Reverse classic HN meta comment: this website is crazy fast and easy to read. Well done Johnny Noble, thank you.
Johnny.Decimal
41–50 of 191 posts
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#42This would be a good system for managing Tasks and TODOs.
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#43> “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.
Don't forget that the document you may be looking for may actually be called "payment schedule" instead of payroll schedule because someone wasn't good at following the implicit, unwritten naming convention.
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#44I 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…
(I'm the eponymous 'Johnny'.)
This. One hundred times this.
Those here arguing that things can, in fact, be found, or saying that my claim that "nobody can find anything any more" is absurd, clearly haven't worked in the ~5 large enterprises that I've worked in over the last decade.
Internal organisation in enterprises is shockingly bad. Remember, these people aren't techs. They have no idea what `find / -iname file | grep whatever` means. They crack open SharePoint and rummage around. When they want to save a thing, they just put it wherever. It's chaos.
I'm just implementing this for a few new projects at my current place and my boss has messaged me a number of times expressing his joy at just knowing where stuff is.
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#45How about a filesystem that just provided tagging as a first class citizen?
There's been a numbmer of those, but I'm fairly certain that you don't use one (or many people for that matter).
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#46This is why I love love love Gmail and Google Photos. The search engine is so powerful. I search "driveway" and get all the photos my wife and I ever took that shows our driveway. Ah yes the cracks are getting worse. I search email for "driveway repair" and find that old recommendation from a friend despite the word driveway having never been mentioned. I don't need a sorting system. I need a big pile of all my data…
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…
(I'm the eponymous 'Johnny'.)
Yep, search is great in Google-world or on your Mac. But try it at work where everything is in disparate SharePoints if you're lucky.
> Hence, the idea of using manual labels to classify stuff - including emails - can still be useful. Crazy that we're forced back to this.
I know!
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#47`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 syst…
Any reason to use `find -type f |xargs grep -i ...` instead of `grep -i -r "whatever" .`?
Couldn't you use `rg` (ripgrep) instead `find -type f |xargs grep -i ...`?
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#48Well, this was bound to happen one day. This is my site. I guess I’ll read the comments here then go take a bath with a bottle of gin. :-) Edit: yep. As suspected. Let me just say this, if I may: 1. You don’t have to like every idea, but please consider that some people do . 2. I’ve been using this successfully for a decade. I’m using it right now to organise a project. My boss loves me for it, because guess what? We…
I have to say, I use it, thank you for publishing it, and have a nice day
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#49> “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".
(I'm the eponymous 'Johnny'.)
This is a real example from a past life, and really works when you're shouting across an office or talking down the phone.
The longer original, edited down for brevity, went something like:
"Hey Kristy, where can I find the payroll schedule?"
"Okay go to the Finance folder. No, the one in the G: drive. Yeah now go to Payroll ... oh sorry, it's Payroll 2020. Yeah no not the Payroll 2020 in the Payroll folder, the one at the root. Yeah. Now in there ... hang on let me have a look ... okay there's a 'Janice' folder and in there..." ... and so on, ad. absurdium.
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#50This 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 w…
(I'm the eponymous 'Johnny'.)
Symlinks can work, and I've used them.
My advice to people is usually, though, that your brain will sort it out for you. And it really does.
The canonical example is "home insurance". Say you have a category of "home" and a category elsewhere of "insurance". Perfectly possible.
Which one does it go in? Well, you designed this system. Your brain came up with it. I've found that in nearly all cases, you just know.
I see where this may fall down in a shared environment (work), which is why I advocate (in one of the many unwritten posts on my as-yet-to-exist blog) for the role of a 'librarian' at work. We seem to think that 20 people can work on a project together and all just magically decide where everything goes. That has been shown again and again to be a fallacy that we believe search will help us with. My argument -- from experience -- is that it does not, and that we need to go back to a world where we organise things, and that people are responsible for this organisation.