user of Johnny.Decimal over
| 7-ish years, I've preempted this a bit with symlinks. It
| reduces the available assignment space but saves time when
| brain goes alt-brain.
|
| One observation from over the years which matters because I
| keep separate sustains for personal (including freelance
| work) and employee office work. I usually can pick just one
| place and remember it for the latter whereas personal is a
| land of struggle and experimentation.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| This is why I like Obsidian (or some other linked-documents
| wiki type of system), because it makes linking things easy, so
| you can take multiple routes to find a thing. I have a health
| note and a finances note. Which one does health insurance go
| under? I pick whichever one seems to make the most sense at the
| time. Then, in the future, if I'm looking for health insurance
| and look in the wrong place first, I can easily make a link
| there to the "health insurance" note/section. Now, I will find
| health insurance whether I look under health or finances.
|
| The "Obsidian way" that many people recommend is notes that are
| as small as possible to maximize this kind of effect, but
| that's not how I like to do it. I prefer bigger notes with lots
| of headings (that can be nested up to 6 levels), and lots of
| links within a note and between notes to specific headings. I
| find this to be a nice blend of hierarchical navigation and
| link navigation.
|
| Non-text files (like receipts or pictures) get linked from the
| relevant note or section, and many types of media can be viewed
| inline in the WYSIWYG editor.
| threecheese wrote:
| You've hit the nail on its head here. Almost every piece of
| information I save has more than one type of contextual
| relevance, this is not handled by any hierarchical organization
| system no matter how clever the addressing is. At a certain
| scale and complexity, I simply cannot remember the magic
| incantation URL for whatever it is I need. Even search falls
| apart frequently, because I saved some reference using an
| abbreviation or synonym to what I think I need.
|
| It doesnt take so much "scale" if one has deficient short term
| memory/recall/adhd or is (as youve elegantly put it) "too
| retarded". (hey - samesies)
|
| Tags/content classifiers/ontologies are I think the solution
| here, but require continuously grooming your data to ensure
| it's classified correctly - a time investment.
|
| My opinion is that modern ML classifiers are helping,l - Ive
| found some help with tools that recently added auto-tagging -
| and I think the real magic bullet will be augmenting this
| capability with relevant personal/activity context. An
| algorithm can infer much of the contextual relevances that are
| missing from the current tools if it can match some incoming
| information to any or all of the
| areas/topics/projects/horizons/decimal-things that users of
| organizational tools have decided are important to them.
| vvillena wrote:
| In today's world, it would be under Ctrl+F -> "insurance". If
| it were on physical paper, it would be on the folder containing
| the important documents.
|
| Over-reliance on hierarchy has been identified as a double
| edged sword of these organizational systems. Hierarchy is only
| useful when the hierarchy itself matters, e.g. when "grab all
| documents about this" is a use case, keeping such documents
| together matters. If the use case is finding one particular
| document, we have better tools than hierarchy for that, and any
| time spent on organization is more or less wasted when a good
| file name and simple storage rules do the work better, and are
| irrelevant for modern retrieval methods.
| koenneker wrote:
| I recently learned that you can also access the mac spotlight
| search index from your terminal using mdfind[1]. It's very
| nice to use when looking for misplaced pdfs.
|
| [1]https://ss64.com/mac/mdfind.html
| mdaniel wrote:
| Hierarchy is where taxonomy fights break out; _tagging_ is
| the way, the truth, and the light. That 's one of the many,
| many reasons I love 1Password over Bitwarden. I don't need
| _folders_ I need _tags_. Same for Firefox 's infinitely
| better bookmarking system than Chrome's, for the same reason
| mjklin wrote:
| That's where a tool like TheBrain.com can come in, in which one
| node can have multiple parents and siblings.
| zwayhowder wrote:
| I have been toying with the idea of introducing something like
| JD to my system using tags though so something can be both.
|
| I use Paperless to catalog all my PDFs, Obsidian for notes and
| Gmail for email, Todoist for tasks and Cloze for CRM, all of
| which support tags.
| Centigonal wrote:
| I tried this for a year, but the juice wasn't worth the squeeze
| for me. I went back to my previous homegrown folder tree.
