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“...surely not Dewey Decimal?” Close! Johnny.Decimal. https://johnnydecimal.com https://johnnydecimal.com I’m Johnny. Feedback much appreciated, I’m working l

“...surely not Dewey Decimal?” Close! Johnny.Decimal. https://johnnydecimal.com https://johnnydecimal.com I’m Johnny. Feedback much appreciated, I’m working like a busy little bee on the site as we speak. Should have a show HN app ready in a couple of months, but I’m learning JS/React as I go so it’s taking time. :-)

edraferi 8y ago
If you have no more than 10 buckets and no more than 10 categories per bucket, why not just use 0-9 for each?
- jen729w 8y ago
  I’m sorry, I don’t understand the question. Would you mind re-phrasing?
  - honk 8y ago
    I believe edraferi is just asking why you chose to use a 1-indexing system vs a 0-indexing system. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-based_numbering https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-based_numbering Interesting note: Dewey Decimals are zero indexing. And of course, "000" is for computer science.
    - jen729w 8y ago
      https://johnnydecimal.com/concepts/what-about-00-09/ https://johnnydecimal.com/concepts/what-about-00-09/ 00 is where I store metadata.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
gbear605 8y ago
One issue that I see arising is the interaction with emails between your system and other Johnny Decimal systems. Say I’m running a team at the company I work at and my team uses this system jointly. Another team also uses it. I email them with an email labeled with a decimal number, and suddenly their system has items out of order.
- jen729w 8y ago
  A good question. I have an idea for handling multiple projects in an overlapping environment, but it involves typing more characters of course which you’re not going to want to do every time. (The idea is to assign each project a 3-letter prefix. So 72.02 becomes PRJ.72.02.) I’ll think on this.
- bschne 8y ago
  I use MS outlook at work and you can actually open incoming emails, edit the subject line and save it, used this a few times as a quick way to tag my emails on what needs to be done with them, e.g.: - [FOLLOW UP] Lorem ipsum dolor... - [ASK MICHAEL] Lorem ipsum dolor... - [INCLUDE IN PROPOSAL] Lorem ipsum dolor...
colorcoded 8y ago
I'm actually using Johnny decimal now, except that I ended up using 100 buckets instead of 10 because some of the categories simply had too many items in them and they would have overflowed or had no room to grow in them otherwise. It's so nice to have a good system and never doubt where to find something and where to put a new thing. I switched from our previous mess to Johnny decimal by using a python script that processed a table in an emacs org mode file. The script filled the rows in the table with the file and directory names and I could then assign a category to each file or directory and say what the script should do to them. Then the script showed the outline of my Johnny decimal system so I could check that's what I wanted. This made it easy to play around with possible categories for all my existing stuff until I was satisfied. In the end it copied all the files to their new home. Thanks for creating Johnny Decimal.
- jen729w 8y ago
  That’s amazing to hear. Thank you! I have come across situations where you need more than 10, yes. I plan on addressing it in a future post on the site. If you’re able to share, I’d love to know more about your case. If not, no stress. hello@johnnydecimal.com.
  - misterdoubt 8y ago
    Johnny.Hexadecimal?
- explainplease 8y ago
  That sounds very interesting. I'm sure /r/emacs and /r/orgmode would be interested in reading about that. :)
Moyamo 8y ago
The problem I'd have with that is that I'd never be able to commit to a fixed set of areas or categories since the type of work I do is constantly evolving. Plus I've always had trouble creating mutually exclusive categories. What works well for me is to keep all things I'll need soon in the top level of my documents folder and when I'm done with it I move it into an archive folder. This way my documents folder has few files and folders in an easily accessible flat heirarchy. While old files can be easily searched for in the archive folder.
- jen729w 8y ago
