Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life

johnnydecimal.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 300 posts

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

#291

Post by lardissone »

asystole wrote: post #27
lardissone wrote: post #12

I tried many organization systems, including Johnny Decimal like PARA. And none of them worked for me. As an ADHD person, I've found the best way for me is not put effort in organizing at all. For that reason I've found tools like Logseq/Tana/Reflect does a great job. I just write in the journal and tag items accordingly if required, then if I need to write some long form document, I create specific pages for it. The…

This is why I love Capacities. It's object oriented with properties and tags. No folders.

ok, it's been a few days now using it, and I'm starting to love it. Specially their API access, so I can send my voice note transcriptions to my daily note.

The custom object types is great, I missed that feature from Anytype in other tools.

The only drawback is that they didn't implemented an import from other platforms tool. And I have all my history and notes on Logseq now.

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

#292

Post by cloudfudge »

ghostly_s wrote: post #18
cloudfudge wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allowing the filesystem to track creation time means you have to worry about how you move the data around and whether the tools you're using preserve it properly. A folder named 20250221-nyc-trip is a coarse but very durable way to store that.

20250221-nyc-trip is not a creation time, it's an identifier of the subject. they're both dates but they're different things.

I mean, if you define your identifiers to start with the creation time, then it's both.

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

#293

Post by fivestones »

Vegenoid wrote: post #167
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…

This is why I like Obsidian (or some other linked-documents wiki type of system), because it makes linking things easy, so you can take multiple routes to find a thing. I have a health note and a finances note. Which one does health insurance go under? I pick whichever one seems to make the most sense at the time. Then, in the future, if I'm looking for health insurance and look in the wrong place first, I can easily…

How do you link non text files? Is it like a link to the file on your computer directly? And if so, do you the. Loose the ability to see those files when you are not on your computer but instead using the mobile app? Or is there a way to include those non-text files in the notes syncing apparatus?

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

#294

Post by unfixed »

lylejantzi3rd wrote: post #286
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?

I guess the key difference is the amount of branches that you can make at any given level.

Calling a folder citron instead of 2, gives room to have N amount of folders at that level instead of just 10, which I think is the constrain that made this system manageable.

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

#295

Post by SebastianKra »

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…

> trade-offs on discoverability, portability, maintainability, and ease of recall

Good insight. Thx.

I feel fairly confident in Obsidian as a portable system, since its basic concept (markdown docs with tags and links between) can be found in many other apps [^1].

I'm currently using Bear, but I've made experiments migrating to Obsidian without issues.

[^1]: Bear Notes, IA Writer, Ulysses, Craft (kinda), NotePlan, ...

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

#296

Post by Terretta »

Appsmith wrote: post #194
Terretta wrote: post #188

Hey, anyone who can't/won't/doesn't stick with a system... THIS IS FOR YOU. 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…

While search works in most cases, sometimes some sort of organization comes in handy because recognition is easier than recall. That said, I do like PARA so built this centered around it, with a few GTD and ZK additions: https://thoughtscape.app/

Clean UI!

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

#297

Post by casey2 »

Something I've always disliked about "Dewey" and now "Johnny" decimal is that they intentionally put a human name on the system. I'm not sure who it helps, confusing a system for a human, but it certainly isn't the user.

Also this doesn't work faster than search, I would be open to evidence to the contrary, but obviously none will be provided cause it's simply false. By the time search becomes slow no single human will need to access or read all those files anyways.

The only exception to this is when a few categories have many files, in which case you can just make directories for them.

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

#298

Post by methods21 »

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…

Yes - This.

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

#299

Post by Vegenoid »

fivestones wrote: post #293
Vegenoid wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I like Obsidian (or some other linked-documents wiki type of system), because it makes linking things easy, so you can take multiple routes to find a thing. I have a health note and a finances note. Which one does health insurance go under? I pick whichever one seems to make the most sense at the time. Then, in the future, if I'm looking for health insurance and look in the wrong place first, I can easily…

How do you link non text files? Is it like a link to the file on your computer directly? And if so, do you the. Loose the ability to see those files when you are not on your computer but instead using the mobile app? Or is there a way to include those non-text files in the notes syncing apparatus?

Non-text files go into a subdirectory of the top-level "vault" directory, and are then linked like:

![some description](media/something.pdf)

The whole vault is in my iCloud drive, so the files are available on my phone.

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

#300

Post by smeej »

cldwalker wrote: post #289
smeej wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Availab…

That you think this solves it for me is exactly the problem. It's taking the one thing that was ever intuitive for me when it came to managing things in my life, mangles it into a dozen steps that aren't remotely intuitive to me and don't even have common characteristics that would give me a heuristic to remember them, and asks that I completely change the way I do things and think about things to suit some back end I don't want and don't need.

That's why I rejected using Notion. Using it requires forcing my mind to operate inside someone else's system.

Logseq finally felt like someone whose brain works like mine made software for people like me.

And now it's being systematically dismantled for the sake of the hordes of people who already have other tools serving them just fine.

Like I said, I get that it's not my call and people are going to do it anyway. I just hate it more than I've ever hated any software change I can remember.

Post reply on HN