| ConanRus wrote:
| What we really need is a personal AI assistant that handles
| labeling, tagging, and organizing documents by creating
| categories and connections. The fact that, in 2025, someone would
| propose doing all of this manually and consider it a good system
| is just ridiculous.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| I've been attempting to integrate this into my life for a few
| years now, and failing. Doing this manually is never going to
| work, HOWEVER, automating it will. I periodically run this
| script[1] to organize my Downloads folder.
|
| Pretty sure I can figure out a way to make macOS watch that
| folder and run the script but I want to live with this more
| before doing that.
|
| Note that all this does is move stuff around...you still gotta go
| to the destination folders and continue organizing there but at
| least half the work is done for you.
|
| ---
|
| [1]:
| https://gist.github.com/NetOpWibby/7e39068c1d0209e4412e3a05e...
| sureIy wrote:
| I realized that I'm very good at remembering time and location
| more than anything. If I want to look at something, I know when I
| did it more than what it contained.
|
| For this purpose the photos app is amazing: "April 2020 cat
| video" and it's exactly what I was looking for.
|
| I really wish file explorers were more consistent with their date
| management and didn't change "creation date" just because the
| file was moved or whenever the app/OS decides.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| I wish someone made an OS that just did this for me
| nicebyte wrote:
| I bet 90% of the reason this is on the front page is the Berkeley
| mono font. the system itself sucks.
| f1shy wrote:
| The first time it was posted I said: I hate the system, but I
| like the presentation.
|
| The system is great if you like to remember the IPs of the
| sites you need instead of the urls...
| camkego wrote:
| If this is a system to organize files and folders, rather than
| physical real life files and folders, it should say so in the
| first sentence.
| tonymet wrote:
| the concept is very good, and i like the approach to distinguish
| personal , business etc. It's not the system that matters, but
| the continued practice of inventorying and assessing your
| library.
|
| One approach is to imagine your archives as a physical library
| and what regular maintenance you would need to keep the library
| in order for others to enjoy it.
|
| These include indexing like the author talked about. but also
| curating & summarization ( meta-summaries of the catalog). Also
| disaster preparation (backup) , replication (e.g. keeping
| repositories in sync between the archive and active work).
|
| Every well built engineering system started as a neglected
| concept that got elevated into a formal area worthy of attention
| dubeye wrote:
| I set this up a few weeks ago and it's working great so far. You
| start to develop muscle memory and now i organise everything to
| the same order, eg bookmarks
|
| i think it's partly that i remember location phsyically. i can
| remember bookmarks in real books, my remembering where certain
| words are on a page and flicking through until i find them. i
| wouldn't stand a chanec ofremembering page number. somehow the JD
| system recreates thsi for me
| g8oz wrote:
| It doesn't have to be all or nothing for the Johnny decimal
| system. Start with a life area like home ownership. Ask AI to
| generate a Johnny decimal system on this topic. I was impressed
| with the comprehensive structure I got.
| subpixel wrote:
| Holy smokes this does not resonate with me. Not the need for
| organization, but the implementation of some watered down Dewey
| decimal system.
| f1shy wrote:
| Seems to be good for people who prefer to remember the IPs
| instead of domain names...
| MailleQuiMaille wrote:
| I think the key for me, a lifelong messy person, was to find out
| what I like or don't.
|
| Like : -Taking notes on the fly for capturing fleeting ideas.
| -When working on a project, embracing the mess by having as many
| documents/spreadsheets as possible. -When a project is over,
| putting everything in a folder and letting it there.
|
| Don't like : -Using fancy tools like Notion, Obsidian and the
| likes. -Getting stuck on rigid systems, and even worse : tied to
| a subscription. -Being forced to use a specific device.
|
| My solution ? Upnote. Proton Drive. A messy desktop.
|
| Am I the most "optimized" I could be ? No. But I can quickly find
| out everything I need fast, and when I'm working on a project, I
| know what to do.
|
| More than that seems overkill, for me at least.
| mattlondon wrote:
| This seems overly complex? 15.2.234 for example is not remotely
| memorable or intuitive - no one knows what that is.
