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Johnny Decimal: A System to Organize Projects (2015)

124 points by trauco 3y ago

spookystats 3y ago
I've implemented this system for a while, but ultimately will switch to a less hierarchical one at some point in the future. Search, especially fuzzy search, is actually great! Using fzf in my terminal I can easily cd into any directory I desire as long as it or one of its parents has a sensible name.
korijn 3y ago
I think this doesn't solve the real problem: every person will categorize a document differently and look in a different place. That's the hard part. Creating categories and uniquely identifying them is easy.
- _1tan 3y ago
  I don't think they're trying to solve this issue directly. This is intended to be used as PKM (personal knowledge management) system. You are correct in any case that this is a hard problem and I would love to get some perspective from the author on implementing such a system org-wide.
  - logdahl 3y ago
    Not sure I agree with your PKM point. It feels like it fits well for company/project structure. Reading his forum and a bit into the article it seems to advocate a "librarian" that keeps the system correctly categorized. I think he mentioned somewhere that this system doesn't fully fit PKM. I remeber some example of categorizing photos according after vacations, but running out of numbers. But I must admit I don't fully remeber the arguments.
- GuB-42 3y ago
  We use a similar system at work and yes, it is a problem. For example we have categories like "customer input", "contractual", "work documents" and "delivery". Some technical specifications could go in every place at once. It is an input from the customer, and it has contractual elements, but sometime, we have to update it, and make it part of the final delivery. These often end up all over the place.
baz00 3y ago
I am convinced that absolutely no hierarchical taxonomy actually works in practice because every categorisation is really slightly fuzzy. Even libraries have problems categorising books into genres because some of them overlap considerably. I spent the last 25 years trying to build up useless hierarchies everywhere and none of them ever worked properly. Tagging/labelling with attributes is the only viable solution that I've found. This book is fiction/science-fiction/fantasy. This document is technical-reference/specification/ratified I believe this was the notion of the now defunct WinFS built on top of a database engine.
- ThouYS 3y ago
  this, tags + dynamic views on those tags
- logdahl 3y ago
  I'm just wondering when we're gonna get tagged filesystems. Maybe something partially hierarchical. Would love a book/ directory that i can query for 'sci-fi' or 'specification'. I guess one could implement it using sym-links :^)
  - baz00 3y ago
    Don't even go there with the symlinks. My mother made a family tree on windows with folders and shortcuts. It broke OneDrive and robocopy completely. I don't even know how to help her fix it.
    - virtue3 3y ago
      It's 3 in the morning and I couldn't stop laughing out loud when I read this. Poor OneDrive lol. I hope she managed to keep all her files and didn't lose anything.
      - baz00 3y ago
        It still works and she hasn't lost anything but you can't actually move or delete any files any more because windows explorer craps out too! I literally have no idea what to do with it :(
rmm 3y ago
I have given up. I now mostly have generic buckets but get super specific file names. E.g one I just saw is “Drawing of rising main chairing beam with solid chairs.pdf” and then use void tools everything to search for it
wmal 3y ago
I’d be so funny (at least for an outsider) to see an office where there’s a lot of corpo speak mixed with this. - we need to raise the bar for 34.18. where are the deliverables for 56.17? - the 65.18 objectives changed, so they will be 14.27 on 11.13 - wait, 11.13, mmeaning the docs or a date? - I’ll check and ping you Is this an early sign that AI is taking over?
- rpastuszak 3y ago
  Sounds more like going back to the analog version of Zettelkasten, i.e. an actual slip-box. I'm getting chills just thinking how much overthinking/over-analysing following this approach would cost me. Because I'd over-engineer the hell out of this (just forget to take the actual notes). But then I remind myself that our brains can be so beautifully different and some people would find this system more productive. I'm quite happy with my poorly but regularly managed evergreen notes.
theshrike79 3y ago
Tagging + searching. I tried the organisation thing and it always falls down somewhere, when an item is supposed to be in multiple places at once. Especially now when Obsidian supports Properties on pages as first-class things combined with Omnisearch makes it a lot easier to just search for whatever I'm looking for. I still have crude categories like "projects", "recipes" and "RPG" with subfolders for each campaign, but that's about it.
drcongo 3y ago
This gets posted here a lot [0], and I hate everything about it. [0] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=johnnydecimal.com https://hn.algolia.com/?q=johnnydecimal.com
- Hbruz0 3y ago
  Care to elaborate ?
  - drcongo 3y ago
    I mean, there's a _lot_ to dislike, but it mostly boils down to this being a physical object system applied to digital objects, and I disagree with every single premise in the list of reasons they give for having created it in the first place. For instance, there's a whole section on how "Search doesn’t help" which ends with "You can search for things, but the results are garbage." - the author hasn't considered that maybe search is garbage for them precisely because they're trying to apply physical object system to digital objects. I don't know about you, but Spotlight on my Mac finds exactly what I'm looking for every single time, because we use simple naming conventions. I also hate the absolute waste of human cognition this system causes making people try to memorise which number is at the start of a folder name they're looking for. From their own examples, a folder called `22 Contracts` is going to be sorted into a different position in a list than it would if it were just named `Contracts` - without the number, I both know exactly what the name of the folder I want is, and where it will appear in a directory listing. With someone else's choice of number at the front, I know neither of these things. Basically, every single thing this claims to solve is either not a problem in the first place, is trivially solved without making people learn a stranger's personal numbering preferences, or is made considerably worse by this system.
- smallerdemon 3y ago
  I also hate it. My hatred stems from the fact that it's very much a tech bro ideology. They get it into their head that THEIR system is 'the one'. It's the same way that tech bro weirdos running startups get it in THEIR head that THEIR product is some sort of life changing piece of technology that every human on the planet is going to ultimately adopt once they just "understand it". And god forbid if the product does catch on, because then it's a horrific confirmation bias to them. So instead of luck and market coercion, the product's success is evidence of their brilliance. I know that seems like a weird conclusion to get to from this, but having read a LOT of these types of articles over the years and seeing people's convictions and deep seated beliefs about their categorization systems, it really underscores a lot of how humans get it in their heads about their POV of the world is the 'right one' that the rest of the world should get on board with.
Hbruz0 3y ago
I've been trying it since last time it came up here, a few weeks ago. I have trouble remembering the nn.mm codes, but found it useful for organising backups on a remote machine. For some files, it's obviously difficult to choose one category but it's not that big of an issue when compared to organising, say, git repos, or folders with a lot of files. Could go higher into the hierarchy but the folder is too specific for that. If anyone has faced or solved these issues, I'd love to hear about it
- chipsa 3y ago
  Don't remember the AC.ID codes. Have a script generate a textfile index based on the file structure. Then you just look at the index. You look into a place enough, and you'll remember it eventually then.
brushfoot 3y ago
