Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life

For what it is worth, some tools actively work against the use of folders on Windows now, including Office. Acrobat is another offender. (Not using Windows is not currently possible, too many assume Windows use in my industry). Even Google Drive hides the folders and makes you go through hoops to get to them each time. Reading the comments here, putting everything in one directory and relying on search seems to be the most popular filing system. In my space, I feel like everything gets lost as a result of that "system", and work is constantly duplicated because people don't know where to look.

This system, at least, doesn't require much to keep organized. The ontology is shallow and it doesn't require me to constantly worry about where something should go best.

If my brain worked like a database, I'd already be using one of the dozens of products that depended on a database structure. I don't doubt that this will be more mainstream because of the decision, but it will ruin what made the product useful for me.

Most organization methods predate search.

PARA, for example, can be a decent first cut (active Projects, Areas of responsibility, Reference(research/reading/recreation/really anything), Archive, and you could use that with the below, but don't need to thanks to search.*

The real reason we're still trying systems instead of search is we don't remember what to look for, and hope we'll find it where we should have filed it. Turns out we don't always file it there... Usually we don't file it at all.

So: whether you use PARA at the top or not, within that...

DON'T ORGANIZE!

Don't even try.

Instead, "journal" or "log" by simply saving all files to your desktop, then using a tool such as Hazel for Mac (or a python script, or whatever) "log sort" by renaming files once you haven't modified them for a while (I like once untouched for 7 days) into folders and filename like "./YYYY/WW/YYYY-MM-DD - Original Title.ext". Pay attention to WW, that means Week Number. Month folders get too many files in them, day folders are too sparse. Life and ideas tend to cluster by the week, so week folders are a natural fit, with only 50 of them in a year, so you can see them all in one window.

Why this works is you can find anything that goes with anything you worked on at the time by searching for anything you can remember from the time. Heck, you don't even have to remember anything, just, roughly when. The things from then will be adjacent.

When you find anything at all from then, what you want will be in that week's folder, or at most go back a couple weeks before or after, and you see what you created or modified around then. Boost your odds by stuffing some other keywords into (parens) in the end of the filename when you first save it, there's no downside.

If you can't even find by week, use YYYY-MM* and file type to see everything for a given month...

Auto log sort is low (zero) effort day over day, week over week, but when you start being able to resurface anything you want, even if you can't remember it only things around the same time as it, you may be amazed you ever bothered any other way.

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* Note: If you collab with others, try to organize everyone by responsibilty areas managed by known owners of those responsibilities, then let them organize in their area, and just deal with figuring out whose thing this is and let them file it if it's not evident where it should go in their scheme. But still rename files by date last changed, since most file systems don't keep dates intact when, say, emailing files, etc., and it's still helpful to see what was being modified along with what. Because of the temporal order, the "sorts" tend to cluster things better than alphabetic sort.

I mean isn't that almost the 101 of organization? I have N big clear plastic bags for each member of my family - each has smaller bags for educational certificates, birth certificates and other legal documents. All of these are in a shelf together. I can immediately produce any of those.

I have been thinking of another low-effort system for other lesser important documents that can be annoying to find. Put a box in each room and dump any lesser important papers in it, just dump it - whoever stays in that room dumps their such papers in it. Periodically clean as needed. Main rule is to not dump such papers _anywhere_ else.