|
| Why limit yourself to this low-signal approach? It seems
| deliberately obtuse for no obvious benefits?
|
| What has worked for me is a folder per financial year, then just
| rough semantic groupings in each year folder called e.g. "cars"
| "health" "house" "tax" etc and just chuck files into those as
| needed. I usually change the filename to be something descriptive
| and information dense too like e.g. "<house number + street> Home
| Insurance Aug 2024-2025.pdf" etc. Store it all on some cloud
| service (OneDrive or Google Docs or whatever - local backup of
| your choice) and then you can just drill-down or even better
| _just search_. Simples.
|
| So e.g.
|
| 2024-2025/
|
| --house/
|
| ----123 ABC Street Home Insurance April 2024-2025.pdf
|
| ----123 ABC Street Mortgage statement Jan 2024.pdf
|
| --cars/
|
| ----Honda repair invoice June 2024.pdf
|
| ----Honda insurance Feb 2024-2025.pdf
|
| ----BMW insurance Mar 2024-2025
|
| Not rocket science. Anyone reading this understands this
| "system", and it is trivial to search. No rote memorisation of
| random numbers needed!
| 0x457 wrote:
| Well, you only need to remember "00.00 Index" which is where
| description of all categories is.
|
| Your version IMO is awful. Year on root level means you have to
| remember year that document was created. Unless you constantly
| need to lookup insurance documents (only thing besides taxes I
| can remember which year I'm looking for) that's not going to
| work IMO.
|
| Since we threw away core organization principle of this system
| (limit your choices), why not all documents realted to
| house1/car1/car2 into corresponding folders?
|
| Also, you used 2 different ways to write a month and date. Now
| I have to remeber is this document on Jan or January, don't
| want to confuse with documents about my friend Jan and Jane
| either.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Well time is the only constant in life, so it makes sense to
| me to store by time since that is always moving forwards and
| things happen at a point in time.
|
| But it is a valid that you have to remember the year, but
| this is why if you store on a cloud service, they all come
| with excellent search facilities that I expect will continue
| to improve with AI. So you don't need to remember, you just
| search for e.g. "insurance" and then you pick the doc with
| the date in it's filename etc.
|
| Sure you could group by theme at the top level too, but again
| time is a constant - you _always_ have 2024, 2025, 2026 etc,
| but you _don 't always_ have a need to store things about
| e.g. "car2" in every year etc. so it makes sense to me that
| if car2 comes into your life in say 2025 and leaves you in
| 2028 or whatever, that you have car2 folders in those
| specific years only and not permanently polluting the top-
| level folders because after car2 leaves you, you don't want
| it hanging around ~forever at the top level. You're just
| building up "organisation-debt" for something you'll need to
| "archive" in the future.
|
| I think perhaps we're thinking about different things though.
| I store documents about day to day life - statements,
| invoices, insurance certificates, etc etc. These all tend to
| be dated and repeat monthly/quarterly/annually or
| thereabouts, and for me the most frequent retrieval need is
| for the current financial year.
|
| I don't store my friend Jane's or Jan's documents, not do I
| have documents _about_ them either. I don 't just have random
| notes documents about random things.
|
| At work where I have non-time-based documents (including
| random notes documents!) coming out of my ears - both written
| by me, reviewed by me, read by me, CC'd but I read etc -
| thousands and thousands etc - I just rely _entirely_ on
| search and it 's never been a problem. No filing system at
| all - just search. It's fine.
|
| Cloud-based storage and search really is key here I think. I
| can be on calls to utility companies etc and I can search and
| have my most recent statement up on my screen quicker than
| the people in the call center folks most of the time.
| reedlaw wrote:
| I used something similar based on https://karl-voit.at/folder-
| hierarchy/ which I found helpful.
| marcusestes wrote:
| [IQ distribution chart meme]
|
| * Just use Apple Notes
|
| * No! You can't just use Apple Notes. You need a full ontological
| graph structure based on an open standard!
|
| * Just use Apple Notes
| 0x457 wrote:
| This one actually works with Apple Notes.