A past coworker implemented a system like this. It was awful. He was the gatekeeper because the numbers had to be "just so" to meet his approval, and he was the most senior person on the team. Limiting yourself to a handful of categories at each level makes sense, but numbering everything is a bad idea. It's busywork, and other people have to learn your idiosyncratic nomenclature. Just give the directories good names. Search really isn't as bad as the article suggests, especially with something like broot [1]. [1]: https://github.com/Canop/broot https://github.com/Canop/broot
- emadda 3y ago
  I didn’t like the numbers to begin with, but there are a few advantages: - After a while you associate the number with the subject so it becomes faster to visually scan a list. - You can type the number faster. They are shorter to reference.
  - jen729w 3y ago
    I'm updating the workbook this morning and I just typed out this little anecdote. The topic is 'whether to put the JD number in the filename or not'. --- Last year the boss mailed me a five-year-old file. "Is this the latest version of this?", he asked. The file name started with the number. I even remember it, it was `31.17`. This allowed me to go directly to the now-archived project folder, immediately navigate to this file's home, and see no, the file he mailed me is the latest. This took me literally one minute. I could probably have found my way there just by the filename -- the folder structure was well organised enough to allow this -- but it would certainly have taken longer and I would not have been as certain that I was in the right place.
- bafe 3y ago
  To me these intricate classification system fall in the same category as people developing very advanced note taking setups, dotfile management tools or fully customisable, reproducible shell/IDE/editor setups. Very nice ideas on paper, but you can get most of the way with far less effort if you mostly stick to the defaults. Trying to perfect it to death ends up looking like busywork and frequently causes conflicts with other team members less obsessed with these secondary issues
delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
I really like the typography of this website. Berkeley Mono for the sidebar, and IBM Plex Serif (IMO, a beautiful serif typeface for the web), very nice.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  Some of the elements (general layout, headings, anchor styling and on-hover highlighting) remind me strongly of my codepen: <https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/KpMqqB https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/KpMqqB>
kelahcim 3y ago
I have found Sublime Text and Sublime Merge to server me well with sort of `GTD` like approach (not orthodox one though). Finding in files + `regexp` works perfectly fine for most of my notes related to projects. Sublime Merge serves as a history keeper.
smallerdemon 3y ago
Is this the one that was speculated on as being a hoax / joke?
c96aes 3y ago
I really love the crazy-people energy of this. There's no hesitation or equivocation, just THE ANSWER. Does it matter if it's a joke / hoax or not? I don't think so, I think it's beautiful either way.
deleted 3y ago
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smallerdemon 3y ago
Honestly, if you want to do this, just study and use the Library of Congress cataloging system: https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/ui/en_US/htdocs/help/numbers.html https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/ui/en_US/htdocs/help/numbers.h... The energy in creating your own catalog system to this extent while one already exists seems pretty ridiculous. Why not Dewey Decimal? Well... I mean... I guess you could. But most libraries have converted to LOC since it is fully supported and still receives attention and updates to categorizations.
- taink 3y ago
  The article you linked to doesn't explain plainly how the cataloging system works. Going to Wikipedia[1] makes it a little more intelligible, but honestly it still sounds pretty complicated. If a cataloging system is difficult to explain in plain and simple terms, it will be tough to advocate for it with other people. I might put in the effort but how can I quickly convince others to do so? Johnny Decimal is pretty simple in comparison, it's 4 bullet points: - A JD number is two numbers with a dot in between: XX.YY - First digit of first number: a broad category - Second digit of first number: a sub-category - The second number is incremented each time you create a new folder (which you want to be careful about!) Once you've explained that and you show a basic folder structure, people will understand how it's used, at least. That's where it performs better than your system. It's probably fine if it's tough to define, but it has to be simple to teach. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress_Classification#Design_and_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress_Classifica...
SanderNL 3y ago
IMO this kind of misses the point because now you have a fancy system to handle your documents, but the rest of the company is using a million variations of just about every system you can think of including having folders named "temp" and "data2" and Karen will not use your system no matter what you will say. I mention this, because the author mentioned "corporate system" and not "personal system". For personal management this is fine of course. Given the "systems" I have seen in the wild I think literally anything that sort of standardizes information generation and retrieval is a massive improvement over random word documents on various NAS'es, local files, powerpoints, emails and of course various sharepoint and custom CMS pages. I think many businesses can noticebly improve by dumping everything they have into .txt files instead of all the bs formats MS and friends came up with and just have a good search function. It looks like ass, but do you care about information or what. I'm sort of joking, of course, but not really..
- xwolfi 3y ago
  I work in a giant place, 100k+ employees, 150+ years of documents, layers upon layers of processes, presence in all countries, heavy regulation, successive mergers. There is simply no way to make it work perfectly. We can do migration upon migration but that has never seemed to simplify anything (the joke in my team is as soon as something starts working, we migrate half of it away to a non working solution and end up with two half systems - this has proven true so many times we dont even take it as a joke anymore). We embrace the chaos, and focus on concrete client problems, and collect the fees for service well provided. No point in trying to make it make sense anymore or to micro optimize productivity. We have a rough estimate that it takes a year for an experienced new joiner to be truly productive, and we simply pay well so they don't leave before doing their first big contribution and basta. I work concurrently on two identical systems doing the same things on paper but with important difference in details, because the current political war made the american system win over the asian system, while knowing the asian system simply handles better our 13 market quirks than the american one that was made for a simple single market. We slowly complexify it to reach feature parity, deploy it in markets with low stakes while we improve the asian system continuously for the hundreds of high-paying clients. One day either we'll reach a point where a market that matters can finally be migrated, or the fact we make much profit in Asia will catch up with the global strategists and the asian system will start being proposed to solve (badly) the american problems. It has never been thought by our strategists to keep two systems working well in their respective core markets at the global scale. So we migrate half of Asia and keep two systems working badly at the local scale. I pity the intern joining in 1000 years though. We have no idea how the kraken will evolve after centuries...
lifthrasiir 3y ago
