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Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
- hasbot 2y agoMaybe the root problem is keeping too much stuff? IRL, I have one bank box that has a folder for everything I truly need (e.g. dog papers, vehicle repair records, tax documents, deeds, and um... that's about it really). In my digital life, I just don't keep much stuff. Songs, audiobooks, ebooks, tax returns, and that's about it.
- fleshmonad 2y ago>organise your file hierarchy in a common sense manner and add numbers >write way too long blog post in """hacker aesthetic""" >It gets to the HN front page Apart from that, the spaces in all filenames are questionable. I truly don't understand how something like this gets 450 points on HN
- spmcl 2y agoI use Johnny.Decimal in my Obsidian vault, but its purpose is less about being able to find things in the future and more like "this is a simple well-trodden system so you may as well use it for some semblance of organization of your folder hierarchy." But I only label the folders. I don't label files with numerical values – folders are just dumping grounds for a certain type of notes. Like I have a folder for journal entries, unique notes, blog posts, book notes, recipes, and individual side-projects. A few tags (most auto-generated in templates) help me search past notes if I need to, but that's a very infrequent need. My point is that switching just the folder hierarchy to Johnny.Decimal was very easy and I don't have to think about how I organize my work ever. Contrast that with some of the other PKM organization schemes you'll find (such as using Johnny.Decimal in its entirety), and you'll see that they both take a ton of time to set up and a ton of effort to maintain. Those are massive wastes of time. There are far more meaningful things you could be doing outside of marginal gains to productivity, if you can even call PKM optimization a "marginal gain."
- sotix 2y agoIt reminds me of accounting systems. Asset accounts are 1000. Liability accounts are 2000. Stockholders' Equity are 3000. Revenue are 4000. Expenses are 5000. Then the second digit differentiates which specific category of account it is. The final two digits are the sub accounts of that broader category.
- fortran77 2y agoI scan and ocr everything. It’s filed by year, with a subfolder for month. I narrow down the year range and search. I have files for decades arranged this way.
- pkilgore 2y agoIt's beautiful things like this exist for people and they are happy with them, but I cannot think of anything more stressful to me! Flat system of tags + Search + Fuzzy Find + Scanner + OCR + Giant Pile has been the route to happiness for me. My brain just isn't wired for hierarchy at all.
- CompoundEyes 2y agoThis reminds me of IBM Rational DOORS requirements documentation software’s approach https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=263&v=Reff4ELfwrM https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=263&v=Reff4ELfwrM
- edgarvaldes 2y agoIs there any solution that works inside Google Docs? The lack of a native tree view in GD is a big stopper for me.
- seguri 2y agoWorks great for me. I've also written a plugin for Power Toys Run that allows me to quickly open a folder, e.g. 53.10. Blog post here: https://blog.seguri.dev/posts/powertoys-run-johnnydecimal/ https://blog.seguri.dev/posts/powertoys-run-johnnydecimal/
- agnishom 2y agoI don't get it. How do I figure out what the top level 10, 20, 30, etc should correspond to? And if I do figure out what they should correspond to, why can't I just use a more informative title for my folder instead of a number?
- igbanam 2y agoCurious, how relevant is something like this in today's world? I was fascinated by this when I first saw it years ago. But in today's world, where fuzzy-finding, and A.I. working off embedded vector databases is a thing, how relevant is this system — if the content being organized is electronic stuff on a computer. I get that this may work as a physical organization system.
- er4hn 2y agoNever before have I read up on OIDs, SNMP, and then thought: Ah, I can apply this to the real world. If it works it works, but this is very funny to me.
- whatever1 2y agoI need none of these. I just need a search engine for my files that is not completely dumb.
- cytocync 2y ago[dead]
- aucisson_masque 2y agothis looks interesting but just as i experienced when i stared taking notes, you can't just classify stuffs in folders, subfolders, sub sub folders and so on because there are case where one thing might fit 2 or more folders in very distinct categories. the author speak about travel insurance in one of his graphic, would you put it in the folder travel -> subfolder insurance but not in the folder Insurance ? it fits both case. what happens in 2 years when you look for these contract, you arent going to remember if you put it in the travel folder or insurance folder. multiply that by the many... many files that fits multiple case. what a waste of time and energy.
