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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

#281

Post by xivzgrev »

threecheese wrote: post #255
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…

You’ve hit the nail on its head here. Almost every piece of information I save has more than one type of contextual relevance, this is not handled by any hierarchical organization system no matter how clever the addressing is. At a certain scale and complexity, I simply cannot remember the magic incantation URL for whatever it is I need. Even search falls apart frequently, because I saved some reference using an abbr…

Yea I don’t often remember which folder I stuck something in.

As a result I’m a heavy search user. I find 90% of the time I can quickly find what I’m looking for with a few keywords.

For the OP, health insurance policy, I’d type “health insurance policy” into my google drive. Then it pops up, wherever it was.

This of course means you name things with something that makes sense to you. Don’t leave it with whatever name when you downloaded it by default.

This also is a huge help with links. I need to find the latest xyz ticket (which I previously viewed) and I’ll type in xyz… and boom, there it is. This is why I don’t clear my browser history very often!

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

#282

Post by blippage »

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…

I have set up a Zettelkasten, which alternates between letters and numbers.21a5 is for my Alcatel 3085 mobile. So it's a similar idea, I think.

Classification is a vexing problem I've tried to grapple with.

The Dewey Decimal system is a really good example of people trying to get a handle on it. It's not easy. "Arduino Cookbook" is in the Electronics section (621.3810285536 to be precise, although the decimal system doesn't usually get that crazy in its specificity), whilst "Getting Started with Arduino" is in 005.133, more that half a library apart.

As one commentator put it, a book is rarely about one thing. People have criticized the Dewey system, so they throw the baby out with the bathwater and declare their bright shiny new wheel to be the solution.

Except, of course , they skip over the same fundamental problem that Dewey had: books don't really fit into a taxonomy.

One solution which may work for small personal systems is to not bother to use a hierarchy. Put car insurance in one folder, then file all folders alphabetically.

Getting more sophisticated, if you have a hierarchical system, consider indexing. I found an old address book that I had lying around. Add entries into that. Sure, entries won't be in strict alphabetical order, but hopefully you won't have a system so big that you can't find anything.

Indexing is "the" solution, because you don't have to try to figure out where in the taxonomy something is. You just look it up. Indexing also allows you to construct different "views" of a subject, thereby allowing you bypass taxonomic choices.

Being a computer geek, you could keep an index file on computer. You can then simply grep it.

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

#283

Post by robertritz »

jppope wrote: post #84

I think this is definitely a cool system so not meaning to knock it, but I used to hyper-optimize all parts of my life and it was exhausting. So one day I just stopped. I started focusing on just being present, prioritizing, and trying to remember things that were important. I still take notes and have todo lists and stuff but they are similarly for being in the moment- just for the time right when I'm using them. I…

This exactly. Losing a few things pales in comparison to less mental overhead in every single task I do.

All I do now is keep a notebook with a rolling to do list where I make a new page every day and write what I have to do. Meeting notes also go there if they don't belong in some project files.

The only thing I wish I could do is keep notes from books somehow in an easily referenceable format. Kindle sucks, Obsidian is 180 from TikTok but still brain rot.

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

#284

Post by ornornor »

disqard wrote: post #172
erganemic wrote: post #80

Off the top of my head, all PKMs make trade-offs on discoverability, portability, maintainability, and ease of recall. Broadly, "discoverability" is how likely you are to stumble on something you'd forgotten (just recently, I found a file in my "taxes" directory listing all the documents I needed last year, which was a big help, and which I did not remember writing), "portability" is how resistant the system is to a…

You and I are in the same boat! I keep everything in a single folder, as plaintext Markdown files. Even if my own software breaks someday, I can always ingest these into a flavor-of-the-month indexer (though I think sqlite + fts plugin goes a long way) and carry on.

I use paperless-ngx with about 10 document types. Most documents don’t have a type. I scan everything we get in paper form (mail, prescriptions, anything) with a document scanner and dump it all in there. For email pdf I forward it to an account that ingests the documents.

It has a classifier so after a while it picks up the date, correspondant (if you set it), document type automatically.