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398027 (2020-12-13, where the site author complains about HN ;-), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36308366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36308366 (2023-06-13) I do believe that such a system has a value, but only when built by users themselves. Sure, there would be some commonalities and schemes like Johnny Decimal may be a good guideline; prefixes would work well because they get sorted without any additional jobs (but doesn't scale for many subjects), tags are fine when you have a software support, you can also use metadata like dates and backlinks, and so on. But making a proper organization takes time and observation, and only long-time users with an urgent need have that knowledge. Especially because no organization system can remain unchagned over time.
Terretta 3y ago
This feels good, but in practice, it's friction. Instead, take advantage that ideas and work evolve through time, and store your work and notes chronologically. Combine that with good search. This allows you to find items by time proximity and keyword / semantic / text embedding search. The only folder categorization needed are slashes around ISO 8601 date parts (whichever groups a reasonable amount of content together naturally): - YYYY/MM or YYYY/WW With files named: - YYYY-MM-DD - Topic headline keywords.ext After a while, just stop filing anything, have a script sweep your desktop and downloads paths into this archive path if a piece of content hasn't been opened in x days. (If you really really want a set of things together, make a folder for them on your desktop, put the bits in it, and ensure the script only sweeps the whole folder once no bits are being used.) If you're still working on a set of stuff, it'll stay on your desktop. When you're done, it'll go where you can find it. If you need something, search. If you can't search, remember when you worked on it, and browse. You'll find it, and all the things around it, that were in your head at the time, and can "reload" the whole context.
samsquire 3y ago
I think everyone has a different thought process and style of thinking and work and it is painful to force others to use your way of thinking or working or organisation. I have written about video game interfaces, for work, person stacks, person based APIs. Conway's law is very real. I like the idea of interlocking lists that act like gears of work between individuals. I can outline my interface with you and you can react to tasks I give you, based on your interface. Like a unit test, I can import you and tell you what I need, you ask clarifying questions and I reply to them and we both track the mutual fallout. Synchronization and back and forth with email is painful and antiquated.
soldeace 3y ago
For the best part of my life I use a controlled set of tags[1] rather than hierarchical categories. This is mostly due to the fact that stuff can be a lot of things at the same time. That said, one of the best use cases for Johnny's system I've found is when you have to share an online drive with hundreds of people, where you can't use tags, and even if you could, there would be no consensus. Strangely, nowadays I can find my way around a huge project's online files quite easily just by the prefix numbers of each categorical level. [1] https://karl-voit.at/2022/01/29/How-to-Use-Tags/ https://karl-voit.at/2022/01/29/How-to-Use-Tags/
dgreisen 3y ago
It's fun seeing information science applied to different domains. This is very similar to the system that we've converged on over the last 100 years for legal codes with title.chapter.section (see, e.g., https://law.cityofsanmateo.org/us/ca/cities/san-mateo/code/8.28.010 https://law.cityofsanmateo.org/us/ca/cities/san-mateo/code/8...). The ability with the system to unambiguously and _succinctly_ cite to a particular part of the law (or, in this case, the filesystem) is a game changer.
makeworld 3y ago
I tried this for a few months, just switched out of it yesterday. In contrast to what many people are saying here, my problem is it didn't have enough hierarchy. I wanted more levels of folders and that wasn't permitted by the system. Now I click more to find what I want, but it's cleaner and easier to find.
deleted 3y ago
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otterpro 3y ago
I use Johnny decimal because it allowed me to offload my decision for file organization. I had my doubt, but when I tried it as a test, I felt a sense of relief. Before, my file system was a mess, and no file search or tagging could save me from naming hell. Naming things are hard and took a lot of mental energy. I see a lot of cynicism in the comments but having an imperfect and flawed system is better than having no system at all.
igrekel 3y ago
Oh god every time someone start numbering sub-directories I want to scream. This feels soooooo like the old days. I hate it because then anything like ordering in alphabetical orders doesn't work. I'm looking for the documentation subdirectory, I know it's starts with "D" it's easy if I can order them in alphabetical order. But nooooo. Don't force me to remember decimal codes unless your name is Dewey and it's going to be the same thing every where, all the time. Also it's the same people who'll create a slew of empty sub directories so it's difficult to get a feel of what is the current state.TO be fair I think part of the problem is they try to apply that to everywhere at any level without logic. Number the directories for all customers... so now we assign the next number to the next customer we get, so to find a customer you need to known in which order they were added and it just makes no sense.. but people will usually support it because it "looks more organized".
neogodless 3y ago
My email folder system was inspired by this and loosely follows it. Works well enough for email (personal and professional). I have not tended to find it as useful for actual file folders. https://imgur.com/a/K2mN8cY https://imgur.com/a/K2mN8cY If nothing else, it's because I'm often working with yet another new set of folders and files, and they are very different from the last, and I haven't developed some sort of intuitive hierarchy that I could apply. With email, it's pretty consistent. The only changes are new project/client folders popping up, and that's typically pretty infrequent, even with agency work.
2big2fail_47 3y ago
i've been using an adopted version since about 6month now and it's actually works great. I really like that every file now has a specific place. I even transferred the concept to my offline documents and folders.
dredmorbius 3y ago
Organisation, classification, taxonomies, hierarchies, and catalogues are complex concepts. I've run across the Johnny Decimal concept a few times, and though it's interesting, and probably better than no organisation, I'm not sold on it. That's strongly informed by a long deep dive into other classification and bibliographic schemes. One key distinction is between a location-based classification system and an indexing or tagging system. A large bibliographic institution with an extensive history which maintains its own versions of both concepts is the US Library of Congress. The Library of Congress Classification is based on a scheme originally inherited from Thomas Jefferson for organising his own personal library whose donation to the US Congress inaugurated the Library of Congress. It is based on 21 top-level divisions, based on letters of the Roman alphabet from A-Z, excluding the letters I, O, W, & X). These are further broken into a vast number of further divisions, with the ultimate aim of identifying an individual work AND locating that work within the library's physical archive. Books, as physical objects, occupy a distinct space, and one space only, which cannot be shared with another book. The Library of Congress (LoC) Subject Headings are a set of descriptions of works. Unlike the classification, a book may be assigned multiple subject headings, corresponding to its major themes. These headings are not used to define a book's location but rather aid in its discovery when searching by subject. Both of these classifications have evolved over well over a century, are the subject of ongoing efforts and development, and have had to address the fact of change in both the underlying subject matter (e.g., the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Soviet Union, and Colonial Africa are no longer extant) and how subject matters are addressed and referenced (psychology, sexuality, race, economics, scientific discoveries, and technological advances have all made old terms obsolete or deprecated, and introduced new ones). These are not the only classification and cataloguing schemes used by the US government, let alone