What happens when the counter reaches 0.99?
Johnny.Decimal
91–100 of 191 posts
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#92I have a creeping feeling that systems like this (one of the most famous of them is GTD, but there are many, many others) are designed by people with a certain temperament: they are organized anyway, and their ability to continually keep things neat and orderly, following the same algorithm day after day, is what really helps them, and what particular system they choose to follow, doesn't really matter much.
But then they are unsuccessfully applied by people with a completely different, chaotic temperament, which are not able to maintain any such system for a significant amount of time anyway. We (as I'm certainly from the second kind) try one system after another, hoping that this will be the one that finally saves us from ourselves, but the real difference lies not in the system, but in something very fundamental in our psyche. It doesn't matter how beautiful the system is, or how fancy are the pens that we buy each september (school memories are the best example of this) - a couple of months later it will lie abandoned and forgotten.
May be I'm wrong? Has there been a single HN user that has been unorganized and chaotic most of his life, but then have actually turned things around because of such a system? Would love to hear about it.
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#93Fantastic system. I've used something similar after file sharing mayhem in a startup of just 3 people. We finally created a few major folders and agreed to never change them.
Search today is still terrible. Nothing reaches across all content or platforms easily, and different scoring systems and operators in different interfaces means it's just as big of a mess as the files it's meant to find.
The ability to direct someone else to a location is also incredibly important, especially because "where" something is can be just as important as "what" is in it. Most systems seem to forget or abstract that away, to their own detriment.
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#94> “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".
Search is not reliable or reproducible. People search for things in different ways, and the content of a file is separate from the location while both are important.
And search systems today are still terrible. Different interfaces, searching different locations and content, with different ranking and relevance and operators. Much faster to just direct someone where something is and let their brain figure out the rest, because we're actually very good at that.
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#95>When we kept everything on paper, organised people had these things called filing cabinets. They stored all of their documents in them in a structured way so that they could find them again. >Now those same people store all of their files in arbitrarily named folders on their company’s shared drive and wonder why they can’t find anything. This is the most outrageously false premise on which to base an argument. It's…
What's false about it?
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#96This is not a good idea. Here is why: - It only solves the problem of communicating categories to another person/party with its brevity. 12.03, easy to tell others. But all this at the expense of the following things. - There is no way to immediately know what 12.03 means. One has to carry a look up table. You can replace it with 2 char code. For example, Finance.Taxes to FN.TX. Why use numbers? Is the ordering impor…
This magical search system doesn't exist. In reality we have dozens of different search backends searching different stuff in different places with different relevance and UIs and results. And if you're going to use labels then this is the same thing, except picking 1 major label to organize with.
It's why we have street numbers to find buildings. It's why libraries use catalogs to locate books. It's why financial systems use a chart of accounts with numbers and prefixes to organize transactions.
Location is important, and abstracting that away into a giant file share with search only makes things worse.
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#97Well, 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…
The HN comments always sting a little. My guess is the cynics are the ones who usually comment while people who are more positive will probably be more likely to just upvote? So my recommendation (having had a couple HN-front pagers) would be to be encouraged by the upvotes and the attention, while keeping your skin thick.. But also learning from the criticism what you can improve.
pretty much that, because what am i going to say other than: i like it, i'll go try that now.
if on the other hand i see something that's problematic or could be improved, i should say that, instead of just downvoting.
i think the problem comes from the tone people use to voice their disagreements
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#98Well, 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’ve been using John Decimal since reading about on HN several years ago, so for every critic, there are folks happily using it and paying no mind.
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#99This is truly a great system. Simple to use and simple to maintain. Kudos for formalizing the data organization methodology.
Re: Johnny.Decimal
#100Well, 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…
Awesome privacy policy! https://johnnydecimal.com/privacy/
I agree, except for the part where they immediately contradict themselves:
> If you choose to give me your email address, I will treat it with the utmost respect. I’ll never spam you, or give it to anyone else.
> In 2019 I moved from Mailchimp, whose business model started to make me uncomfortable, to Buttondown. It’s run by one guy who I trust to do the right thing.