Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
johnnydecimal.com
Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
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Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
#2Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
#3I think having a system is more important than which system it is. I don't see much benefit to limiting your hierarchy to 3 levels. Putting metadata like creation time in filenames is probably the wrong thing to do, since it's redundant, although it's mighty tempting-and I do it all the time.
Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
#4Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
#5I think having a system is more important than which system it is. I don't see much benefit to limiting your hierarchy to 3 levels. Putting metadata like creation time in filenames is probably the wrong thing to do, since it's redundant, although it's mighty tempting-and I do it all the time.
I will say that I have a few hierarchies I use regularly that go beyond 3 levels, and they are annoying to work with. There are times where I will copy the entire sub-directory to my desktop just to reduced how many levels I'm working from. Then once I'm done, I'll copy the files back into their little "box" and delete the desktop version.
Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
#6I see this pop up every few years. I wish I had the follow though to do this.
Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
#7I originally started with Johnny.Decimal for my life and after giving it a big try, switched to PARA.
J.D is fine (maybe even great) if your categories are relatively static, such as a small business, but as an individual, I found it very restrictive and challenging to remember. Moreover, while the decimals are cool, I found them somewhat irrelevant if I was the only one referencing them.
J.D is optimized for retrieval, where what I needed was optimized storage, and then occasional retrial.
To each their own of course, and using any system is better than none.
Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
#8I think having a system is more important than which system it is. I don't see much benefit to limiting your hierarchy to 3 levels. Putting metadata like creation time in filenames is probably the wrong thing to do, since it's redundant, although it's mighty tempting-and I do it all the time.
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.
Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
#9I'm always impressed by systems like this, but I've personally never understood the point.
I'd be curious to learn from others what the benefits of this kind of archiving are for them? And if the time cost is worth it.
For me, I feel like I treat most of my documents as very temporal things. I need them for a certain period of time, but then after that, they can be list to the ether. I have never really had a need to reference old content, plans, documents, etc.
The only old things I ever need to reference are old code projects and writings. But even that I can usually manage with just a single folder for the project.
Everytime I get a new computer, I just start fresh. Keeping only a very small amount of files backed up in cloud services. Which as I mentioned are just a very small collection of code projects and writings. Am I crazy? Haha.
Re: Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
#10I think having a system is more important than which system it is. I don't see much benefit to limiting your hierarchy to 3 levels. Putting metadata like creation time in filenames is probably the wrong thing to do, since it's redundant, although it's mighty tempting-and I do it all the time.
I will say that I have a few hierarchies I use regularly that go beyond 3 levels, and they are annoying to work with. There are times where I will copy the entire sub-directory to my desktop just to reduced how many levels I'm working from. Then once I'm done, I'll copy the files back into their little "box" and delete the desktop version.
That sort of thing really makes me miss the Miller Column Filebrowser on my NeXT Cube (and wish that Apple's implementation were more like to it --- it just doesn't "feel" right to me when I use it on my MacBook).