other bibliography-manangement institutions elsewhere. The Superintendent of Documentation (SUDOC) system is used by the Government Printing Office to manage its publications and archives, and is organised principally around government offices (Cabinet divisions amongst the Executive, others in the Legislative and Judiciary), as well as date. Some libraries don't organise works by subject but instead assign a location code to works independent of subject by which the works may be requested by patrons. (These are typically "closed-stack" systems.) There are other classifications: Dewey Decimal (superficially resembling the LoC classification), Decimal Classification, and Colon Classification are amongst the most widely used. Digital storage has different requirements than physical. Documents needn't have a single storage location or address. They may be part of numerous distinct systems, often with idiosyncratic or incompatible management or organisation themselves. Documents are far more likely to be live, with ongoing development and adaptation as opposed to the static state of a print archive. "Documents" may in fact be data held in databases, wikis, or other systems, and be associated with multiple projects. One generally useful set of concepts for organising documents is the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) with a set of 15 defined elements: Contributor, Coverage, Creator, Date, Description, Format, Identifier, Language, Publisher, Relation, Rights, Source, Subject, Title, and Type. A document might have zero or more of each element associated with it (e.g., multiple authors, translators, illustrators, and/or editors as Contributors). And it's been observed that some elements are themselves ambiguous (e.g., what is the difference between a "contributor" and a "creator"). But in general this at least provides a useful framework for considering works. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Core> In looking at document management I've found a few other elements are useful to consider: - Project: the task being worked on. - Workflows: what is being done with documents. - Document lifecycle: Often consisting of a set of stages: creation, edits/updates, acquisition, cataloguing, format conversions or transformations, transmission or publishing, and deacquisition or destruction. - Security and/or distribution scope. Keep in mind that metadata itself has significant value and should be considered withing your data management / privacy / security policies. - Teams and participants. Both within and external to your organisation. - Organisational evolution. Personnel, departments, divisions, enterprises, and governments come, go, and change. The terms used now might not apply in a year, or 10, or 100. (Your document lifescycle might not extend to 10 or 100 years. Then again, it might.) Most usually, I'll find I use the following in organisation: - Date. Generally the start date of a project. Organising documents by time makes a great deal of sense, and creates natural search spans: day, week, month, quarter, year, decade, etc. - Author/owner. The person, department, or institution which created or "owns" the document. Within a sufficiently large organisation, these should live within a departmental / divisional structure. - Title. How the document is generally referred to. This can be startlingly ambiguous, especially internally. Third-party documents tend to have far more fixed and established titles, though even these can be tricky. E.g., "The White Album" is not actually titled "The White Album". - Other relevant distinguishing information. Where possible, I'll try to store information under a single filesystem directory hierarchy, though in practice things tend to live in multiple places: a shared code repository (public or private), a wiki or other platform, databases and application data. If possible these are tied together in some useful fashion, though any such organisation tends to be approximate and lagging reality at best. With a sufficiently large organisation, a librarian role who manages overall storage and resolves disputes is helpful. Though you'll be exceedingly lucky to have someone actually assigned to such a role. Johnny Decimal is interesting, and may well work for some cases. I doubt it meets all needs, and certainly isn't the One True Path for all individuals and organisations.
syats 3y ago
For anyone interested in how the obsession for organization can end: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet
- 0x445442 3y ago
  Or this guy... https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/albums https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/albums
cygnion 3y ago
The approaches for information organization versus info retrieval are often different. For example, we mostly read content based on whatever fixed structure it's in, be it a blog post or a scientific article. Note-taking tends to follow that structure. But we retrieve and consume the information in a non-linear, context-driven search. Putting everything in a rigid hierarchical oder has some benefits, namely familiarityto the author, but incurs the cost of organizing the material and the mental context switch from the task at hand. I've been researching ways to make information tagging and visual search easy and effective - at the source - in the narrow case of reading scholarly documents [1]. The goal is to avoid a prescribed organization format in favor of contextual tagging, visualization for personal analytics, and linking of concepts afterwards, in a way that reduces distraction from reading and understanding. [1] https://www.knowledgegarden.io/ https://www.knowledgegarden.io/
istjohn 3y ago
LLMs will soon make file organization something we never have to think about.
kkfx 3y ago
IMVHO Johnny Decimal is a good system for paper archives in classic filing cabinets / furniture with many drawers, not much reasonable for computer-based systems. Beside that IME in PKM/PIM terms we need taxonomies just to manage storage, if it's not managed alone. In that case a time-based taxonomy like an year-based root, a month based II level or so it's enough for storage handling and eventual "time traveling" in noted contents. I have almost anything in org-mode/org-attached binaries, org-mode tangle-d configs and so on, I've tried various taxonomies and in the end just choosing to have subdirs of my org mode root dir one per year just to manage contents. Similarly this is how I split my Beancount-ed personal finance, one note per month. org-roam-node-find title-based search&narrow access + eventual ripgrep full-text-search are good enough to find anything. Rarely I've used org-ql but it's simply too long to keep consistent notes even with templates to use an SQL-alike querying.
Linux-Fan 3y ago
I have started to use this system shortly after having first heard of it. I think the greatest challenge is that as I constantly create new things while only completing a fraction of them, I'd end up with a very “sparse” set of numbers being “active” in the end and unlike what is claimed by the system the relevance of directories for me is rarely linked to the time of their creation. Hence I needed to tweak this system a little to be useful to me and while it is a minor improvement over before I am still dissatisfied with the outcome... An alternative organization system which is more lightweight and could also work well -- I am not affiliated, but would like to try to add some of these ideas to my own structuring approach: https://plaintext-productivity.net/3-02-file-folder-structure-for-life.html https://plaintext-productivity.net/3-02-file-folder-structur... During the course of time the License of the JD system itself seems to have changed to a CC “NonCommercial” license. This really contradicts that this system is intended to be also useful in business contexts. I shall only look at my old copy where it is still under a DFGS-compliant license, but I wonder whether it is even possible to claim ownership on an organization system by means of a license? Wouldn't the only way to protect against it being used or described anywhere be a patent?
jen729w 3y ago
Not sure why this is tagged (2015), I redeveloped this site earlier this year. The last-updated date is right there in my sidebar. @dang you might want to remove. No biggie like. Hey all, Johnny here. This pops up here every few months, always happy to answer questions.

