My take is to organize everything by projects using a predictable structure and naming.[0]
Johnny.Decimal
21–30 of 191 posts
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#22Hierarchically organized information vs. searchable information ... rings a bell.
Oh yeah: Yahoo directory vs. Google.
I've given up on organizing documents in hierarchies a long time ago. Specifically because many things actually belong in many places.
Search is the way to go.
[edit]: and by "Search" and mean "indexed search"
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#23> None of the areas or categories overlap. There’s only one place anything can ever be. Exactly unlike actual documents. Where do I put the sales figures we use for marketing?
This, so much.
This is what basically kills the whole idea. It's what made people want to switch from folders to search, which this site claims doesn't work.
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#24Re: Johnny.Decimal
#25This idea looks great, and it would be great if it worked: I've been struggling to keep all my documents organized many times, and I think I've followed basically the same system (except for the number.mapping). This is my gotcha: how do you decide where a document go? The categories might be clearly split, but documents typically won't fall in exactly one category. How do you manage temporary tags? That is: how do y…
> This is my gotcha: how do you decide where a document go? The categories might be clearly split, but documents typically won't fall in exactly one category.
Symlinks!
> How do you manage temporary tags?
Symlinks again!
Basically you put everything in an incoming folder, maybe organized by year or month/year or even type. Then you symlink to all of the categories it would be interesting to you.
Your temporary tags would just all be a folder of symlinks, so you can kill the tag and retain your document.
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#26How about a filesystem that just provided tagging as a first class citizen?
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Search is awesome. I agree, gmail's is great. Apple's Spotlight is also fabulous. So why does the article say "search doesn't fix this?" The problem is when search extends across domains. I can search files with Spotlight, but not my google emails. On my phone, it's worse because there are so many different comms systems. I can search my Whatsapp messages; my SMS messages; my email; Facebook messenger; Skype.... Each…
Couldn’t agree with this more. Local folder organisation isn’t the problem, silo’d data in proprietary ecosystems is.
There is a product who's name I cannot remember that indexes all your stuff (local, cloud) to make it all searchable - it's not Google but your index is in their system.
Edit: Seva and Cloudtenna
I wish I had a local one that just packed it all into Solr
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#28I remember when everything was on network drives, and no-one understood the folders other people had created, so they created their own. So you end up with three 'IT Projects' folders, in three different places. And worse, multiple copies of the same document in different places, all slightly different. Sharepoint should have been able to fix all that, but somehow it just made it the same, but slower. Even after 20 y…
> So yep I really like this Johnny.Decimal idea, simple and workable.
Seems to be no different than this:
>something that rings alarm bells is if the Project Manager has created sixty empty folders in Sharepoint arranged into a three level hierarchy
Except that it's a hundred empty folders in a two level hierarchy replicated by convention across different systems, including Sharepoint if your organization uses it.
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#29> “Hey Kristy, where can I find the payroll schedule?” > “Twelve dot oh-three.” Or, you know, don't encumber the brains of people with useless numbers, and use computers for what they are actually good are, at least better than people, e.g. use the search feature of your file browser for "payroll schedule".
In practice it looks like this: here's stuff matching "payroll schedule" - "payroll schedule 2018", "payroll schedule template", "payroll schedule for contractors", "payroll to reschedule July 2017", etc.
It's a common issue with intranets. There's lots of content, but not enough traffic to figure out what you may be interested in. And even if there was, you may not be after the "most popular" item.
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#30`find |grep -i ...` and `find -type f |xargs grep -i ...` have become old favourites.
This seems like an interesting system, provided you don't have more categories than you can easily remember.
If you use it in a team setting, there must not be more categories than the team as a whole can remember which is, perhaps counter-intuitively, fewer than you can probably remember on your own.
As with all classification systems, one should beware the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevole... or be doomed to repeat it.