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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

#121

Post by gloomyday »

Beestie wrote: post #90

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…

I've had this problem for a long time. My solution was to keep my organization as flat as possible. This means everything insurance-related would go to 13.

A flat structure seems less organized, since you are “mixing” stuff, but as long as there isn't too much stuff inside, going through stuff one-by-one is faster than you think. If I do have a lot of stuff in a section, I either split into several sections in the top structure (so 13 is life insurance, 14 is other...), or go one level deeper (not preferred, but I do it when it's very clear and there is too much stuff, like photos, which btw sorting chronologically works best for me).

It is really not much of an issue having 50 top sections. It makes the organization transparent, and indexing, sorting and going one-by-one remains easy.

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

#122

Post by tikhonj »

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 am pretty ADD. For me, moving to a system using org-mode helped a lot. It didn't make me an "organized" person (hah!), but it has repeatedly kept me from losing track of important things and has given me a place to take tasks/reminders/notes/etc off my mind. Being able to write something down and trust that it will surface back when I need it has reduced my mental load and general anxiety.

I haven't been super organized or consistent in how I use org-mode—org-mode is great at letting me discover my own workflow and adapt the tool to what I need rather than adapting myself to the tool—and I've gone through periods where I lost the habit, but, overall, it's been a concrete improvement to my life. I've found that seeing it as a tool rather than a "system" made a big difference for me. I've never liked productivity systems (especially at work), but having a tool I can use in whatever ways helps me is a qualitatively different—and better!—thing.

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

#123

Post by arnonejoe »

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…

Same. My file system gets "cleaned up" every two years when I buy a new macbook.

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

#124

Post by wink »

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 challenge the "organized person" thing already.

I'm very organized in some areas and make the biggest mess in others.

Also what does "unorganized" even mean? I usually don't forget work TODOs but I regularly forget non-work TODOs. One has me have a text file open on the same computer, and in the other area stuff comes up left and right, and if I have my phone to jot it down it doesn't mean I will look at my phone on time...

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

#126

Post by puffybuf »

tikhonj wrote: post #122
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 am pretty ADD. For me, moving to a system using org-mode helped a lot . It didn't make me an "organized" person (hah!), but it has repeatedly kept me from losing track of important things and has given me a place to take tasks/reminders/notes/etc off my mind. Being able to write something down and trust that it will surface back when I need it has reduced my mental load and general anxiety. I haven't been super org…

I love org-mode with emacs. I use it to organize my notes / game hacks / todo / pretty much anything using a tree structure. You can use drawers to hide things like sample code.

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

#127

Post by ryanstorm »

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…

Your principles mirror my own, which have been developed and refined over the last ten years (I'm 34 now). There have been periods of overcomplicating things, but they've mostly reached a natural state that works for me.

Maybe interesting is the evolution of my system:

• 2015 and prior: Sticky notes, calendars, notebooks, sheets of paper, chaos

• 2016-2019: I found the bullet journal method and implemented the most basic form found here: https://bulletjournal.com/blogs/faq (collections, future log, monthly log, daily log) and never really evolved from that utilitarian mode.

• 2019-2025: I signed up for Notion and ported my bullet journal system there. I miss the physical version, but prefer the easy access and easy editing in the online version. In addition to Notion, I heavily use Google Calendar, and also Google Keep as a quicker-access and catch-all of smaller notes. I use Notion for life admin and Obsidian for work notes and files.

OP's Johnny.Decimal system caught my attention since I've been interested in a consistent and proven way to organize the files on my laptop, SSDs, Drive, as well as all my physical docs. I could also see it being a nice way to organize my Notion and Obsidian, but I also tend to rely on search and backlinking as others have commented about for their own systems.

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

#128

Post by BigGreenJorts »

haliskerbas wrote: post #108
ipsento606 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I did the third laundry basket for a bit. I think it's missing what's peak about the chair which is that I can still sorta see what's in the pile. I'm trying to find a coat hook esque system.

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

#129

Post by 4k93n2 »

haliskerbas wrote: post #108
ipsento606 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

wont everything be wrinkled when you take it back out of wear-again basket?!

i just tend to order most things on hangers with the most newly washed things to the right, then every time i wear something and put it back it goes a bit closer to the left. then when im putting on a wash i know that its all the things on the very left that need to be washed.

another useful way to keep track of things is to hang up anything thats newly washed with the hook of the hanger facing towards you, then hang it up the normal way once you worn it. and i still order the newly washed things from right to left as well since theres the odd thing i dont wear that often which can go musty if its just sitting there for months, so when im putting on a wash sometimes i check the very left side of the newly washed things as well

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

#130

Post by tonymet »

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 process of trying to organize is helpful, even if the organization system itself fails. I think people resent organizing because they expect magic to happen once they try. but like exercise, learning, playing music, cooking -- it's the practice of the habit that develops results . Everything great takes repetition
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