124 points by trauco 3y ago

I've implemented this system for a while, but ultimately will switch to a less hierarchical one at some point in the future. Search, especially fuzzy search, is actually great! Using fzf in my terminal I can easily cd into any directory I desire as long as it or one of its parents has a sensible name.

korijn 3y ago

I think this doesn't solve the real problem: every person will categorize a document differently and look in a different place. That's the hard part. Creating categories and uniquely identifying them is easy.

_1tan 3y ago
I don't think they're trying to solve this issue directly. This is intended to be used as PKM (personal knowledge management) system. You are correct in any case that this is a hard problem and I would love to get some perspective from the author on implementing such a system org-wide.
- logdahl 3y ago
  Not sure I agree with your PKM point. It feels like it fits well for company/project structure. Reading his forum and a bit into the article it seems to advocate a "librarian" that keeps the system correctly categorized. I think he mentioned somewhere that this system doesn't fully fit PKM. I remeber some example of categorizing photos according after vacations, but running out of numbers. But I must admit I don't fully remeber the arguments.
GuB-42 3y ago
We use a similar system at work and yes, it is a problem. For example we have categories like "customer input", "contractual", "work documents" and "delivery". Some technical specifications could go in every place at once. It is an input from the customer, and it has contractual elements, but sometime, we have to update it, and make it part of the final delivery. These often end up all over the place.

baz00 3y ago

I am convinced that absolutely no hierarchical taxonomy actually works in practice because every categorisation is really slightly fuzzy. Even libraries have problems categorising books into genres because some of them overlap considerably. I spent the last 25 years trying to build up useless hierarchies everywhere and none of them ever worked properly. Tagging/labelling with attributes is the only viable solution that I've found. This book is fiction/science-fiction/fantasy. This document is technical-reference/specification/ratified I believe this was the notion of the now defunct WinFS built on top of a database engine.

ThouYS 3y ago
this, tags + dynamic views on those tags
logdahl 3y ago
I'm just wondering when we're gonna get tagged filesystems. Maybe something partially hierarchical. Would love a book/ directory that i can query for 'sci-fi' or 'specification'. I guess one could implement it using sym-links :^)
- baz00 3y ago
  Don't even go there with the symlinks. My mother made a family tree on windows with folders and shortcuts. It broke OneDrive and robocopy completely. I don't even know how to help her fix it.
  - virtue3 3y ago
    It's 3 in the morning and I couldn't stop laughing out loud when I read this. Poor OneDrive lol. I hope she managed to keep all her files and didn't lose anything.
    - baz00 3y ago
      It still works and she hasn't lost anything but you can't actually move or delete any files any more because windows explorer craps out too! I literally have no idea what to do with it :(

rmm 3y ago

I have given up. I now mostly have generic buckets but get super specific file names. E.g one I just saw is “Drawing of rising main chairing beam with solid chairs.pdf” and then use void tools everything to search for it

wmal 3y ago

I’d be so funny (at least for an outsider) to see an office where there’s a lot of corpo speak mixed with this. - we need to raise the bar for 34.18. where are the deliverables for 56.17? - the 65.18 objectives changed, so they will be 14.27 on 11.13 - wait, 11.13, mmeaning the docs or a date? - I’ll check and ping you Is this an early sign that AI is taking over?

rpastuszak 3y ago
Sounds more like going back to the analog version of Zettelkasten, i.e. an actual slip-box. I'm getting chills just thinking how much overthinking/over-analysing following this approach would cost me. Because I'd over-engineer the hell out of this (just forget to take the actual notes). But then I remind myself that our brains can be so beautifully different and some people would find this system more productive. I'm quite happy with my poorly but regularly managed evergreen notes.

theshrike79 3y ago

Tagging + searching. I tried the organisation thing and it always falls down somewhere, when an item is supposed to be in multiple places at once. Especially now when Obsidian supports Properties on pages as first-class things combined with Omnisearch makes it a lot easier to just search for whatever I'm looking for. I still have crude categories like "projects", "recipes" and "RPG" with subfolders for each campaign, but that's about it.

drcongo 3y ago

This gets posted here a lot [0], and I hate everything about it. [0] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=johnnydecimal.com https://hn.algolia.com/?q=johnnydecimal.com

Hbruz0 3y ago
Care to elaborate ?
- drcongo 3y ago
  I mean, there's a _lot_ to dislike, but it mostly boils down to this being a physical object system applied to digital objects, and I disagree with every single premise in the list of reasons they give for having created it in the first place. For instance, there's a whole section on how "Search doesn’t help" which ends with "You can search for things, but the results are garbage." - the author hasn't considered that maybe search is garbage for them precisely because they're trying to apply physical object system to digital objects. I don't know about you, but Spotlight on my Mac finds exactly what I'm looking for every single time, because we use simple naming conventions. I also hate the absolute waste of human cognition this system causes making people try to memorise which number is at the start of a folder name they're looking for. From their own examples, a folder called `22 Contracts` is going to be sorted into a different position in a list than it would if it were just named `Contracts` - without the number, I both know exactly what the name of the folder I want is, and where it will appear in a directory listing. With someone else's choice of number at the front, I know neither of these things. Basically, every single thing this claims to solve is either not a problem in the first place, is trivially solved without making people learn a stranger's personal numbering preferences, or is made considerably worse by this system.
smallerdemon 3y ago
I also hate it. My hatred stems from the fact that it's very much a tech bro ideology. They get it into their head that THEIR system is 'the one'. It's the same way that tech bro weirdos running startups get it in THEIR head that THEIR product is some sort of life changing piece of technology that every human on the planet is going to ultimately adopt once they just "understand it". And god forbid if the product does catch on, because then it's a horrific confirmation bias to them. So instead of luck and market coercion, the product's success is evidence of their brilliance. I know that seems like a weird conclusion to get to from this, but having read a LOT of these types of articles over the years and seeing people's convictions and deep seated beliefs about their categorization systems, it really underscores a lot of how humans get it in their heads about their POV of the world is the 'right one' that the rest of the world should get on board with.

