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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

#91
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 you need is a tree where the items can be in multiple places.

Bear does this really well with its hierarchical tags.

Most filesystems can do this with hardlinks (but the UX mostly sucks).

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

#92
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the mobile app could handle PDF reading/highlighting like the desktop app can, and especially if it could reflow PDFs like KOreader can, I would never use another tool for information management.

I have loads of epub books that I want to read on my Android eInk reader (Boox Note 2 Color). I can convert them to PDF no problem, if that's the only option, but man I wish I could read them right in Logseq on Android. I've tried various syncing solutions to export KOreader highlights, and it's just not nearly as good. Even tried buying a ChromeOS tablet so I could run Linux Logseq on it, but the form factor sucks compared to the Boox.

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

#94

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…

You may have ADHD. Medication helps. A personal support system (the people in your life) helps more.

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

#95
post #91
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 you need is a tree where the items can be in multiple places. Bear does this really well with its hierarchical tags. Most filesystems can do this with hardlinks (but the UX mostly sucks).

omigosh - genius idea - I need a Schrödinger's file system! WooHoo! The dumb insurance policy is wherever I look for it! :-)

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

#96

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…

My brother claims to have achieved that transformation with GTD. My personal experience is that complex rigid systems like GTD require high initial investments in effort and can be brittle. They are sort of like doing a total rewrite of a codebase. My biggest wins have come from making small incremental changes.

The biggest win I ever made was getting a small filing cabinet (a banker box works, too) and putting it, a stack of manilla folders, and a marker next to my desk. Then, when I get a piece of mail or have a piece of paper, I file it in the appropriate folder, making a new one if need be. If you have a huge, chaotic pile of papers somewhere, try this. Take that pile and throw it in a box somewhere. Don't try to organize it. You now have a Pile-Of-Papers-In-a-Box. From now on, instead of putting new items on the POPIB, file them in your new proper file system. And if you need to dig something out of the POPIB, when you're done with it, file it away instead of returning it to the POPIB. Soon, the POPIB will shrink to a pile of mostly trash that you can store in a shoebox in the back of a closet.

My biggest loss was trying to digitize my home office with a fancy Fujitsu scanner, Google Drive, and Airtable. It turned out to be a bigger project than I anticipated, and I prematurely abandoned my trusty analog system. Soon, AI will make this trivial, but for the time being, I'm sticking to paper. I also prefer the user experience of physical paper, at least until I can hand over all the paper shuffling to an AI.

Other small gains I've made are using Obsidian on my phone for notes and using Google Calendar religiously for all appointments and scheduled activities.

Filing cabinets, digital calendars, note taking apps--these are all simple, obvious things, but I think being organized is all about acquiring a handful of these small habits and sticking to them. If your system is simple enough to become reflexive, you'll be more likely to stick to it under stress.

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

#98

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…

For me, part of the tension stems from being unwilling to design a system crappy enough that I will actually stick to.

To take a trivial example, say your problem is that you leave clothes all over your bedroom floor, so you decide to set up a system to solve that.

The naive approach is to design a system like "If it's too dirty to wear again, put it in the laundry basket, coded by light or dark. If it's clean, decide if it should go on a hanger or in a drawer. If it needs a hanger, hang it up, being careful to select the right kind of hanger for the right kind of clothing. If it needs to go in a drawer..."

That's the system I want to design because that's how I want my life to be.

It would feel very unnatural to design a system like "pile all clothes on the chair in the corner and worry about them later", because I don't want my life to be like that, and I don't want to believe that that's the only kind of system I might have a chance of sticking to.

But that is the only kind of system I'll stick to. And ultimately, it's much better to have all your clothes piled on the chair in the corner rather than strewn all over the bedroom floor.

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

#99
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 had exactly this issue before, an I blame overthinking things. Trying to put in place a system where none is needed.

I ended up with a box, in the box there are large plastic envelopes, and each envelope is labelled.

I have:

- "assets" (cars, warrantees, service records, purchase invoices etc)

- "health" (all medical related things)

- "insurance" (everything insurance related)

- "guns" (I like guns... so licenses, legal paperwork, etc etc)

The best thing is, this is a box. So worst case, even if I misfiled something, all I need to do is rifle through a box. The box is portable and universal, and if my wife needs something, I can easily guide her to where to find it.

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

#100
I've been attempting to integrate this into my life for a few years now, and failing. Doing this manually is never going to work, HOWEVER, automating it will. I periodically run this script[1] to organize my Downloads folder.

Pretty sure I can figure out a way to make macOS watch that folder and run the script but I want to live with this more before doing that.

Note that all this does is move stuff around...you still gotta go to the destination folders and continue organizing there but at least half the work is done for you.

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[1]: https://gist.github.com/NetOpWibby/7e39068c1d0209e4412e3a05e...

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