Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by MailleQuiMaille » Fri, Feb 21, 2025, 7:48 PM UTC

I think the key for me, a lifelong messy person, was to find out what I like or don't.

Like : -Taking notes on the fly for capturing fleeting ideas. -When working on a project, embracing the mess by having as many documents/spreadsheets as possible. -When a project is over, putting everything in a folder and letting it there.

Don't like : -Using fancy tools like Notion, Obsidian and the likes. -Getting stuck on rigid systems, and even worse : tied to a subscription. -Being forced to use a specific device.

My solution ? Upnote. Proton Drive. A messy desktop.

Am I the most "optimized" I could be ? No. But I can quickly find out everything I need fast, and when I'm working on a project, I know what to do.

More than that seems overkill, for me at least.

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

#142

Post by mattlondon » Fri, Feb 21, 2025, 8:26 PM UTC

This seems overly complex? 15.2.234 for example is not remotely memorable or intuitive - no one knows what that is.

Why limit yourself to this low-signal approach? It seems deliberately obtuse for no obvious benefits?

What has worked for me is a folder per financial year, then just rough semantic groupings in each year folder called e.g. "cars" "health" "house" "tax" etc and just chuck files into those as needed. I usually change the filename to be something descriptive and information dense too like e.g. " Home Insurance Aug 2024-2025.pdf" etc. Store it all on some cloud service (OneDrive or Google Docs or whatever - local backup of your choice) and then you can just drill-down or even better just search. Simples.

So e.g.

2024-2025/

--house/

----123 ABC Street Home Insurance April 2024-2025.pdf

----123 ABC Street Mortgage statement Jan 2024.pdf

--cars/

----Honda repair invoice June 2024.pdf

----Honda insurance Feb 2024-2025.pdf

----BMW insurance Mar 2024-2025

Not rocket science. Anyone reading this understands this "system", and it is trivial to search. No rote memorisation of random numbers needed!

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

#143

Post by marcusestes » Fri, Feb 21, 2025, 8:40 PM UTC

[IQ distribution chart meme]

* Just use Apple Notes

* No! You can't just use Apple Notes. You need a full ontological graph structure based on an open standard!

* Just use Apple Notes

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

#144

Post by nilslindemann » Fri, Feb 21, 2025, 8:41 PM UTC

Looks like a task oriented sorting - "for what do I need this?" - and the numbers are a workaround for a shortcoming in file managers, which does not allow giving a user defined sorting to a list of files/folders.

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

#145

Post by raajg » Fri, Feb 21, 2025, 8:42 PM UTC

I think that local search, retrieval, and filing will become much easier with LLMs.

There are already tools and products in the market that allow you to rename and organize files. I believe this is the future.

We have developed various systems over decades, but I anticipate with LLMs it'll be so easy to file and retrieve things that we won't even have to think about it.

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

#146

Post by GarnetFloride » Fri, Feb 21, 2025, 8:48 PM UTC

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 love exploring different organizational systems.

Getting Things Done is good for project management but falls down for organizing.

Marie Kondo is good at organizing and deciding if something is worth keeping or not, but has issues with scale.

Covey/Daytimer was good for time management but didn't do project management all that well.

Jamie Hynaman has a massive wall of transparent boxes for organizing materials for his shop but all the hammers are in one box and you have to go to that box to get the hammer whenever you need one.

Adam Savage's system puts his most needed tools right around each workstation but it's expensive as he had multiple copies of many tools.

Kitchens use mise en place to prep and organize the ingredients for cooking so they can 100-200 plates out to table a day.

There's PARA, and Zettlekasten for organizing information.

There are, all told, tens of thousands of rules for writers.

In the end I see them all as tools for solving problems and not all of them work for all problems and that's okay, if I can find a tool to make solving a problem I am currently working on easier, that's wonderful or I make something myself.

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

#147

Post by ediwdlrow » Fri, Feb 21, 2025, 8:51 PM UTC

"If you put those boxes in boxes, in boxes, you'd never know which box to open to find the next box. It would be chaos."

Not really...

If my outermost box says "Tools", a box in that box says "Automotive", and the box in that box says "Trim Removal".

There's no chaos, I drill down from the generic to the specific and find what I need.

Using Tags (keywords, etc) you can cross reference things too -- for example Tools that may have uses in both the Automotive, Household, Computer realms get those as keywords, and ideally the tool will have a primary role so it can exist in that box, or otherwise if it truly doesn't belong in any one box then it can just be in the Tools box along w/ the boxes that contain all the task-specific stuff...

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

#148

Post by groby_b » Fri, Feb 21, 2025, 8:59 PM UTC

For anybody going to implement it: Good luck, enjoy the journey and learning from it.

At the end of the road, there will be a sign. It will say "hierarchical taxonomies never work". You will likely ignore it. (We all do). Ab initio.

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

#149

Post by edding4500 » Fri, Feb 21, 2025, 9:06 PM UTC

Tomte wrote: post #62

edding4500 wrote: post #22

So basically a Zettelkasten?

No. It has practically nothing to do with Zettelkasten. For starters, Johnny Decimal says nothing about links.

Uh, you are right, that was a silly comment I made.

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

#150

Post by ghaff » Fri, Feb 21, 2025, 9:18 PM UTC

GarnetFloride wrote: post #146

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 love exploring different organizational systems. Getting Things Done is good for project management but falls down for organizing. Marie Kondo is good at organizing and deciding if something is worth keeping or not, but has issues with scale. Covey/Daytimer was good for time management but didn't do project management all that well. Jamie Hynaman has a massive wall of transparent boxes for organizing materials for…

>Adam Savage's system puts his most needed tools right around each workstation but it's expensive as he had multiple copies of many tools.

It's a tradeoff. For travel, I obviously don't have multiple passports or high-value items. But it's absolutely worth having some extra cords and toiletries so I have dedicated travel kits for those sorts of items. Not perfect or absolute but being able to more or less grab a couple kits and throw them in my luggage works for a lot of purposes.