  That can certainly be an issue, yes. It's not one I personally have come across yet as I tend to have quite distinct 'domains' that don't change much. At work, I'm a contractor and I typically spend 1-3 years on a project. Each gets its own system, nice and simple. My home system has 10-19 capturing all of my 'personal, daily life' which leaves plenty of areas for my personal projects. For instance, 50-59 is Johnny.Decimal itself. So far I've implemented JD: - Managing a 2 year contemporary dance production, multiple locations, staff, ticketing, marketing, etc. - Consolidating 200+ data centres in to 7; I did basically all of the hardware from procurement to having a green light on a NIC. - Running an infrastructure upgrade project for a major bank. - Running 2nd level desktop support for an international packaging company. - My personal life, including managing the limited company that I contract through. I plan on anonymising and documenting as many of these cases as I can on the site. I just need to find the time.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    To clarify: for all those activities you listed, you used a separate JD system for each, or were they all within the same system? I really like this idea, and am reading through the site right now, and my main fear is that I'll quickly run out of top-level categories.
    - jen729w 8y ago
      Separate! Absolutely separate. I need to write another page explaining this. You may have many non-overlapping ‘domains’, whose numbers don’t relate to each other at all. You just have to keep them separate: home computer, work computer. This job, the next job. Etc. The system running my personal life has been going since 2012. Meanwhile, those other jobs have come and gone. Maybe it’s just me – clearly I have a mind that loves numbers – but I haven’t found it confusing at all. Weirdly I have found that I have developed my own internal standards. I generally need to travel with work, and that always ends up being ‘16 Travel’. (10-19 is usually “Administration” at work.) High on my list of stuff to write is a whole bunch of example pages. Drop me an email if you’d like me to let you know when they’re done.
egypturnash 8y ago
Chunking stuff into sets of ten is a good idea, memorizing the arbitrary numbers I’m not so sure about, but... “An important restriction of the system is that you’re not allowed to create any folders inside a Johnny.Decimal folder.” WHAT WHY Like let’s say I’m using your example structure and I am working on a new marketing campaign. With a ton of moving parts to it - new logos to make, contracts to sign and save, websites to design, ads to put together, brochures to design and print, etc, etc. Potentially hundreds of files for each campaign. I just throw all this stuff into the same directory as all the other marketing campaigns? This sounds absolutely insane to me. I guess alternatively I make a new JD folder - 30.04 Rumplestilskin campaign, 30.05 Butterscotch campaign, etc, but what happens once I’ve filled up the name space and have a new project?
- jen729w 8y ago
  Ha! Well... Your use-case needs a bit more thought, and doesn't fit the simple "marketing" example on the website. But that's the beauty of my system – it forces you to actually think about your business, about how you arrange things. It makes you deconstruct it in your mind in order to create that model. I personally find that very instructive in and of itself. "Hundreds of files for each campaign" is clearly something that needs to be managed. If you're interested in exploring a JD solution for it, I'd be very happy to help. This is all great experience for me, and the more I know about how other people use this system, the better I can make it overall.
  - egypturnash 8y ago
    I can’t imagine making it work for me, to be honest. I’m looking at some finished projects and I’ve got more than ten subdirectories in most of them. Obviously this works for you but it sure sounds impractical for stuff like what you can see a hint of in http://egypt.urnash.com/media/blogs.dir/1/files/2019/01/Screen-Shot-2019-01-06-at-6.27.43-PM.png http://egypt.urnash.com/media/blogs.dir/1/files/2019/01/Scre... ...
adito 8y ago
Damn. This might works for my bookmarks folder. I have ton of bookmarks on Firefox and it becomes a disorganized mess. Definitely will try it and see how it goes. Thanks for sharing it.
MildlySerious 8y ago
How do you handle old files, if you don't mind me asking? My document directory has the year at the root level, i.e. ~/Documents/2018/billing/projectname which is nice in so far that you don't have to scan through files and folders that stopped being relevant.
- jen729w 8y ago
  Because the ID is incremental, old stuff naturally sorts itself. For example, I have '16 Travel' as a category. I make a new JD number for each trip I take and create Finder & email folders. Order details and PDFs tend to live there. 16.01 was, let me look ... a trip to Perth in 2012. And my latest, 16.31, just happened. But of course my '16 Travel' folder sorts like: 16.01 Trip to Perth to see Bart 16.02 <name of trip> 16.03 <name of trip> ... 16.29 16.30 16.31 Hunter Valley, Xmas '18 - so those old trips just kind of hide themselves away. My eye only ever looks at the most recent stuff, and all of the recent things sit near each other. It just works. This also has the advantage in that you don't need to remember which year a thing was in. They're all there, visible.
  - MildlySerious 8y ago
    That's a very cool actually, I hadn't even considered it being that simple. This has me convinced to give this a shot soon with a new new system. Thank you!

