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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

#211

Post by pillefitz »

hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #199
ghaff wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree. I tried a few times but they never stick. I admit that my life would receive a positive buff if I stick to one of the systems, but I just don't have the heart.

Why is that? GTD for me was the only system that stuck. Set it up once and have it synced across all devices (I use MS ToDo, as it's free, comes pre installed ony work computer and doesn't have many fancy features).

The secret is to set up a weekly reminder to review tasks.

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

#212

Post by BakirKreso »

thfuran wrote: post #184
plagiarist wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setting constant reminders is a good life hack. Sometimes I wonder if I might be better at life with a haptic tap on the wrist every ten minutes, like just a nudge to think if I am doing what I want to do.

The real trick would be for it to be able to tell whether what you're doing is what you want to be doing so it doesn't interrupt you when you already are.

You can use a thumb counter (a small clicker on your thumb) to count how many times you were able to get yourself back on track

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

#213

Post by krykp »

I think this gets the 'imposed limits' part right.

What I've found is that I am unable to be organized or keep things organized if I have too much stuff. It doesn't matter if I organize by 'category' then 'thing' or 'thing' then 'category' or if I keep myself to 2 levels of nesting or 3.

I have been decluttering every now and then, say, I will dedicate a weekend once every 6 months. I have started by getting rid of what is _obviously_ not necessary.

By necessity I'm not talking in a materialistic sense, I find joy in the tiny statues I own and a physical photo album, even if they are not _vital_ for my life.

I started by getting rid of things that are useful but just wasn't up to par anymore. Like old clothes. I would wear old clothes inside the home and justify their existence, but I have come to value myself enough to wear my nicer clothes, which are honestly still just relatively cheap shirts, inside the home too.

After that, it was getting rid of things that are working, in good condition, but I had no use for anymore. For example I had built a computer, this meant ending up with a stock cooler, stock fans, stock thermal paste, my old PSU that was still very much working, all that. I wouldn't throw these away as they had no issues, but wasn't of use to me anymore. For these donating was easiest for me, as I would feel bad about getting rid of tons of in-working-situation hardware.

I must note, all this requires certain privileges in life. Just getting rid of things you don't use but might, by some low chance, need, requires you to be wealthy enough to replace that without worrying about the price tag.

I have also come to find out gender also matters. My clothes fit in a single-side wardrobe, and no one pays enough attention to my clothes to realize I'm cycling through 10 t-shirts and 5 shirts. Or if they did, that's plenty anyway. For women there's a certain social expectation and imposed necessity and a deeper sense of fashion. For a man a dress-shirt functions well in the workplace just as it functions in a job interview and it functions just as well in a wedding. For a women what they can wear to a wedding and what they can wear to work are very different, so there is a natural difference of expectation and necessity. But I digress.

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

#214

Post by SoftTalker »

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 roughly the same. Here's what I do.

I go to Staples and buy some bankers boxes. These are cardboard boxes that come in a flat pack and you fold the flaps in and make a box. It's sized to hold file folders, but I don't use file folders.

I write the year on the side and top of the box. Every imporant piece of paper, paid bill, receipt, credit card and bank statements, anything I want to hang on to goes into the box. That's it. No other organization. On January 1, I start a new box, and I put the old box on a shelf.

If I need something (which is much more rare than you might expect) I go through the box and find it. It's in roughly chronological order and generally doesn't take more than a few minutes.

After 5 years the oldest box goes in the shredder.

OK there are a few exceptions. Stuff I need to save longer than that (car titles, etc.) goes in a fireproof document safe. But all the common stuff goes in the box.

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

#216

Post by PeterStuer »

After having tried to be organised for decades, I gave in to my inner holistic self and gave up on (most) explicit organization and just became very good at searching/finding things.

I could theorize about how no taxonomy deals with multiple contexts or remains valid over time, how filing errors will always happen so you will need search anyway, how unstructured scales to seamless incorporate outside sources etc., but thruth be told big piles of unorganised stuff with keen finding skills more naturally allign with my nature. Ymmv, and that's just fine.

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

#217

Post by meander_water »

This is a neat system, but like many others here I doubt I could be disciplined enough to maintain it.

Organising a second brain appears to be something that people have been grappling with for ages. For e.g. here's John Locke's system for organising his commonplace book - https://fs.blog/john-locke-common-place-book/

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

#218

Post by atoav »

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 an unorganized person who has a job that requires a certain amount of organization to allow me to stay on top of what I am doing and gives me very little time to do said organization.

The following things work for me:

1. Whenever you leave a project you leave with it all the info to quickly get started again. If it is physical that can be a paper note, if it is digital thats a readme note (or a note directly in the thing). This is not just for documentation, it means the shelved project requires zero mental capacity as everything I need to remember is shelved as well.

2. Lists for ephemeral todos. There are so many ways of organizing to do lists, the only thing that worked for me over long and intense periods was a little notebook where every Monday of a week I write down what needs to be done in principle. This typically just contains urgent things and the occasional lkng term project.

3. Digital Calendar: everything that is an appointment or some preparation for an appointment goes in here. Appointments do not land in the todos unless they are majorly crucial ones.

4. Travel stuff: most of the travel info will be in the calendar as well, for notes/tickets I add them either in the calendar or in my obsidian notes

5.Knowledgebase: everything that has long form relevance is either in my password manager (surprisingly good for storing info like your tax ID) or into the obsidian notebook

That is roughly it.

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

#219

Post by tener »

jen729w wrote: post #161
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…

Johnny here. This is the canonical example, and I quote it myself: is it `Insurance > Car` or `Car > Insurance`? In reality you just decide. One feels better to your brain. And you tend to remember that. It helps of course if you remain consistent. In the systems we design we’ve realised that most people want the insurance close to the thing being insured . So in our life admin system we have health, pet, home, motor…

> And you tend to remember that.

Haha, nope. Different brains work differently. One day I genuinely prefer one, a week later another.

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

#220

Post by ySteeK »

I was on a search for the 'perfect' system all my life.

And I found it after 40 years : The No-System System... and it's the exactly opposite of op's suggestion :-)

All together in somewhat chaotic folders and subfolders... the clou is that I use "recoll" everytime i search something. It's an Index based search engine. Take a look...

I never missed something since I use just recoll and throw things just anywhere in the huge black box.

The main pro: it costs me no time to "sort" things into things.

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