- ab071c41 2y agoI was looking for an organization system and came across Johnny.Decimal. I actually applied that methodology to organize my bookmarks and that's been pretty good. It does help that my browser shows all the folders and everything fits into something specific there. For my files/folders though, it was a little much. I borrowed the concept of 10 subfolders though, and that became my new folder organization structure without the leading numbers. High level folders are very broad - Entertainment, Financial, Food, Life, etc. Under there, they get specific quickly. Food > Cooking > Stews is for stew recipes, Food > Cocktails are for cocktail recipes, and so on. Life > Housing > $address is for all the docs related to my current place. Life > Work > $company is for anything related to my current employer. Financial > Taxes > TY2024 is for 2024 tax docs, etc. I found the numerical indexing to be overkill since each folder has, at most, 10 subfolders. Alphabetical sorting is much better for that - at least for me.
- tonijn 2y agoA well setup Obsidian vault with some added plugins is another great way to organize your life
- hcarvalhoalves 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Decimal_Classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Decimal_Classification
- oneeyedpigeon 2y agoI think having a system is more important than which system it is. I don't see much benefit to limiting your hierarchy to 3 levels. Putting metadata like creation time in filenames is probably the wrong thing to do, since it's redundant, although it's mighty tempting-and I do it all the time.
- tsumnia 2y agoI will say that I have a few hierarchies I use regularly that go beyond 3 levels, and they are annoying to work with. There are times where I will copy the entire sub-directory to my desktop just to reduced how many levels I'm working from. Then once I'm done, I'll copy the files back into their little "box" and delete the desktop version.
- WillAdams 2y agoThat sort of thing really makes me miss the Miller Column Filebrowser on my NeXT Cube (and wish that Apple's implementation were more like to it --- it just doesn't "feel" right to me when I use it on my MacBook).
- cloudfudge 2y agoAllowing the filesystem to track creation time means you have to worry about how you move the data around and whether the tools you're using preserve it properly. A folder named 20250221-nyc-trip is a coarse but very durable way to store that.
- ghostly_s 2y ago20250221-nyc-trip is not a creation time, it's an identifier of the subject. they're both dates but they're different things.
- cloudfudge 2y agoI mean, if you define your identifiers to start with the creation time, then it's both.
- vander_elst 2y agoPrevious discussions: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36308366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36308366 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37506640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37506640 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398027
- dang 2y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: Johnny Decimal: A System to Organize Projects (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37506640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37506640 - Sept 2023 (118 comments) Johnny Decimal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36308366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36308366 - June 2023 (193 comments) Johnny.Decimal – A System to Organize Projects - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36300472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36300472 - June 2023 (1 comment) Johnny•Decimal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33683874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33683874 - Nov 2022 (1 comment) Johnny.Decimal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398027 - Dec 2020 (187 comments) Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise projects - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13770827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13770827 - March 2017 (2 comments)
- awestley 2y agoI see this pop up every few years. I wish I had the follow though to do this.
- RationPhantoms 2y agoCan I ask what benefit it provides? I'm genuinely curious what it could potentially provide.
- ashu1461 2y agoI think it is for power users who document a lot, just think of it as a better way to organise your documentation. I think the secret behind good documentation is the effort which will go daily to maintain it vs following a specific system. If you are putting in daily effort you will automatically find a system which suits your needs.
- zerkten 2y agoIt's therapy for a lot of people. The act of organizing helps them deal with information. That act of organizing and storing can help with recall for me but not as much as writing something down on paper does. The number of times people pull info out of these systems is questionable. An argument people use is that these systems help you later in life. I find these systems really hard to adopt and also find it difficult to work with people who expose these systems outwardly.
- emacsen 2y agoI originally started with Johnny.Decimal for my life and after giving it a big try, switched to PARA. J.D is fine (maybe even great) if your categories are relatively static, such as a small business, but as an individual, I found it very restrictive and challenging to remember. Moreover, while the decimals are cool, I found them somewhat irrelevant if I was the only one referencing them. J.D is optimized for retrieval, where what I needed was optimized storage, and then occasional retrial. To each their own of course, and using any system is better than none.