Hbruz0 3y ago

I've been trying it since last time it came up here, a few weeks ago. I have trouble remembering the nn.mm codes, but found it useful for organising backups on a remote machine. For some files, it's obviously difficult to choose one category but it's not that big of an issue when compared to organising, say, git repos, or folders with a lot of files. Could go higher into the hierarchy but the folder is too specific for that. If anyone has faced or solved these issues, I'd love to hear about it

chipsa 3y ago
Don't remember the AC.ID codes. Have a script generate a textfile index based on the file structure. Then you just look at the index. You look into a place enough, and you'll remember it eventually then.

brushfoot 3y ago

A past coworker implemented a system like this. It was awful. He was the gatekeeper because the numbers had to be "just so" to meet his approval, and he was the most senior person on the team. Limiting yourself to a handful of categories at each level makes sense, but numbering everything is a bad idea. It's busywork, and other people have to learn your idiosyncratic nomenclature. Just give the directories good names. Search really isn't as bad as the article suggests, especially with something like broot [1]. [1]: https://github.com/Canop/broot https://github.com/Canop/broot

emadda 3y ago
I didn’t like the numbers to begin with, but there are a few advantages: - After a while you associate the number with the subject so it becomes faster to visually scan a list. - You can type the number faster. They are shorter to reference.
- jen729w 3y ago
  I'm updating the workbook this morning and I just typed out this little anecdote. The topic is 'whether to put the JD number in the filename or not'. --- Last year the boss mailed me a five-year-old file. "Is this the latest version of this?", he asked. The file name started with the number. I even remember it, it was `31.17`. This allowed me to go directly to the now-archived project folder, immediately navigate to this file's home, and see no, the file he mailed me is the latest. This took me literally one minute. I could probably have found my way there just by the filename -- the folder structure was well organised enough to allow this -- but it would certainly have taken longer and I would not have been as certain that I was in the right place.
bafe 3y ago
To me these intricate classification system fall in the same category as people developing very advanced note taking setups, dotfile management tools or fully customisable, reproducible shell/IDE/editor setups. Very nice ideas on paper, but you can get most of the way with far less effort if you mostly stick to the defaults. Trying to perfect it to death ends up looking like busywork and frequently causes conflicts with other team members less obsessed with these secondary issues

delta_p_delta_x 3y ago

I really like the typography of this website. Berkeley Mono for the sidebar, and IBM Plex Serif (IMO, a beautiful serif typeface for the web), very nice.

dredmorbius 3y ago
Some of the elements (general layout, headings, anchor styling and on-hover highlighting) remind me strongly of my codepen: <https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/KpMqqB https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/KpMqqB>

kelahcim 3y ago

I have found Sublime Text and Sublime Merge to server me well with sort of `GTD` like approach (not orthodox one though). Finding in files + `regexp` works perfectly fine for most of my notes related to projects. Sublime Merge serves as a history keeper.

smallerdemon 3y ago

Is this the one that was speculated on as being a hoax / joke?

c96aes 3y ago

I really love the crazy-people energy of this. There's no hesitation or equivocation, just THE ANSWER. Does it matter if it's a joke / hoax or not? I don't think so, I think it's beautiful either way.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

smallerdemon 3y ago

Honestly, if you want to do this, just study and use the Library of Congress cataloging system: https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/ui/en_US/htdocs/help/numbers.html https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/ui/en_US/htdocs/help/numbers.h... The energy in creating your own catalog system to this extent while one already exists seems pretty ridiculous. Why not Dewey Decimal? Well... I mean... I guess you could. But most libraries have converted to LOC since it is fully supported and still receives attention and updates to categorizations.

taink 3y ago
The article you linked to doesn't explain plainly how the cataloging system works. Going to Wikipedia[1] makes it a little more intelligible, but honestly it still sounds pretty complicated. If a cataloging system is difficult to explain in plain and simple terms, it will be tough to advocate for it with other people. I might put in the effort but how can I quickly convince others to do so? Johnny Decimal is pretty simple in comparison, it's 4 bullet points: - A JD number is two numbers with a dot in between: XX.YY - First digit of first number: a broad category - Second digit of first number: a sub-category - The second number is incremented each time you create a new folder (which you want to be careful about!) Once you've explained that and you show a basic folder structure, people will understand how it's used, at least. That's where it performs better than your system. It's probably fine if it's tough to define, but it has to be simple to teach. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress_Classification#Design_and_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress_Classifica...

SanderNL 3y ago

IMO this kind of misses the point because now you have a fancy system to handle your documents, but the rest of the company is using a million variations of just about every system you can think of including having folders named "temp" and "data2" and Karen will not use your system no matter what you will say. I mention this, because the author mentioned "corporate system" and not "personal system". For personal management this is fine of course. Given the "systems" I have seen in the wild I think literally anything that sort of standardizes information generation and retrieval is a massive improvement over random word documents on various NAS'es, local files, powerpoints, emails and of course various sharepoint and custom CMS pages. I think many businesses can noticebly improve by dumping everything they have into .txt files instead of all the bs formats MS and friends came up with and just have a good search function. It looks like ass, but do you care about information or what. I'm sort of joking, of course, but not really..

xwolfi 3y ago
I work in a giant place, 100k+ employees, 150+ years of documents, layers upon layers of processes, presence in all countries, heavy regulation, successive mergers. There is simply no way to make it work perfectly. We can do migration upon migration but that has never seemed to simplify anything (the joke in my team is as soon as something starts working, we migrate half of it away to a non working solution and end up with two half systems - this has proven true so many times we dont even take it as a joke anymore). We embrace the chaos, and focus on concrete client problems, and collect the fees for service well provided. No point in trying to make it make sense anymore or to micro optimize productivity. We have a rough estimate that it takes a year for an experienced new joiner to be truly productive, and we simply pay well so they don't leave before doing their first big contribution and basta. I work concurrently on two identical systems doing the same things on paper but with important difference in details, because the current political war made the american system win over the asian system, while knowing the asian system simply handles better our 13 market quirks than the american one that was made for a simple single market. We slowly complexify it to reach feature parity, deploy it in markets with low stakes while we improve the asian system continuously for the hundreds of high-paying clients. One day either we'll reach a point where a market that matters can finally be migrated, or the fact we make much profit in Asia will catch up with the global strategists and the asian system will start being proposed to solve (badly) the american problems. It has never been thought by our strategists to keep two systems working well in their respective core markets at the global scale. So we migrate half of Asia and keep two systems working badly at the local scale. I pity the intern joining in 1000 years though. We have no idea how the kraken will evolve after centuries...

lifthrasiir 3y ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398027 (2020-12-13, where the site author complains about HN ;-), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36308366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36308366 (2023-06-13) I do believe that such a system has a value, but only when built by users themselves. Sure, there would be some commonalities and schemes like Johnny Decimal may be a good guideline; prefixes would work well because they get sorted without any additional jobs (but doesn't scale for many subjects), tags are fine when you have a software support, you can also use metadata like dates and backlinks, and so on. But making a proper organization takes time and observation, and only long-time users with an urgent need have that knowledge. Especially because no organization system can remain unchagned over time.