| hdrz wrote:
| This. Just use the most immediate thing available. For me its:
| * Apple Notes * Apple Reminders That's it. Gets the job done.
| nilslindemann wrote:
| Looks like a task oriented sorting - "for what do I need this?" -
| and the numbers are a workaround for a shortcoming in file
| managers, which does not allow giving a user defined sorting to a
| list of files/folders.
| raajg wrote:
| I think that local search, retrieval, and filing will become much
| easier with LLMs.
|
| There are already tools and products in the market that allow you
| to rename and organize files. I believe this is the future.
|
| We have developed various systems over decades, but I anticipate
| with LLMs it'll be so easy to file and retrieve things that we
| won't even have to think about it.
| ediwdlrow wrote:
| "If you put those boxes in boxes, in boxes, you'd never know
| which box to open to find the next box. It would be chaos."
|
| Not really...
|
| If my outermost box says "Tools", a box in that box says
| "Automotive", and the box in that box says "Trim Removal".
|
| There's no chaos, I drill down from the generic to the specific
| and find what I need.
|
| Using Tags (keywords, etc) you can cross reference things too --
| for example Tools that may have uses in both the Automotive,
| Household, Computer realms get those as keywords, and ideally the
| tool will have a primary role so it can exist in that box, or
| otherwise if it truly doesn't belong in any one box then it can
| just be in the Tools box along w/ the boxes that contain all the
| task-specific stuff...
| groby_b wrote:
| For anybody going to implement it: Good luck, enjoy the journey
| and learning from it.
|
| At the end of the road, there will be a sign. It will say
| "hierarchical taxonomies never work". You will likely ignore it.
| (We all do). Ab initio.
| urda wrote:
| I'm still working a lot of my internal tribal knowledge out
| around this, but as I work that blog post out my general flow of
| organizing information in my life has been as follows:
|
| - Starts with a physical Moleskine notebook and fountain pen.
| This is the most free flowing and easiest way to get information
| saved. It is literally pen to paper, it does not crash, it does
| not fail.
|
| - From there ideas and notes are migrated, shaped, and
| restructured in digital ink and text on a Freeform board on my
| iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision.
|
| - Finally, as those ideas become more real and solid, they are
| formed into well understood wiki pages and saved there. From that
| point all new and changing information is committed to the wiki.
|
| Not all my information needs to flow into the wiki, but it is
| nice to have a knowledge "funnel" when keeping notes. When I
| think about information and notes, I always think about my
| favorite quote:
|
| > "For this you keep a lab notebook. Everything gets written
| down, formally, so that you know at all times where you are,
| where you've been, where you're going and where you want to get.
| In scientific work and electronics technology this is necessary
| because otherwise the problems get so complex you get lost in
| them and confused and forget what you know and what you don't
| know and have to give up."
|
| > Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
| whalesalad wrote:
| The aesthetic of this website immediately tells me that this
| person has no qualifications to tell me how to organize my life.
| mattfrommars wrote:
| Another system to organize my life? I JUST got started with
| BulletJournal :)
|
| Tbh, a person with ADHD and in my mid 30s, the biggest problem I
| have faced and none of these system [haven't tried
| Johnny.Decimal] yet is 'given my current situation, be it career
| and life, what should I prioritize' and the second hard part if
| keep track/progress.
|
| I do miss school/university days where we had a curriculum to
| follow with deadline and all. That brought structure and with
| fixed milestone. But in personal life, with unknowns everywhere,
| it is challenging. I have tried multiple strategies but they
| don't seem to work or eventually are forgotten. From two minute
| rule to this, I can't remember the exact details but something
| like invest x hours and if it doesn't work out, move on.
| dmje wrote:
| Been using JD for ~5 years or so. It's great. Sufficient
| structure to make sense of chaos, not too much to create more
| davikr wrote:
| This is so obtuse - why does "15.22 Checklists" start at ID 22
| instead of 11?
| projektfu wrote:
| It took me about 2 hours to organize a disorganized syncthing
| folder for my business into this system as I understood it. Now
| to see if it helps. I am diagnosed with ADHD.
