I see this pop up every few years. I wish I had the follow though to do this.
Can I ask what benefit it provides? I'm genuinely curious what it could potentially provide.
Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
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Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
#12I 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.
Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
#13I'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…
You will understand when you get into your 50-60s.
Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
#14I 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.
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.
Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
#15I 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.
Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
#16I 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
Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
#17I'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…
You will understand when you get into your 50-60s.
Because of the volume of documents, or because of some cognitive change at that age?
Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
#18I 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.
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.
20250221-nyc-trip is not a creation time, it's an identifier of the subject. they're both dates but they're different things.
Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
#19It’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.
Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
#20I 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.