Live data from Hacker News

Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life

johnnydecimal.com

131–140 of 300 posts

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

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does this transfer to mobile when you're out and about?

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

#132

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 approach I’ve found so far is to just have a single master “event log” where I dump everything that I want to save by default. I have specific places to put things but if I can’t be bothered to decide where or am not sure it’ll just go to the event log. I’m using Notion for this where each entry is its own page in a “database” list. Adding a new page is trivial though through the site or app. I have an iOS shortcut setup too to open the entry creation

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

#133
the concept is very good, and i like the approach to distinguish personal , business etc. It's not the system that matters, but the continued practice of inventorying and assessing your library.

One approach is to imagine your archives as a physical library and what regular maintenance you would need to keep the library in order for others to enjoy it.

These include indexing like the author talked about. but also curating & summarization ( meta-summaries of the catalog). Also disaster preparation (backup) , replication (e.g. keeping repositories in sync between the archive and active work).

Every well built engineering system started as a neglected concept that got elevated into a formal area worthy of attention

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

#134
I set this up a few weeks ago and it's working great so far. You start to develop muscle memory and now i organise everything to the same order, eg bookmarks

i think it's partly that i remember location phsyically. i can remember bookmarks in real books, my remembering where certain words are on a page and flicking through until i find them. i wouldn't stand a chanec ofremembering page number. somehow the JD system recreates thsi for me

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

#135
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…

it's only going to be one of a few places though, and the key thing is you know where those places are and can get to them quickly

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

#136
post #88
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The closest I've come is in using an "outliner". I don't have it in me to impose structure on notes. I like how logseq works, where you don't need to name your files. You just write into the "today" log about whatever. Then if you someday want to create a page on a particular topic, the system combs through your past daylogs for incidences of that phrase and throws a reference to it into the doc for you. There's no n…

Seconding Logseq, though I think the move to database structure is going to ruin it for me. I'm one of those people for whom Notion is counterintuitive to the point of being completely unusable, and all I can suss out about this switch is that it's going to make Logseq more like Notion. Every time the Johnny.Decimal system resurfaces on HN, though, I'll admit to spending a couple weeks revisiting the task of finally…

> I'm one of those people for whom Notion is counterintuitive to the point of being completely unusable

Most of the existing workflows remain the same and the DB version opens up many more workflows. Would recommend trying it out if you haven't already with https://test.logseq.com/ and https://github.com/logseq/docs/blob/feat/db/db-version.md. If you have tried it out, please give us feedback :)

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

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I saw Simone Giertz's build, I immediately wished she'd start selling those. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H175G8NH2Cg - "A chair built for your half-dirty clothes". I'd love this to be my "3rd basket".

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

#138
post #41

I 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. The…

You might want to take a look at https://www.limitless.ai/#pendant We've received great feedback from ADHD users about how it has helped them throughout their lives

And if I don't want my conversation recorded? How do I know if I am being recorded?
Post reply on HN