|
| For what it is worth, some tools actively work against the use of
| folders on Windows now, including Office. Acrobat is another
| offender. (Not using Windows is not currently possible, too many
| assume Windows use in my industry). Even Google Drive hides the
| folders and makes you go through hoops to get to them each time.
| Reading the comments here, putting everything in one directory
| and relying on search seems to be the most popular filing system.
| In my space, I feel like everything gets lost as a result of that
| "system", and work is constantly duplicated because people don't
| know where to look.
|
| This system, at least, doesn't require much to keep organized.
| The ontology is shallow and it doesn't require me to constantly
| worry about where something should go best.
| fonema wrote:
| On Windows for many years now I've been putting things anywhere
| and then relying on a program called "Everything" to find
| stuff. I'm very happy with this set up. It allows extremely
| quick file system searches. I've tried to work with neatly
| organized folders at times but I would always get lost in them
| and things end up in the wrong place anyway.
| Terretta wrote:
| Hey, anyone who can't/won't/doesn't stick with a system... THIS
| IS FOR YOU.
|
| Most organization methods predate search.
|
| PARA, for example, can be a decent first cut (active Projects,
| Areas of responsibility,
| Reference(research/reading/recreation/really anything), Archive,
| and you could use that with the below, but _don 't need to_
| thanks to search.*
|
| The real reason we're still trying systems instead of search is
| we don't remember what to look for, and hope we'll find it where
| we should have filed it. Turns out we don't always file it
| there... Usually we don't file it at all.
|
| So: whether you use PARA at the top or not, within that...
|
| DON'T ORGANIZE!
|
| Don't even try.
|
| Instead, "journal" or "log" by simply saving all files to your
| desktop, then using a tool such as Hazel for Mac (or a python
| script, or whatever) "log sort" by renaming files once you
| haven't modified them for a while (I like once untouched for 7
| days) into folders and filename like "./YYYY/WW/YYYY-MM-DD -
| Original Title.ext". Pay attention to WW, that means Week Number.
| Month folders get too many files in them, day folders are too
| sparse. Life and ideas tend to cluster by the week, so week
| folders are a natural fit, with only 50 of them in a year, so you
| can see them all in one window.
|
| Why this works is you can find anything that goes with anything
| you worked on at the time by searching for _anything_ you can
| remember from the time. Heck, you don 't even have to remember
| anything, just, roughly when. The things from then will be
| adjacent.
|
| When you find anything at all from then, what you want will be in
| that week's folder, or at most go back a couple weeks before or
| after, and you see what you created or modified around then.
| Boost your odds by stuffing some other keywords into (parens) in
| the end of the filename when you first save it, there's no
| downside.
|
| If you can't even find by week, use YYYY-MM* and file type to see
| everything for a given month...
|
| Auto log sort is low (zero) effort day over day, week over week,
| but when you start being able to resurface anything you want,
| even if you can't remember it only things around the same time as
| it, you may be amazed you ever bothered any other way.
|
| ---
|
| * Note: If you collab with others, try to organize everyone by
| responsibilty areas managed by known owners of those
| responsibilities, then let them organize in their area, and just
| deal with figuring out whose thing this is and let them file it
| if it's not evident where it should go in their scheme. But still
| rename files by date last changed, since most file systems don't
| keep dates intact when, say, emailing files, etc., and it's still
| helpful to see what was being modified along with what. Because
| of the temporal order, the "sorts" tend to cluster things better
| than alphabetic sort.
| Appsmith wrote:
| While search works in most cases, sometimes some sort of
| organization comes in handy because recognition is easier than
| recall.
|
| That said, I do like PARA so built this centered around it,
| with a few GTD and ZK additions:
|
| https://thoughtscape.app/
| vvillena wrote:
| The one key takeaway from PARA, Johnny Decimal, and such other
| systems, is that nowadays the system itself doesn't matter
| much, but replicating the same system across all document and
| information hubs is still a net advantage.
| thallukrish wrote:
| The problem with organizing is not the lack of tools or
| techniques. It is simply not possible to devise a system which
| works automatically with little effort. Everything requires
| varying levels of discipline which is hard to keep up with time
| and a different situation.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _It is simply not possible to devise a system which works
| automatically with little effort._
|
| I use one.
