Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life

I'm in my mid-40s and have severe ADHD and I've tried many many techniques and systems over the years. Over the last ~15 years I've come to evolve a set of systems that work for me.

I'm starting (in my "ample free time") to document them and in a series blog posts help people find systems that will work for them. My experience is that the best systems are the ones that have five characteristics:

1. They're simple

No complex patterns, no "we'll solve everything"

2. They require little or no task switching in the middle

This breaks my ADHD concentration.

3. They're forgiving if you fall off the wagon

You will always have bad days and need to restart. The system must make it easy.

4. The system must be very general, maybe even "too simple" but easy to customize.

There is a natural desire, especially in ADHD people, to over complicate, so the system must allow you to be as simple as possible, but then let you customize later.

5. They don't require any specialized tool (especially not an online tool). No system should be invariably tied to a specific piece of software or hardware. These may be excellent augmentations, but they should never be requirements.

Am I an "organized" person? No, but I'm far better organized than I was. Tasks rarely get missed now. I'm far more productive than I was (and I have stats to back up my assertion). I can almost always retrieve documents I need relatively quickly.

These systems won't change who you are, but they will assist you in being better at being who you are.

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 may have lost some things over the years but the removing the stress has made me better at all the things I was working on in general.

I had to get organized in college because I was doing a lot of additional coursework and still working. Previously I was completely disorganized in terms of planning.

Honestly the best way to do it isn't even a "system" it's to take the most lightweight level of organization and applying it to things you use.

For me the main organizational tool is just google calendar, using an all day event to denote due dates/trip planning/reminders, but even a daily note with what you're looking to do and important dates could be useful.

All these """systems""" have never caught on for me. It takes a lot of time to understand to the system and adjust instead of building a habit of surfacing information.

Get the system out of the way and just start putting stuff down. I get a ton of stuff done now that I couldn't without organizing things particularly when it comes to planning trips or work.

Seconding Logseq, though I think the move to database structure is going to ruin it for me. I'm one of those people for whom Notion is counterintuitive to the point of being completely unusable, and all I can suss out about this switch is that it's going to make Logseq more like Notion.

Every time the Johnny.Decimal system resurfaces on HN, though, I'll admit to spending a couple weeks revisiting the task of finally systematizing the decades of old files stored on my hard drive, until I remember that I haven't looked for any of them in many years, never mind opened them, so it's probably not worth any effort after all.

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, etc.

I also need a top folder for Medical for doc visits, vaxes, ER visits, Surgeries, the kids' allergies and stuff.

So where all this is going is two months later, where is the health insurance policy? Is it under medical or under money? Is the car insurance under Automobiles or Insurance under Money?

Back to my head exploding - this is my issue - I can never remember which branch of the tree to find a specific leaf? Does my annual car tax belong with the Money or with the Auto branch? If I want to see the tax for all the cars at the same time, I put it under Money - Taxes - Auto but when I need to know the last time I paid the tax on the VW, I will assume its filed under Auto-VW-Car Tax.

This is why I can never find anything. All due respect to Johnny but I'm too retarded to use it properly.