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Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life

johnnydecimal.com

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Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life

#101

Post by cautious-fly »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #48

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…

In terms of organising files over the years I have found that nothing beats good file names and file search.

Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life

#102

Post by y33t »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #48

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…

The best system I've come up with is to timestamp all my notes and sort them chronologically in a filing cabinet. You can link to notes by their timestamp, create indexes, calendars, weekly or daily todos etc, as necessary. The idea is that a note can be whatever you want or need it to be in that moment. Just make it addressable. Timestamps also give temporal context to correlate with emails, phone calls, or any other logged activity.

I found that trying to organize my notes one way or another introduced more work and cognitive load than it saved. Just timestamp it and let the rest happen naturally. Wu wei?

It's similar to a zettlekasten I guess, but without the effort.

Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life

#104

Post by istjohn »

emacsen wrote: post #82
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #48

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…

I'm in my mid-40s and have severe ADHD and I've tried many many techniques and systems over the years. Over the last ~15 years I've come to evolve a set of systems that work for me. I'm starting (in my "ample free time") to document them and in a series blog posts help people find systems that will work for them. My experience is that the best systems are the ones that have five characteristics: 1. They're simple No…

I just wrote a sibling comment echoing essentially the same philosophy, although you've elucidated the principles in more detail. As I wrote, my system is basically use a paper filing system (don't overthink it, just alphabetically ordered, labeled manila files), Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Obsidian on my phone for miscellaneous note-taking.

I'm eager to learn more about your systems. Where's your blog?

Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life

#105

Post by sureIy »

I realized that I'm very good at remembering time and location more than anything. If I want to look at something, I know when I did it more than what it contained.

For this purpose the photos app is amazing: "April 2020 cat video" and it's exactly what I was looking for.

I really wish file explorers were more consistent with their date management and didn't change "creation date" just because the file was moved or whenever the app/OS decides.

Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life

#107

Post by pjerem »

emacsen wrote: post #82
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #48

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…

I'm in my mid-40s and have severe ADHD and I've tried many many techniques and systems over the years. Over the last ~15 years I've come to evolve a set of systems that work for me. I'm starting (in my "ample free time") to document them and in a series blog posts help people find systems that will work for them. My experience is that the best systems are the ones that have five characteristics: 1. They're simple No…

May I ask your blog URL ? Or add it in your profile :)

Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life

#108

Post by haliskerbas »

ipsento606 wrote: post #98
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #48

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…

For me, part of the tension stems from being unwilling to design a system crappy enough that I will actually stick to. To take a trivial example, say your problem is that you leave clothes all over your bedroom floor, so you decide to set up a system to solve that. The naive approach is to design a system like "If it's too dirty to wear again, put it in the laundry basket, coded by light or dark. If it's clean, decid…

I’m like you and I’ve slowly started to embrace it. Sometimes that means three laundry baskets. One for clean one for dirty and one for wear again. And then iterating on top of that!

Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life

#109

Post by jrootabega »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #48

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…

There is no voluntary system which can't be sabotaged by your own feelings. Performance anxiety, overthinking, fear of success, etc. And if you let things pile up without processing them, that becomes another snowballing reason to avoid the system. One's thoughts and feelings ABOUT the system seem to have no way to be processed BY the system, so one just avoids all of it. There is also sometimes an expectation that a system will do the hard work for you, instead of just telling you what you should be putting hard work into in a certain time slice.

I am not betting my life that there is no one who is psychologically incapable of working with certain systems without intractable distress. But I doubt it.

Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life

#110

Post by marttt »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #48

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…

These two older HN comments might relate to your lines of thinking. I found both of these very insightful when I got stuck with trying out all sorts of rigid systems, outliners, zettelkasten etc:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17893139

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8807252

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