- pendingU 2y agoI'm always impressed by systems like this, but I've personally never understood the point. I'd be curious to learn from others what the benefits of this kind of archiving are for them? And if the time cost is worth it. For me, I feel like I treat most of my documents as very temporal things. I need them for a certain period of time, but then after that, they can be list to the ether. I have never really had a need to reference old content, plans, documents, etc. The only old things I ever need to reference are old code projects and writings. But even that I can usually manage with just a single folder for the project. Everytime I get a new computer, I just start fresh. Keeping only a very small amount of files backed up in cloud services. Which as I mentioned are just a very small collection of code projects and writings. Am I crazy? Haha.
- BoredPositron 2y agoYou will understand when you get into your 50-60s.
- ocharles 2y agoBecause of the volume of documents, or because of some cognitive change at that age?
- BoredPositron 2y agoVolume is a factor but it’s more about melancholia and being able to recall the years of your life.
- raintrees 2y agoBoth, for me. Memory not as sharp as it used to be, and more to be organized.
- esafak 2y agoMy parents are way older than that and never worried about such things.
- Al-Khwarizmi 2y ago
- lardissone 2y agoI tried many organization systems, including Johnny Decimal like PARA. And none of them worked for me. As an ADHD person, I've found the best way for me is not put effort in organizing at all. For that reason I've found tools like Logseq/Tana/Reflect does a great job. I just write in the journal and tag items accordingly if required, then if I need to write some long form document, I create specific pages for it. Then search and backlinks are everything I need. My brain works better searching than browsing.
- niteshpant 2y ago> As an ADHD person, I've found the best way for me is not put effort in organizing at all Agreed - I looked at the website for a hot second, got overwhelmed and immediately closed it Consistency is key for a good organization system. Unfortunately, consistency in such manners of life isnt our forte
- doomnuts 2y agoPreach brother
- kossTKR 2y agoExactly. Intricate systems are pure noise for me, a simple MD file opened in a texteditor like Sublime is enough, or as you say just a simple taggable system or really just a bunch of files in folder - as long as you have great search you'll find stuff in no time and forget most as you should. I personnaly just have a huge file with various notes, text, todos or whatever for each year divided into days, then i can just scroll up through days, or search to find out what i did and what day - some days have nothing, some have lots. Some topics / projects get their own file.
- asystole 2y agoThis is why I love Capacities. It's object oriented with properties and tags. No folders.
- lardissone 2y agook, it's been a few days now using it, and I'm starting to love it. Specially their API access, so I can send my voice note transcriptions to my daily note. The custom object types is great, I missed that feature from Anytype in other tools. The only drawback is that they didn't implemented an import from other platforms tool. And I have all my history and notes on Logseq now.
- edding4500 2y agoSo basically a Zettelkasten?
- Tomte 2y agoNo. It has practically nothing to do with Zettelkasten. For starters, Johnny Decimal says nothing about links.
- edding4500 2y agoUh, you are right, that was a silly comment I made.
- markus_zhang 2y agoI probably need real-life shelves and boxes for organization. But I think I failed strategically because I brought too many I do not enjoy about into my life. Juggling 6 pieces of shit is not fun however good I'm doing it. I'll buy those shelves and boxes and just grit my teeth for another 15 years, and then it should be a lot better.
- bluechair 2y agoI really appreciate what Johnny Decimal is trying to solve - we're all struggling with digital organization and the appeal of a clean, simple system is undeniable. Having implemented similar approaches across several teams, I can say it works beautifully for personal projects or well-defined small team efforts. But here's the challenge: most real-world information refuses to fit into single categories. A technical spec might be simultaneously system architecture, compliance documentation, etc. While the Johnny Decimal strength is its rigid simplicity, that's also its weakness when facing actual organizational complexity. Rather than fighting these natural interconnections, I've found more success embracing them - using approaches that allow documents to exist in multiple contexts while maintaining the Johnny Decimal core goal of findability/searcability. The solution to chaos might not be enforcing a decimal hierarchy, but rather building systems that match how information actually flows in modern organizations.
- raintrees 2y agoFor me, that is the value of tags. No need to have duplicates to have items represented in multiple categories, yet each appropriate category gets a nod about the particular item.
