231–240 of 300 posts
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.
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 th…
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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 f…
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 :)
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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 you tend to remember that. Haha, nope. Different brains work differently. One day I genuinely prefer one, a week later another.
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).
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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 :)
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.
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.
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 th…
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 inher…
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 th…
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.
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, et…
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.
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?