Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life

Similar here, documents goes into the documents drawer. Digital documents has been going into /Dropbox/docs/$current_year (without much organization within them). New year, new folder.

I would love to read a continuation of this blog. I don't have an ADHD diagnose or even a suspicion of one but these problems of organizing everyone has. It's just easier or harder to get to grips with them. We need more different views of how minds work so we can find the one that resonates. Short posts that solve one problem is perfect so one can get one step in the right direction at a time.

Well time is the only constant in life, so it makes sense to me to store by time since that is always moving forwards and things happen at a point in time.

But it is a valid that you have to remember the year, but this is why if you store on a cloud service, they all come with excellent search facilities that I expect will continue to improve with AI. So you don't need to remember, you just search for e.g. "insurance" and then you pick the doc with the date in it's filename etc.

Sure you could group by theme at the top level too, but again time is a constant - you always have 2024, 2025, 2026 etc, but you don't always have a need to store things about e.g. "car2" in every year etc. so it makes sense to me that if car2 comes into your life in say 2025 and leaves you in 2028 or whatever, that you have car2 folders in those specific years only and not permanently polluting the top-level folders because after car2 leaves you, you don't want it hanging around ~forever at the top level. You're just building up "organisation-debt" for something you'll need to "archive" in the future.

I think perhaps we're thinking about different things though. I store documents about day to day life - statements, invoices, insurance certificates, etc etc. These all tend to be dated and repeat monthly/quarterly/annually or thereabouts, and for me the most frequent retrieval need is for the current financial year.

I don't store my friend Jane's or Jan's documents, not do I have documents about them either. I don't just have random notes documents about random things.

At work where I have non-time-based documents (including random notes documents!) coming out of my ears - both written by me, reviewed by me, read by me, CC'd but I read etc - thousands and thousands etc - I just rely entirely on search and it's never been a problem. No filing system at all - just search. It's fine.

Cloud-based storage and search really is key here I think. I can be on calls to utility companies etc and I can search and have my most recent statement up on my screen quicker than the people in the call center folks most of the time.

I must be missing something. This is recommending folders are numbered. Is that it? Is this a "system" now? I think that may have been used previously - for example by humanity for the last 5,000 years or so.

Just personal experience, read with a grain of salt.

I don't consider myself an organised person (my calendar is chaotic, I don't clean out my inbox and use it as a pseudo to-do list with priorities, I don't have enough time and energy and constantly feel like I'm being a shit friend/family/mentor, etc.) but everyone I have worked with see me as a very organised person: I document every piece of my work in detail that others can understand, I have good estimates on tasks I'm assigned and very rarely miss deadline, I remember when important events are without needing a calendar and am always on time.

The thing is, GTD doesn't work for me. I have also worked with many mangers who tried to shove the framework du jour onto everyone and never had any success with it despite putting in a lot of effort into "meeting expectations".

The cynical me now thinks that people who tells everyone certain system work is because:

1. Someone published a popular book that managed to sell well from the business section.

2. It just happened to work for some people. Even 2 out of 10 people you meet talk about it is enough to make you think about it, now imagine 6 out of 10 managers you meet knows about that system.

3. Most managers I have met (whose jobs are to get others to get things done) don't really have time to understand you, that includes most of them who say they care about my career (they didn't, they cared about their own careers more than mine). If there is something existing they can manage you with they'll use it because when it doesn't work it's either your problem or the framework's problem, not theirs.

4. (Cynical opinion) It's mostly just a facade for people who have authority over you (especially the ones who are technically less capable but somehow moved up) to show their bosses they are doing _something_. Like the new lead designer who decided to change the company brand color or the new head of department who thinks that changing the department's name is going to invigorate everyone's passion to do better work.

One thing that I have learned from the people who are smart and productive is that they have actually spent time to continuously develop and refine a system that works for them over time. They also try new things and just move on if it doesn't.

You probably have met a lot of amazing people if you have mostly been working with others so far. Just think about what the people you truly admire professionally do -- I'd bet that they don't talk about GTD and even if they do it's just an introduction to something remotely similar to what they do and have refined over time.

I know it can be difficult at work sometimes when (whether you know at that moment or not) people are offloading their responsibilities and pressure onto you (it's particularly bad if you are a very responsible person). However, if you believe that you usually have a reasonable amount of time to get things done, just ask yourself if you have done your job well and and delivered things on time. If you have, then the problem probably isn't you or GTD or some other framework that doesn't work for you.