- satiric 2y agoI tried this with my personal Google drive and am not really using the numbers. It's just a little extra work to set up. I don't see much of a benefit to it personally, but if you do then great. The important thing is to have a system you like
- SvenL 2y agoIt’s pretty amazing that there are such systems. Everytime I try something like this I fail following it just a few weeks later. I just relay on search, I have one mailbox, one download folder and that’s it. If I look for something I have just 2 searchboxes, one in finder and one in outlook.
- lokimedes 2y agoI love the ADHD meets ASD of this one! As long as it requires self-control, and long-term memory, it is DOA for me. Oh the curse of knowing what one requires, but always having it out of reach due to misfiring dopamine regulators/receptors.
- ashu1461 2y agoI think with any documentation, specially something like life tracker tracker, it is a daily effort to maintain it, clean it, figure out which sections are outdated. I make sure that with every new article which is added into my documentation, I go through some past pages and organise / clean them up. This also helps in revision of some of the past insights which were collated.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 2y agoI've been using this for the past 18 months, and it works really well. I'll write 19.01 on my calendar now instead of "review finances". I don't maintain the index on a regular basis yet, and so far I haven't needed an index. Yes, I used to think tags were so neat, but I was fooling myself.
- shoknawe 2y agoJoplin might be a good vehicle for the implementation of Johnny.Decimal.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- drcongo 2y agoPreviously: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=johnnydecimal.com https://hn.algolia.com/?q=johnnydecimal.com
- krunck 2y agoDoes it support symlinks? Because there is always stuff I want in two different places.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoJust a general observation as someone nearing 50. I'm honestly very curious to see if someone has had a different experience than me. I'm am, to put it mildly, not an "organized person". I have tried a million different systems throughout my life - GTD, Inbox Zero, spreadsheets, etc. etc. To be honest, I don't believe that any of these "organization systems" really help people that have problems being organized in the first place. I think it's just a fundamentally different way of how I'm wired. My general conclusion is that trying to "fight" my natural way of doing things is always going to be a losing battle, and that instead I just need to figure out ways to handle my general messiness and get it to work for me. I mean, I can certainly be organized for sizable stretches of time, but whenever I start getting pressed for time, or stressed, or lose my motivation for some other reason, it always reverts to the mean. I'd honestly be really interested to hear if anyone has ever changed from being a "unorganized person" to an "organized person", because it my few decades of life I've never seen it be successfully accomplished.
- farley13 2y agoYou have many great replies about specific methods - but I found the most important tip wasn't where I was looking. Tools, software, books, methods all can come later. The most important part for me was creating the time for cleanup and organization. Physically and mentally. Jumping from thing to thing without time set aside for "stop, reflect, adjust" makes it very challenging to make changes. I realized that you don't become organized if you don't spend time on it. Picking up physical messes. Thinking about what was important in your day vs what you got done. How the week went. Writing it down. I found it was only after I started consistently putting time aside to catchup, think and adjust that I started being able to consider if any particular methods would be helpful. Parts of GTD have helped me (capture first) - but the aha moment really came before that. If you want to be organized, put time into reflecting and adjusting (eg. organizing) the critical parts of your life. Once a day, every day. Maybe more than once a day. Then use one of those to reflect on the week. Not reading about it or endlessly sorting the books on your shelf, but focusing intently on stuff you'll remember 20 years from now.
- fmbb 2y agoThe problem everyone are trying to solve is ”I have too much to do”. All these solutions are band-aids akin to sticking a queue in your backend to try and cope with constant overload. The simplest way to get organized I think is to say ”no” more often, and stop caring about crap. GTD has one good idea, and that is that first step ”can you do it in under five minutes, do it now” or however it’s written. The rest is procrastination.
- react_nodejs 2y agoSo are you selling several file explorer folders for $15? ;D
- diimdeep 2y agono, he is selling lifestyle
- MetaWhirledPeas 2y agoAs a system, this makes sense and I love it. As a personal practice it's completely impractical for all but a narrow band of the population. And when those people need to collaborate with others, good luck getting everyone else to follow the system. I recommend embracing the chaos instead. Enhance the tools for finding information, and make it easy to apply metadata. At a certain point you can get no further without demanding more personal discipline, but that point is way beyond what is prescribed here.
- pavlov 2y agoA cousin of Johnny Mnemonic?