edraferi 8y ago

If you have no more than 10 buckets and no more than 10 categories per bucket, why not just use 0-9 for each?

jen729w 8y ago
I’m sorry, I don’t understand the question. Would you mind re-phrasing?
- honk 8y ago
  I believe edraferi is just asking why you chose to use a 1-indexing system vs a 0-indexing system. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-based_numbering https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-based_numbering Interesting note: Dewey Decimals are zero indexing. And of course, "000" is for computer science.
  - jen729w 8y ago
    https://johnnydecimal.com/concepts/what-about-00-09/ https://johnnydecimal.com/concepts/what-about-00-09/ 00 is where I store metadata.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

gbear605 8y ago

One issue that I see arising is the interaction with emails between your system and other Johnny Decimal systems. Say I’m running a team at the company I work at and my team uses this system jointly. Another team also uses it. I email them with an email labeled with a decimal number, and suddenly their system has items out of order.

jen729w 8y ago
A good question. I have an idea for handling multiple projects in an overlapping environment, but it involves typing more characters of course which you’re not going to want to do every time. (The idea is to assign each project a 3-letter prefix. So 72.02 becomes PRJ.72.02.) I’ll think on this.
bschne 8y ago
I use MS outlook at work and you can actually open incoming emails, edit the subject line and save it, used this a few times as a quick way to tag my emails on what needs to be done with them, e.g.: - [FOLLOW UP] Lorem ipsum dolor... - [ASK MICHAEL] Lorem ipsum dolor... - [INCLUDE IN PROPOSAL] Lorem ipsum dolor...

colorcoded 8y ago

I'm actually using Johnny decimal now, except that I ended up using 100 buckets instead of 10 because some of the categories simply had too many items in them and they would have overflowed or had no room to grow in them otherwise. It's so nice to have a good system and never doubt where to find something and where to put a new thing. I switched from our previous mess to Johnny decimal by using a python script that processed a table in an emacs org mode file. The script filled the rows in the table with the file and directory names and I could then assign a category to each file or directory and say what the script should do to them. Then the script showed the outline of my Johnny decimal system so I could check that's what I wanted. This made it easy to play around with possible categories for all my existing stuff until I was satisfied. In the end it copied all the files to their new home. Thanks for creating Johnny Decimal.

jen729w 8y ago
That’s amazing to hear. Thank you! I have come across situations where you need more than 10, yes. I plan on addressing it in a future post on the site. If you’re able to share, I’d love to know more about your case. If not, no stress. hello@johnnydecimal.com.
- misterdoubt 8y ago
  Johnny.Hexadecimal?
explainplease 8y ago
That sounds very interesting. I'm sure /r/emacs and /r/orgmode would be interested in reading about that. :)

Moyamo 8y ago

The problem I'd have with that is that I'd never be able to commit to a fixed set of areas or categories since the type of work I do is constantly evolving. Plus I've always had trouble creating mutually exclusive categories. What works well for me is to keep all things I'll need soon in the top level of my documents folder and when I'm done with it I move it into an archive folder. This way my documents folder has few files and folders in an easily accessible flat heirarchy. While old files can be easily searched for in the archive folder.