|
| See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43135927 in this
| thread.
|
| Truly ZERO effort, yet a backup way to find things without
| search.
| Appsmith wrote:
| I kind of agree with you! But still wanted to take a shot at
| it:
|
| https://thoughtscape.app/
| noisy_boy wrote:
| > an area is a shelf, a category is a box, and an ID is a manila
| folder.
|
| I mean isn't that almost the 101 of organization? I have N big
| clear plastic bags for each member of my family - each has
| smaller bags for educational certificates, birth certificates and
| other legal documents. All of these are in a shelf together. I
| can immediately produce any of those.
|
| I have been thinking of another low-effort system for other
| lesser important documents that can be annoying to find. Put a
| box in each room and dump any lesser important papers in it, just
| dump it - whoever stays in that room dumps their such papers in
| it. Periodically clean as needed. Main rule is to not dump such
| papers _anywhere_ else.
| linhns wrote:
| I tried this. Simply does not work for me. In the end more time
| will be spent looking for the box
| asasidh wrote:
| search, don't sort
| kovek wrote:
| I like to have a category (folder, list, document, etc.) per
| entity that I am interacting with. That entity can be a
| government, a company, a person, an object, or other.
|
| What do you think?
| kras143 wrote:
| The more I tried to control and organize my life, the more
| stressed I became. Digitizing and organizing my knowledge base,
| in particular, wasted countless precious hours. Recently, I
| decided to let go of that rigid structure and instead focus on
| naturally prioritizing the most important tasks for the day,
| week, and month. So far, this approach has been working well, or
| at least it feels like it is.
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| I had the same experience with using a paper notebook. There
| are various systems and tips about how and what to write in a
| notebook to become more productive. But the best way for me was
| just to use it as a sheet of paper and write about what feels
| necessary at the moment with no structure whatever.
| stevage wrote:
| This seems to solve a problem I don't have, in a way that seems
| particularly irritating.
|
| In their example of travel as a category, I just have a folder
| called adventures, and underneath it, one folder per year.
|
| Is anyone really storing that many folders these days?
| krykp wrote:
| I think this gets the 'imposed limits' part right.
|
| What I've found is that I am unable to be organized or keep
| things organized if I have too much stuff. It doesn't matter if I
| organize by 'category' then 'thing' or 'thing' then 'category' or
| if I keep myself to 2 levels of nesting or 3.
|
| I have been decluttering every now and then, say, I will dedicate
| a weekend once every 6 months. I have started by getting rid of
| what is _obviously_ not necessary.
|
| By necessity I'm not talking in a materialistic sense, I find joy
| in the tiny statues I own and a physical photo album, even if
| they are not _vital_ for my life.
|
| I started by getting rid of things that are useful but just
| wasn't up to par anymore. Like old clothes. I would wear old
| clothes inside the home and justify their existence, but I have
| come to value myself enough to wear my nicer clothes, which are
| honestly still just relatively cheap shirts, inside the home too.
|
| After that, it was getting rid of things that are working, in
| good condition, but I had no use for anymore. For example I had
| built a computer, this meant ending up with a stock cooler, stock
| fans, stock thermal paste, my old PSU that was still very much
| working, all that. I wouldn't throw these away as they had no
| issues, but wasn't of use to me anymore. For these donating was
| easiest for me, as I would feel bad about getting rid of tons of
| in-working-situation hardware.
|
| I must note, all this requires certain privileges in life. Just
| getting rid of things you don't use but might, by some low
| chance, need, requires you to be wealthy enough to replace that
| without worrying about the price tag.
|
| I have also come to find out gender also matters. My clothes fit
| in a single-side wardrobe, and no one pays enough attention to my
| clothes to realize I'm cycling through 10 t-shirts and 5 shirts.
| Or if they did, that's plenty anyway. For women there's a certain
| social expectation and imposed necessity and a deeper sense of
| fashion. For a man a dress-shirt functions well in the workplace
| just as it functions in a job interview and it functions just as
| well in a wedding. For a women what they can wear to a wedding
| and what they can wear to work are very different, so there is a
| natural difference of expectation and necessity. But I digress.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I feel like if you are disciplined and organized enough to use a
| system like this, you probably don't need it.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| After having tried to be organised for decades, I gave in to my
| inner holistic self and gave up on (most) explicit organization
| and just became very good at searching/finding things.
