A system to organise your life • Johnny.Decimal
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idk, it seems I'll have a similar set of problems I already have with organizing files. If I have health expense documents, is that "health", "me", or "money"? What about travel expense receipts? Or [pick any two categories that may overlap]?
That's why I prefer using tags or labels: they don't force you to make a mutually exclusive choice.
I like the "no more than ten" principle though; when organizing a file tree I try to aim for up to 5 or 6 items in a given directory, as I tend to notice the friction when choosing among more than a handful.
It's obviously not for every body but I hate tags because they are so random and I would forget what I used. I've been successfully using the Johnny decimal guide for a few years because it's intuitive for me. Your examples are obvious for me: health expense goes into "Receipts > Health" and travel expense goes into "Receipts > Travel." If I had to use tags I would think of "health, personal, money, receipts, bank, medication, etc." and it would be a real mental struggle to categorize everything and remember all the tags I have ever used. Also I use Joplin and Obsidian which make this kind of organization easier.
The "no more than ten" principles forces me to put everything in the most generic category I can think of. And if I need more than 10, it's a new project or a new something. But I agree it's not for everyone, it just happens to be suited with how I'm organized and how I think.
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Today: reorganize all your files according to this
new systemTomorrow: forget everything you did yesterday. Your spouse can’t find shit.
50 years later: your kids and grandkids can’t find a fucking thing, wonder what the hell you were thinking
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This makes sense for some kind of files. I just don't keep a lot of receipts and forms, I guess. The decimal as shorthand makes sense if you're in those folders often.
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Today: reorganize all your files according to this
new systemTomorrow: forget everything you did yesterday. Your spouse can’t find shit.
50 years later: your kids and grandkids can’t find a fucking thing, wonder what the hell you were thinking
Every month I throw out the old system and start over.
Should be a word for that.
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This is literally just adding opaque numbers to file/folder names to make [computer algorithm] searching faster, instead of good file organization.
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It's obviously not for every body but I hate tags because they are so random and I would forget what I used. I've been successfully using the Johnny decimal guide for a few years because it's intuitive for me. Your examples are obvious for me: health expense goes into "Receipts > Health" and travel expense goes into "Receipts > Travel." If I had to use tags I would think of "health, personal, money, receipts, bank, medication, etc." and it would be a real mental struggle to categorize everything and remember all the tags I have ever used. Also I use Joplin and Obsidian which make this kind of organization easier.
The "no more than ten" principles forces me to put everything in the most generic category I can think of. And if I need more than 10, it's a new project or a new something. But I agree it's not for everyone, it just happens to be suited with how I'm organized and how I think.
This is why you need a tagging system that limits your choices and can easily sort across folders by tags. I prefer Tagspaces because it just adds the tags directly to the end of filenames so I never lose the tags and if I am on a system where it's not installed I do always have the option of just manually adding a tag.
I keep things in folders too and 8/10 times the folder structure does the trick, but boy it's nice to have those tags when I'm either looking for something or need to see a lot of similar things all at once. Never more applicable than tax time. Can pull up receipts w2s, loan stuff, medical stuff all by just pulling the (tax) tag. -
Bingo. I really wish Explorer, OneDrive, and Microsoft’s office stuff would support tags. It would actually help me in the workplace unlike the CoPilot initiative.
Don't have an agenda and already mentioned it here but consider looking at "Tagspaces" newer versions got a little enshittified, I forget right now what version I parked at, but I think you can still find older builds that have almost all the best features for free. Your files / tagging infrastructure will not fall apart if you switch OS or ditch the app which I think is really important for longevity. It would be really easy to code something new that's compatible with the tagging structure if you ever wanted too.
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Dewey Decimal applied life-wide...
Could be useful... Could be over-complicating...
78.47 things I tried to make myself more organised that failed because I'm inherently disorganized and have the memory of a goldfish.
97.34 things I tried to make myself more organized that failed because I'm not great at organizing and Im pretty sure I already made a folder like this somewhere but I probably spelled something wrong and I can't find the damn thing.
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The category part makes sense, but I don't understand why the second number is better than alphabetical order. It mentions a muscle memory but you can already sort things by date. Use that, and have alphabetical sort as an option when needed. All this does is force date order for both sorts.
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Been using this for years, it’s good, but probably not for everyone. I like being able to manually sort the order of my folders, and it forces a maximum folder depth of like 3 or 4 depending on how you interpret one part. This makes it very quick to navigate, particularly from the command line. Add something like Zoxide on top and I can fly through all my notes and projects.
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How is this better than being top level folders like school, receipts, car maintenance etc and then naming your files like:
2025-02-21 - car service receipt.PDF
Easy to find and see what is newest since it alphabetical by age and easy to search since the file name is descriptive.
Combine this with better search tools like powertools OK windows and it seems way more intuitive than this system.
Combine this by having the folder in a backup solution like google drive / Nextcloud / seafile etc and you can access these files anywhere securely.
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Call me a skeptic, but I think offering "hyper-organization" as a solution to those too lazy to organize is probably a non-starter.
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I tried to usw this for my home folder in my daily driver, but it just did not work for me.
I'm now trying out the PARA system, and Iike it better.
I should also add I use obsidian.md for basically everything having to do with files/folders/organization, so I do have all sorts of tags, auto-updated tables, etc. So a simpler file structure suits me better.
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I love the argument that it's easy to communicate. Then people can ask you what the fuck you're talking about.
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How is this better than being top level folders like school, receipts, car maintenance etc and then naming your files like:
2025-02-21 - car service receipt.PDF
Easy to find and see what is newest since it alphabetical by age and easy to search since the file name is descriptive.
Combine this with better search tools like powertools OK windows and it seems way more intuitive than this system.
Combine this by having the folder in a backup solution like google drive / Nextcloud / seafile etc and you can access these files anywhere securely.
If you use the command line it can make a few keys take you to your destination since the beginning is always distinct by 1 character (quicker for 10 or less categories per layer to avoid 2 char completion requirement).
0 tab 8 tab 11 tab, you are now at:
~/0-code/8-api-upgrade/11-infrastructure-pipeline
Works better for work that you use similar repos for a repeated number of times. I find for personal projects by the time I remember a completion combo, I might not need it any longer.
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