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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

#151

Post by ghaff »

istjohn wrote: post #96
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…

My brother claims to have achieved that transformation with GTD. My personal experience is that complex rigid systems like GTD require high initial investments in effort and can be brittle. They are sort of like doing a total rewrite of a codebase. My biggest wins have come from making small incremental changes. The biggest win I ever made was getting a small filing cabinet (a banker box works, too) and putting it, a…

>And if you need to dig something out of the POPIB, when you're done with it, file it away instead of returning it to the POPIB. Soon, the POPIB will shrink to a pile of mostly trash that you can store in a shoebox in the back of a closet.

It's also the case that you may legitimately need something out of the POPIB sometime over the next 12 months. Assuming you've been smart about it (I did have an old doc I needed a while ago but I had actually kept it in my fire box because it seemed like something I might need) if something is a few years old, it can probably go in the trash.

The problem with scanning is that there's work involved and if you don't do a decent job with metadata, it's going to be pretty much useless anyway. For a lot of people, file cabinet with folders is probably a good system unless they really are on-the-go or have multiple residences a lot of the time.

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

#152

Post by urda »

I'm still working a lot of my internal tribal knowledge out around this, but as I work that blog post out my general flow of organizing information in my life has been as follows:

- Starts with a physical Moleskine notebook and fountain pen. This is the most free flowing and easiest way to get information saved. It is literally pen to paper, it does not crash, it does not fail.

- From there ideas and notes are migrated, shaped, and restructured in digital ink and text on a Freeform board on my iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision.

- Finally, as those ideas become more real and solid, they are formed into well understood wiki pages and saved there. From that point all new and changing information is committed to the wiki.

Not all my information needs to flow into the wiki, but it is nice to have a knowledge "funnel" when keeping notes. When I think about information and notes, I always think about my favorite quote:

> “For this you keep a lab notebook. Everything gets written down, formally, so that you know at all times where you are, where you’ve been, where you’re going and where you want to get. In scientific work and electronics technology this is necessary because otherwise the problems get so complex you get lost in them and confused and forget what you know and what you don’t know and have to give up.”

> Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

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

#153

Post by ghaff »

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 found GTD had a few basic concepts I try--sometimes even successfully--to follow. But I've basically never been an "organizational system" person.

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

#155

Post by a-saleh »

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 some level of organization you have to achieve to be at least somewhat successful.

I think these sort of more complex systems are there to help you if your problem is being overwhelmed, or if you have need to have things classified and under control.

If your problem is the baseline fact that sticking to any sort of system is hard ... haha, same, and then you need a system that is simple.

I currently live by my google-calendar. Alerts in advance, trying to put everything there, to a point I https://sectograph.com/ as my watchface on my smartwatch, just so that I won't forget what I need to do today.

Also, writing out my daily todo-list in a ~private-ish channel I have on friend's discord suprisingly works better just having a todolist. Because my friends see that and that makes my brain actually care :)

So, yeah, "just need to figure out ways to handle my general messiness and get it to work" is right on the money.

It is like with that Bullet Journal thing. You see the elaborate ones from people that love their melticulous templates. But when I used it for a month or so successfully, it was just about the simple bulet-points, sometimes with dates, review once a day. I stopped because I lost the notebook, so ... oversharing on discord it is - I probably am procrastinating there anyway :D

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

#156

Post by anktor »

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…

Recently I have been thinking about this, because I feel I have managed to become way more organized than I ever thought it was possible.

What is working for me right now is noting everything in a calendar so I cannot forget it or as TODO in a somewhat heavy personalized Obsidian configuration.

A few years ago (5-6 aprox) I started copying my older co-workers habits to see myself improve. Physical notebooks were soon discarded because I never remember where I wrote down things.

I used a TODO plugin in sublime which worked for several months, until I felt I needed screenshots so I moved to OneNote. After a while I became frustrated with not being able to customize it enough, so I started trying out different things. I saw a coworker using Obsidian, watched a couple long YouTube videos to learn how to customize, and I'm never going back.

My team this week told me they are impressed with how much info I write down and it was a very proud moment for me!

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

#159

Post by 0x457 »

mattlondon wrote: post #142

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 u…

Well, you only need to remember "00.00 Index" which is where description of all categories is.

Your version IMO is awful. Year on root level means you have to remember year that document was created. Unless you constantly need to lookup insurance documents (only thing besides taxes I can remember which year I'm looking for) that's not going to work IMO.

Since we threw away core organization principle of this system (limit your choices), why not all documents realted to house1/car1/car2 into corresponding folders?

Also, you used 2 different ways to write a month and date. Now I have to remeber is this document on Jan or January, don't want to confuse with documents about my friend Jan and Jane either.

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

#160

Post by mattfrommars »

Another system to organize my life? I JUST got started with BulletJournal :)

Tbh, a person with ADHD and in my mid 30s, the biggest problem I have faced and none of these system [haven't tried Johnny.Decimal] yet is 'given my current situation, be it career and life, what should I prioritize' and the second hard part if keep track/progress.

I do miss school/university days where we had a curriculum to follow with deadline and all. That brought structure and with fixed milestone. But in personal life, with unknowns everywhere, it is challenging. I have tried multiple strategies but they don't seem to work or eventually are forgotten. From two minute rule to this, I can't remember the exact details but something like invest x hours and if it doesn't work out, move on.

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