|
| I could theorize about how no taxonomy deals with multiple
| contexts or remains valid over time, how filing errors will
| always happen so you will need search anyway, how unstructured
| scales to seamless incorporate outside sources etc., but thruth
| be told big piles of unorganised stuff with keen finding skills
| more naturally allign with my nature. Ymmv, and that's just fine.
| meander_water wrote:
| This is a neat system, but like many others here I doubt I could
| be disciplined enough to maintain it.
|
| Organising a second brain appears to be something that people
| have been grappling with for ages. For e.g. here's John Locke's
| system for organising his commonplace book -
| https://fs.blog/john-locke-common-place-book/
| ySteeK wrote:
| I was on a search for the 'perfect' system all my life.
|
| And I found it after 40 years : The No-System System... and it's
| the exactly opposite of op's suggestion :-)
|
| All together in somewhat chaotic folders and subfolders... the
| clou is that I use "recoll" everytime i search something. It's an
| Index based search engine. Take a look...
|
| I never missed something since I use just recoll and throw things
| just anywhere in the huge black box.
|
| The main pro: it costs me no time to "sort" things into things.
| mock-possum wrote:
| > You assign a unique ID to everything in your life.
|
| Ah - that's fun, but no. Using codes to organize stuff like that
| is unnecessary complication. Just label them robustly, and search
| for what you want, when you want it.
|
| > In real life, if you stored your stuff in piles of badly-
| labelled boxes you'd never find anything again.
|
| Okay but this isn't real life, this is a computer. The robot's
| entire job is to process data automatically in a way that would
| be tedious for you to accomplish manually.
|
| Forcing a user to remember an indexing system that matches
| concepts describable in plain English to esoteric numeral codes
| is just - why, why are you doing this to yourself. It's not
| better.
| ss64 wrote:
| Using numerical prefixes like the 'Johnny Decimal' system for
| folder organization is fine for personal files, if that floats
| your boat, but trying to implement it in a shared team area can
| be a recipe for strife. At best people will think you are
| slightly mad expecting them to memorise lists of numbers just to
| file things.
| binbag wrote:
| I must be missing something. This is recommending folders are
| numbered. Is that it? Is this a "system" now? I think that may
| have been used previously - for example by humanity for the last
| 5,000 years or so.
| dack wrote:
| Man, I completely recoiled when reading this.
|
| I spent a bunch of time in my 20s and early 30s trying out
| different organizational systems but I realized I just don't
| care. I care about doing interesting things, not organizing them.
|
| Also computers are pretty good at full-text searching for things,
| or tagging so you don't have to come up with a perfect hierarchy.
| And I think LLMs will make it even easier to find stuff using
| fuzzy language.
|
| Life's too short to spend it organizing.
| keepamovin wrote:
| I love the website design: the IBM code page 437 block characters
| and text styles are fantastic.
| 41d wrote:
| I think it's an interesting observation, and I understand that
| there are pros and cons to this. I like organized designs, grid
| styles, neatly arranged bookshelves, things that fit together
| perfectly, and clean environments, and I was always thinking
| about how to keep folders neat and avoid a state where I get
| tired of looking at them every time. And it's true that there are
| many people who don't particularly mind that. Is it similar to
| the location of a remote control, which looks messy but is
| perfectly placed for that person?
|
| Anyway, I really like it, and the introduction is very easy to
| understand. I also like the design of the WEB site.
|
| And your WEB tool is very useful for making the hierarchy easy to
| see at a glance (because it's very difficult to build it suddenly
| and edit it later).
| hasbot wrote:
| Maybe the root problem is keeping too much stuff? IRL, I have one
| bank box that has a folder for everything I truly need (e.g. dog
| papers, vehicle repair records, tax documents, deeds, and um...
| that's about it really). In my digital life, I just don't keep
| much stuff. Songs, audiobooks, ebooks, tax returns, and that's
| about it.