Daily backups to rsync.net and the export function is a dump of all the files + metadata in json format.

The search (via OCR) is pretty good and it’s the easiest system to manage I’ve found. I used mayanedms before but it’s too cumbersome and upgrading major versions was very complicated.

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

#285

Post by billbrown »

smeej wrote: post #237
mcgrath_sh wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out Dana K. White. She uses this principle along with 5 other "rules" to declutter. Has really helped me get my space in order.

I just spent fully 15 minutes trying to find anywhere there's a simple list of what the 5 rules are. Couldn't get AI search bots to pull it up for me either. I don't know whether I'm more worried for her, that her work is somehow disorganized enough for this not to be screaming obvious, repeatedly, throughout her blog, or worried for the state of my ability to search the internet anymore, when I used to find it to ea…

I found it via Kagi[1] as the first non-video result. https://www.aslobcomesclean.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/D...

[1] https://kagi.com/search?q=dana+white+5+rules&r=us&sh=-_lVctP...

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

#286

Post by lylejantzi3rd »

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…

What I don't understand is: why use numbers?

Using your example, you could describe the insurance for your Citron as 21.2.8. Or, you could call it automobiles.citron.insurance. Which looks a lot like automobiles/citron/insurance. How is this any different from just using a folder structure?

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

#287

Post by MollyRealized »

blippage wrote: post #282
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…

I have set up a Zettelkasten, which alternates between letters and numbers.21a5 is for my Alcatel 3085 mobile. So it's a similar idea, I think. Classification is a vexing problem I've tried to grapple with. The Dewey Decimal system is a really good example of people trying to get a handle on it. It's not easy. "Arduino Cookbook" is in the Electronics section (621.3810285536 to be precise, although the decimal system…

I was surprised to learn what an awful person Melvil Dewey was.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melvil_Dewey#Controversies

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

#289

Post by cldwalker »

smeej wrote: post #185
cldwalker wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm one of those people for whom Notion is counterintuitive to the point of being completely unusable Most of the existing workflows remain the same and the DB version opens up many more workflows. Would recommend trying it out if you haven't already with https://test.logseq.com/ and https://github.com/logseq/docs/blob/feat/db/db-version.md . If you have tried it out, please give us feedback :)

I've played with it enough to know I don't intend to move forward with it. It takes so many of the things that were intuitive and functional for me, adds a ton of stuff I don't want and wouldn't use, and ruins what made me love the product so much. For example, I like just popping "TODO" on the front of a line, but the database version adds a bunch of stuff I don't want. I don't want to have a drop-down list pop up w…

> I like just popping "TODO" on the front of a line

Tasks can be created with `/todo` and additional ways - https://github.com/logseq/docs/blob/feat/db/db-version.md#cr...

> I don't want to have a drop-down list pop up with distracting icons

The Status property is customizable - https://github.com/logseq/docs/blob/feat/db/db-version.md#cu.... If you don't like the icons, you can delete them from a property's Available Choices - https://github.com/logseq/docs/blob/feat/db/db-version.md#pr...

> I don't want tags on the ends of my lines

Then press `Cmd-Enter` as the ui tells you todo and as documented in https://github.com/logseq/docs/blob/feat/db/db-version.md#cr.... Tags entered that way display as before

> I like having the status right at the front, not singled out as just one more property

It is in the front and the position of a property is configurable ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#290

Post by 0x457 »

mattlondon wrote: post #225
0x457 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (…

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…

The thing is, sometimes I need a document from a specific time (i.e. last year tax returns), and sometimes I need something I don't know specific time (i.e. lease agreement or a contract).

However, in both cases, I know the kind of document I'm looking for.

Currently, all my digital documents get scanned and pushed to https://teedy.io/en/#!/ and it works alright.

However, my physical documents are just in a suitcase labeled "documents, evacuate first".

After reading about Johnny.Decimal, I've decided to adopt it to physical documents. I've added the concept of sagas tho, a cross-category ID that links documents together in some cases: for example, I got rear ended recently, and it resulted in a lot of paper work that spread across different categories.

> 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.

Well, what if my SO name is Jane and together with Jan we're planing a trip. You get the idea.

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