Terretta 3y ago

This feels good, but in practice, it's friction. Instead, take advantage that ideas and work evolve through time, and store your work and notes chronologically. Combine that with good search. This allows you to find items by time proximity and keyword / semantic / text embedding search. The only folder categorization needed are slashes around ISO 8601 date parts (whichever groups a reasonable amount of content together naturally): - YYYY/MM or YYYY/WW With files named: - YYYY-MM-DD - Topic headline keywords.ext After a while, just stop filing anything, have a script sweep your desktop and downloads paths into this archive path if a piece of content hasn't been opened in x days. (If you really really want a set of things together, make a folder for them on your desktop, put the bits in it, and ensure the script only sweeps the whole folder once no bits are being used.) If you're still working on a set of stuff, it'll stay on your desktop. When you're done, it'll go where you can find it. If you need something, search. If you can't search, remember when you worked on it, and browse. You'll find it, and all the things around it, that were in your head at the time, and can "reload" the whole context.

samsquire 3y ago

I think everyone has a different thought process and style of thinking and work and it is painful to force others to use your way of thinking or working or organisation. I have written about video game interfaces, for work, person stacks, person based APIs. Conway's law is very real. I like the idea of interlocking lists that act like gears of work between individuals. I can outline my interface with you and you can react to tasks I give you, based on your interface. Like a unit test, I can import you and tell you what I need, you ask clarifying questions and I reply to them and we both track the mutual fallout. Synchronization and back and forth with email is painful and antiquated.

soldeace 3y ago

For the best part of my life I use a controlled set of tags[1] rather than hierarchical categories. This is mostly due to the fact that stuff can be a lot of things at the same time. That said, one of the best use cases for Johnny's system I've found is when you have to share an online drive with hundreds of people, where you can't use tags, and even if you could, there would be no consensus. Strangely, nowadays I can find my way around a huge project's online files quite easily just by the prefix numbers of each categorical level. [1] https://karl-voit.at/2022/01/29/How-to-Use-Tags/ https://karl-voit.at/2022/01/29/How-to-Use-Tags/

dgreisen 3y ago

It's fun seeing information science applied to different domains. This is very similar to the system that we've converged on over the last 100 years for legal codes with title.chapter.section (see, e.g., https://law.cityofsanmateo.org/us/ca/cities/san-mateo/code/8.28.010 https://law.cityofsanmateo.org/us/ca/cities/san-mateo/code/8...). The ability with the system to unambiguously and _succinctly_ cite to a particular part of the law (or, in this case, the filesystem) is a game changer.

makeworld 3y ago

I tried this for a few months, just switched out of it yesterday. In contrast to what many people are saying here, my problem is it didn't have enough hierarchy. I wanted more levels of folders and that wasn't permitted by the system. Now I click more to find what I want, but it's cleaner and easier to find.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

otterpro 3y ago

I use Johnny decimal because it allowed me to offload my decision for file organization. I had my doubt, but when I tried it as a test, I felt a sense of relief. Before, my file system was a mess, and no file search or tagging could save me from naming hell. Naming things are hard and took a lot of mental energy. I see a lot of cynicism in the comments but having an imperfect and flawed system is better than having no system at all.

igrekel 3y ago

Oh god every time someone start numbering sub-directories I want to scream. This feels soooooo like the old days. I hate it because then anything like ordering in alphabetical orders doesn't work. I'm looking for the documentation subdirectory, I know it's starts with "D" it's easy if I can order them in alphabetical order. But nooooo. Don't force me to remember decimal codes unless your name is Dewey and it's going to be the same thing every where, all the time. Also it's the same people who'll create a slew of empty sub directories so it's difficult to get a feel of what is the current state.TO be fair I think part of the problem is they try to apply that to everywhere at any level without logic. Number the directories for all customers... so now we assign the next number to the next customer we get, so to find a customer you need to known in which order they were added and it just makes no sense.. but people will usually support it because it "looks more organized".

neogodless 3y ago

My email folder system was inspired by this and loosely follows it. Works well enough for email (personal and professional). I have not tended to find it as useful for actual file folders. https://imgur.com/a/K2mN8cY https://imgur.com/a/K2mN8cY If nothing else, it's because I'm often working with yet another new set of folders and files, and they are very different from the last, and I haven't developed some sort of intuitive hierarchy that I could apply. With email, it's pretty consistent. The only changes are new project/client folders popping up, and that's typically pretty infrequent, even with agency work.

2big2fail_47 3y ago

i've been using an adopted version since about 6month now and it's actually works great. I really like that every file now has a specific place. I even transferred the concept to my offline documents and folders.