| fleshmonad wrote:
| >organise your file hierarchy in a common sense manner and add
| numbers
|
| >write way too long blog post in """hacker aesthetic"""
|
| >It gets to the HN front page
|
| Apart from that, the spaces in all filenames are questionable. I
| truly don't understand how something like this gets 450 points on
| HN
| spmcl wrote:
| I use Johnny.Decimal in my Obsidian vault, but its purpose is
| less about being able to find things in the future and more like
| "this is a simple well-trodden system so you may as well use it
| for some semblance of organization of your folder hierarchy." But
| I only label the folders. I don't label files with numerical
| values - folders are just dumping grounds for a certain type of
| notes. Like I have a folder for journal entries, unique notes,
| blog posts, book notes, recipes, and individual side-projects. A
| few tags (most auto-generated in templates) help me search past
| notes if I need to, but that's a very infrequent need.
|
| My point is that switching just the folder hierarchy to
| Johnny.Decimal was very easy and I don't have to think about how
| I organize my work ever. Contrast that with some of the other PKM
| organization schemes you'll find (such as using Johnny.Decimal in
| its entirety), and you'll see that they both take a ton of time
| to set up and a ton of effort to maintain. Those are massive
| wastes of time. There are far more meaningful things you could be
| doing outside of marginal gains to productivity, if you can even
| call PKM optimization a "marginal gain."
| sotix wrote:
| It reminds me of accounting systems. Asset accounts are 1000.
| Liability accounts are 2000. Stockholders' Equity are 3000.
| Revenue are 4000. Expenses are 5000. Then the second digit
| differentiates which specific category of account it is. The
| final two digits are the sub accounts of that broader category.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I scan and ocr everything. It's filed by year, with a subfolder
| for month. I narrow down the year range and search. I have files
| for decades arranged this way.
| pkilgore wrote:
| It's beautiful things like this exist for people and they are
| happy with them, but I cannot think of anything more stressful to
| me!
|
| Flat system of tags + Search + Fuzzy Find + Scanner + OCR + Giant
| Pile has been the route to happiness for me.
|
| My brain just isn't wired for hierarchy at all.
| CompoundEyes wrote:
| This reminds me of IBM Rational DOORS requirements documentation
| software's approach
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=263&v=Reff4ELfwrM
| edgarvaldes wrote:
| Is there any solution that works inside Google Docs? The lack of
| a native tree view in GD is a big stopper for me.
| seguri wrote:
| Works great for me. I've also written a plugin for Power Toys Run
| that allows me to quickly open a folder, e.g. 53.10. Blog post
| here: https://blog.seguri.dev/posts/powertoys-run-johnnydecimal/
| agnishom wrote:
| I don't get it. How do I figure out what the top level 10, 20,
| 30, etc should correspond to? And if I do figure out what they
| should correspond to, why can't I just use a more informative
| title for my folder instead of a number?
| igbanam wrote:
| Curious, how relevant is something like this in today's world?
|
| I was fascinated by this when I first saw it years ago. But in
| today's world, where fuzzy-finding, and A.I. working off embedded
| vector databases is a thing, how relevant is this system -- if
| the content being organized is electronic stuff on a computer. I
| get that this may work as a physical organization system.
| er4hn wrote:
| Never before have I read up on OIDs, SNMP, and then thought: Ah,
| I can apply this to the real world.
|
| If it works it works, but this is very funny to me.
| whatever1 wrote:
| I need none of these. I just need a search engine for my files
| that is not completely dumb.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| this looks interesting but just as i experienced when i stared
| taking notes, you can't just classify stuffs in folders,
| subfolders, sub sub folders and so on because there are case
| where one thing might fit 2 or more folders in very distinct
| categories.
|
| the author speak about travel insurance in one of his graphic,
| would you put it in the folder travel -> subfolder insurance but
| not in the folder Insurance ? it fits both case.
|
| what happens in 2 years when you look for these contract, you
| arent going to remember if you put it in the travel folder or
| insurance folder.
|
| multiply that by the many... many files that fits multiple case.
|
| what a waste of time and energy.
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