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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

#51

Post by lardissone »

bicx wrote: post #31
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…

I don’t have ADHD (that I know of) and still love Logseq. For me, it’s the perfect mix of notetaking, journaling, outlining, task tracking, and lightweight hierarchy/linking. I find that if I have to organize or categorize entries in a system, entries just don’t get logged at all.

I'm trying a lot of tools, but I end up using Logseq. It's amazing.

Only bad thing is their mobile app, it's so bad.

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

#53

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

As a system, this makes sense and I love it. As a personal practice it's completely impractical for all but a narrow band of the population. And when those people need to collaborate with others, good luck getting everyone else to follow the system.

I recommend embracing the chaos instead. Enhance the tools for finding information, and make it easy to apply metadata.

At a certain point you can get no further without demanding more personal discipline, but that point is way beyond what is prescribed here.

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

#54

Post by ejoso »

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…

Similar age. Similar realization.

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

#55

Post by ziddoap »

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 agree with your take. I think someone who can/will get organized will do so regardless of which system they use. Someone who can't/won't get organized isn't going to no matter what system is proposed.

The benefits of these organization systems, in my experience, come into play when there are multiple people involved (e.g. a workplace, shared storage, etc.), so that everyone can be organized in the same way rather than having a bunch of competing organization systems created by each person.

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

#56

Post by znpy »

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…

most stuff don't work, and don't stand the test of time.

anyway, here is what's has been working for me:

for physical stuff (documents, printouts etc): a dumb file organizer box, one of those where you can hang those hanging manila folders. and of course a few such folders. I bought fifty such folders some years ago, have used about half so far?

for digital stuff: a simple mediawiki installation. it's hosted at home and it's not accessible from the public internet. the visual editor makes it low-friction to edit, the categories system works well enough, a page can belong to more than one category and there's always a search function that works well enough.

the nice thing about mediawiki is that you can upload and embed images, you can link to other systems (like files in nextcloud) and you can upload whole files and link to them from various pages.

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

#58

Post by dominicrose »

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 not organized by default but I can live or work with organized people. It's possible to fit in and participate in the organization.

I tend to let my brain organize my life for me. The end result is that I don't do many different things but I do the things I care about.

However, A 4-colour pen and a small spiral notebook with a grid can help. The paper and colours allows you to be much more creative than just using an ordered sequence of words or some more complex but still limited note taking system.

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

#59

Post by asystole »

lardissone wrote: post #50
asystole wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I just tried it, looks good. But TBH, I miss outlining. I would like they offer a way to have an outlining mode (with collapsing ability). Thanks for the recommendation.

https://capacities.io/tutorials/outliner-mode
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