jen729w 8y ago
That can certainly be an issue, yes. It's not one I personally have come across yet as I tend to have quite distinct 'domains' that don't change much. At work, I'm a contractor and I typically spend 1-3 years on a project. Each gets its own system, nice and simple. My home system has 10-19 capturing all of my 'personal, daily life' which leaves plenty of areas for my personal projects. For instance, 50-59 is Johnny.Decimal itself. So far I've implemented JD: - Managing a 2 year contemporary dance production, multiple locations, staff, ticketing, marketing, etc. - Consolidating 200+ data centres in to 7; I did basically all of the hardware from procurement to having a green light on a NIC. - Running an infrastructure upgrade project for a major bank. - Running 2nd level desktop support for an international packaging company. - My personal life, including managing the limited company that I contract through. I plan on anonymising and documenting as many of these cases as I can on the site. I just need to find the time.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  To clarify: for all those activities you listed, you used a separate JD system for each, or were they all within the same system? I really like this idea, and am reading through the site right now, and my main fear is that I'll quickly run out of top-level categories.
  - jen729w 8y ago
    Separate! Absolutely separate. I need to write another page explaining this. You may have many non-overlapping ‘domains’, whose numbers don’t relate to each other at all. You just have to keep them separate: home computer, work computer. This job, the next job. Etc. The system running my personal life has been going since 2012. Meanwhile, those other jobs have come and gone. Maybe it’s just me – clearly I have a mind that loves numbers – but I haven’t found it confusing at all. Weirdly I have found that I have developed my own internal standards. I generally need to travel with work, and that always ends up being ‘16 Travel’. (10-19 is usually “Administration” at work.) High on my list of stuff to write is a whole bunch of example pages. Drop me an email if you’d like me to let you know when they’re done.

egypturnash 8y ago

Chunking stuff into sets of ten is a good idea, memorizing the arbitrary numbers I’m not so sure about, but... “An important restriction of the system is that you’re not allowed to create any folders inside a Johnny.Decimal folder.” WHAT WHY Like let’s say I’m using your example structure and I am working on a new marketing campaign. With a ton of moving parts to it - new logos to make, contracts to sign and save, websites to design, ads to put together, brochures to design and print, etc, etc. Potentially hundreds of files for each campaign. I just throw all this stuff into the same directory as all the other marketing campaigns? This sounds absolutely insane to me. I guess alternatively I make a new JD folder - 30.04 Rumplestilskin campaign, 30.05 Butterscotch campaign, etc, but what happens once I’ve filled up the name space and have a new project?

jen729w 8y ago
Ha! Well... Your use-case needs a bit more thought, and doesn't fit the simple "marketing" example on the website. But that's the beauty of my system – it forces you to actually think about your business, about how you arrange things. It makes you deconstruct it in your mind in order to create that model. I personally find that very instructive in and of itself. "Hundreds of files for each campaign" is clearly something that needs to be managed. If you're interested in exploring a JD solution for it, I'd be very happy to help. This is all great experience for me, and the more I know about how other people use this system, the better I can make it overall.
- egypturnash 8y ago
  I can’t imagine making it work for me, to be honest. I’m looking at some finished projects and I’ve got more than ten subdirectories in most of them. Obviously this works for you but it sure sounds impractical for stuff like what you can see a hint of in http://egypt.urnash.com/media/blogs.dir/1/files/2019/01/Screen-Shot-2019-01-06-at-6.27.43-PM.png http://egypt.urnash.com/media/blogs.dir/1/files/2019/01/Scre... ...

adito 8y ago

Damn. This might works for my bookmarks folder. I have ton of bookmarks on Firefox and it becomes a disorganized mess. Definitely will try it and see how it goes. Thanks for sharing it.

MildlySerious 8y ago

How do you handle old files, if you don't mind me asking? My document directory has the year at the root level, i.e. ~/Documents/2018/billing/projectname which is nice in so far that you don't have to scan through files and folders that stopped being relevant.

jen729w 8y ago
Because the ID is incremental, old stuff naturally sorts itself. For example, I have '16 Travel' as a category. I make a new JD number for each trip I take and create Finder & email folders. Order details and PDFs tend to live there. 16.01 was, let me look ... a trip to Perth in 2012. And my latest, 16.31, just happened. But of course my '16 Travel' folder sorts like: 16.01 Trip to Perth to see Bart 16.02 <name of trip> 16.03 <name of trip> ... 16.29 16.30 16.31 Hunter Valley, Xmas '18 - so those old trips just kind of hide themselves away. My eye only ever looks at the most recent stuff, and all of the recent things sit near each other. It just works. This also has the advantage in that you don't need to remember which year a thing was in. They're all there, visible.
- MildlySerious 8y ago
  That's a very cool actually, I hadn't even considered it being that simple. This has me convinced to give this a shot soon with a new new system. Thank you!