dredmorbius 3y ago

Organisation, classification, taxonomies, hierarchies, and catalogues are complex concepts. I've run across the Johnny Decimal concept a few times, and though it's interesting, and probably better than no organisation, I'm not sold on it. That's strongly informed by a long deep dive into other classification and bibliographic schemes. One key distinction is between a location-based classification system and an indexing or tagging system. A large bibliographic institution with an extensive history which maintains its own versions of both concepts is the US Library of Congress. The Library of Congress Classification is based on a scheme originally inherited from Thomas Jefferson for organising his own personal library whose donation to the US Congress inaugurated the Library of Congress. It is based on 21 top-level divisions, based on letters of the Roman alphabet from A-Z, excluding the letters I, O, W, & X). These are further broken into a vast number of further divisions, with the ultimate aim of identifying an individual work AND locating that work within the library's physical archive. Books, as physical objects, occupy a distinct space, and one space only, which cannot be shared with another book. The Library of Congress (LoC) Subject Headings are a set of descriptions of works. Unlike the classification, a book may be assigned multiple subject headings, corresponding to its major themes. These headings are not used to define a book's location but rather aid in its discovery when searching by subject. Both of these classifications have evolved over well over a century, are the subject of ongoing efforts and development, and have had to address the fact of change in both the underlying subject matter (e.g., the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Soviet Union, and Colonial Africa are no longer extant) and how subject matters are addressed and referenced (psychology, sexuality, race, economics, scientific discoveries, and technological advances have all made old terms obsolete or deprecated, and introduced new ones). These are not the only classification and cataloguing schemes used by the US government, let alone other bibliography-manangement institutions elsewhere. The Superintendent of Documentation (SUDOC) system is used by the Government Printing Office to manage its publications and archives, and is organised principally around government offices (Cabinet divisions amongst the Executive, others in the Legislative and Judiciary), as well as date. Some libraries don't organise works by subject but instead assign a location code to works independent of subject by which the works may be requested by patrons. (These are typically "closed-stack" systems.) There are other classifications: Dewey Decimal (superficially resembling the LoC classification), Decimal Classification, and Colon Classification are amongst the most widely used. Digital storage has different requirements than physical. Documents needn't have a single storage location or address. They may be part of numerous distinct systems, often with idiosyncratic or incompatible management or organisation themselves. Documents are far more likely to be live, with ongoing development and adaptation as opposed to the static state of a print archive. "Documents" may in fact be data held in databases, wikis, or other systems, and be associated with multiple projects. One generally useful set of concepts for organising documents is the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) with a set of 15 defined elements: Contributor, Coverage, Creator, Date, Description, Format, Identifier, Language, Publisher, Relation, Rights, Source, Subject, Title, and Type. A document might have zero or more of each element associated with it (e.g., multiple authors, translators, illustrators, and/or editors as Contributors). And it's been observed that some elements are themselves ambiguous (e.g., what is the difference between a "contributor" and a "creator"). But in general this at least provides a useful framework for considering works. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Core> In looking at document management I've found a few other elements are useful to consider: - Project: the task being worked on. - Workflows: what is being done with documents. - Document lifecycle: Often consisting of a set of stages: creation, edits/updates, acquisition, cataloguing, format conversions or transformations, transmission or publishing, and deacquisition or destruction. - Security and/or distribution scope. Keep in mind that metadata itself has significant value and should be considered withing your data management / privacy / security policies. - Teams and participants. Both within and external to your organisation. - Organisational evolution. Personnel, departments, divisions, enterprises, and governments come, go, and change. The terms used now might not apply in a year, or 10, or 100. (Your document lifescycle might not extend to 10 or 100 years. Then again, it might.) Most usually, I'll find I use the following in organisation: - Date. Generally the start date of a project. Organising documents by time makes a great deal of sense, and creates natural search spans: day, week, month, quarter, year, decade, etc. - Author/owner. The person, department, or institution which created or "owns" the document. Within a sufficiently large organisation, these should live within a departmental / divisional structure. - Title. How the document is generally referred to. This can be startlingly ambiguous, especially internally. Third-party documents tend to have far more fixed and established titles, though even these can be tricky. E.g., "The White Album" is not actually titled "The White Album". - Other relevant distinguishing information. Where possible, I'll try to store information under a single filesystem directory hierarchy, though in practice things tend to live in multiple places: a shared code repository (public or private), a wiki or other platform, databases and application data. If possible these are tied together in some useful fashion, though any such organisation tends to be approximate and lagging reality at best. With a sufficiently large organisation, a librarian role who manages overall storage and resolves disputes is helpful. Though you'll be exceedingly lucky to have someone actually assigned to such a role. Johnny Decimal is interesting, and may well work for some cases. I doubt it meets all needs, and certainly isn't the One True Path for all individuals and organisations.

syats 3y ago

For anyone interested in how the obsession for organization can end: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet

0x445442 3y ago
Or this guy... https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/albums https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/albums

cygnion 3y ago

The approaches for information organization versus info retrieval are often different. For example, we mostly read content based on whatever fixed structure it's in, be it a blog post or a scientific article. Note-taking tends to follow that structure. But we retrieve and consume the information in a non-linear, context-driven search. Putting everything in a rigid hierarchical oder has some benefits, namely familiarityto the author, but incurs the cost of organizing the material and the mental context switch from the task at hand. I've been researching ways to make information tagging and visual search easy and effective - at the source - in the narrow case of reading scholarly documents [1]. The goal is to avoid a prescribed organization format in favor of contextual tagging, visualization for personal analytics, and linking of concepts afterwards, in a way that reduces distraction from reading and understanding. [1] https://www.knowledgegarden.io/ https://www.knowledgegarden.io/

istjohn 3y ago

LLMs will soon make file organization something we never have to think about.

kkfx 3y ago

IMVHO Johnny Decimal is a good system for paper archives in classic filing cabinets / furniture with many drawers, not much reasonable for computer-based systems. Beside that IME in PKM/PIM terms we need taxonomies just to manage storage, if it's not managed alone. In that case a time-based taxonomy like an year-based root, a month based II level or so it's enough for storage handling and eventual "time traveling" in noted contents. I have almost anything in org-mode/org-attached binaries, org-mode tangle-d configs and so on, I've tried various taxonomies and in the end just choosing to have subdirs of my org mode root dir one per year just to manage contents. Similarly this is how I split my Beancount-ed personal finance, one note per month. org-roam-node-find title-based search&narrow access + eventual ripgrep full-text-search are good enough to find anything. Rarely I've used org-ql but it's simply too long to keep consistent notes even with templates to use an SQL-alike querying.

Linux-Fan 3y ago

I have started to use this system shortly after having first heard of it. I think the greatest challenge is that as I constantly create new things while only completing a fraction of them, I'd end up with a very “sparse” set of numbers being “active” in the end and unlike what is claimed by the system the relevance of directories for me is rarely linked to the time of their creation. Hence I needed to tweak this system a little to be useful to me and while it is a minor improvement over before I am still dissatisfied with the outcome... An alternative organization system which is more lightweight and could also work well -- I am not affiliated, but would like to try to add some of these ideas to my own structuring approach: https://plaintext-productivity.net/3-02-file-folder-structure-for-life.html https://plaintext-productivity.net/3-02-file-folder-structur... During the course of time the License of the JD system itself seems to have changed to a CC “NonCommercial” license. This really contradicts that this system is intended to be also useful in business contexts. I shall only look at my old copy where it is still under a DFGS-compliant license, but I wonder whether it is even possible to claim ownership on an organization system by means of a license? Wouldn't the only way to protect against it being used or described anywhere be a patent?

jen729w 3y ago

Not sure why this is tagged (2015), I redeveloped this site earlier this year. The last-updated date is right there in my sidebar. @dang you might want to remove. No biggie like. Hey all, Johnny here. This pops up here every few months, always happy to answer questions.