- galfarragem 2y agoMy take on "systems to organise your life". It may help somebody: https://github.com/slowernews/hamster-system https://github.com/slowernews/hamster-system
- bpev 2y agoMy filesystem organization has been based off of Johnny decimal for some years now. TBH, I don't know how much I specifically recommend it, since it did take quite a long time (years) for me to really figure out my organization and become comfortable. But now, because my system is now pretty set in my brain, the big benefit is that I can pretty much navigate to mostly any directory instantly from anywhere without too much thought, using scripts I wrote. (https://johnny.bpev.me/guide https://johnny.bpev.me/guide, which is really mainly https://github.com/bpevs/johnny_decimal/blob/main/source/shell/main.sh https://github.com/bpevs/johnny_decimal/blob/main/source/she...). But it makes my filesystem feel much flatter and simpler to me. For example... - My latest large coding project spans from `22.00` - `22.20` (clients from `.01`, server from `.11`, libs from `.21`), and I can navigate to any of those directories from anywhere in my filesystem via `jd 22.10`. Or if I forget which one, `jd ls 22`. - For things like photos and completed music production projects, I organize in more of a date system, but that entire system is housed in the jd structure, so if I want to look at some photos, I can easily open `31.02` and navigate internally to that. Oh fwiw, I only use a few broad categories: - `10-19 Notes` - `20-29 Projects` (active projects, code and music mostly) - `30-39 Archives` (closed projects)
- hbarka 2y agoIn 2025 someone discovered the ancient Dewey Decimal system.
- NetOpWibby 2y agoThis has existed before 2025
- f1shy 2y agoIt was sarcasm to make a point , in case you did not notice.
- kstrauser 2y agoMore like, someone realized a few years ago that you can make your own Dewey Decimal system and apply it to your own library.
- erganemic 2y agoOff the top of my head, all PKMs make trade-offs on discoverability, portability, maintainability, and ease of recall. Broadly, "discoverability" is how likely you are to stumble on something you'd forgotten (just recently, I found a file in my "taxes" directory listing all the documents I needed last year, which was a big help, and which I did not remember writing), "portability" is how resistant the system is to a company shutting down/project being abandoned, "maintainability" is how easy to keep your system consistent with its principles (including inserting a new note), and "ease of recall" is how easy it is to find something if you know you're looking for it. When thinking about a lifelong PKM, I feel like I value portability more than most; something highly tied to a particular company like Notion is right out for me, and I'm leery of stuff like Obsidian or even org-roam, since even if the entries in those systems are just text, I just know that someday the logic that ties them together will stop being developed/maintained and I'll have to migrate. I feel confident in directory structures and text files as long-term mediums though, and so JD is appealing to me, but its maintainability (specifically the cognitive load around inserting a new note) is such a stumbling block for actually creating content for it. Not to mention the primary thing it trades maintainability off for (ease of recall) is almost entirely solved by search functionality, leaving discoverability as the only benefit over just chucking everything in a flat "notes" directory. I do something PARA-adjacent now, and I might just commit to that, although denote is interesting as an Emacs user for a slightly more portable tagging- and search-based option.
- SebastianKra 2y ago> trade-offs on discoverability, portability, maintainability, and ease of recall Good insight. Thx. I feel fairly confident in Obsidian as a portable system, since its basic concept (markdown docs with tags and links between) can be found in many other apps [^1]. I'm currently using Bear, but I've made experiments migrating to Obsidian without issues. [^1]: Bear Notes, IA Writer, Ulysses, Craft (kinda), NotePlan, ...
- disqard 2y agoYou and I are in the same boat! I keep everything in a single folder, as plaintext Markdown files. Even if my own software breaks someday, I can always ingest these into a flavor-of-the-month indexer (though I think sqlite + fts plugin goes a long way) and carry on.
- jppope 2y agoI think this is definitely a cool system so not meaning to knock it, but I used to hyper-optimize all parts of my life and it was exhausting. So one day I just stopped. I started focusing on just being present, prioritizing, and trying to remember things that were important. I still take notes and have todo lists and stuff but they are similarly for being in the moment- just for the time right when I'm using them. I may have lost some things over the years but the removing the stress has made me better at all the things I was working on in general.
- robertritz 2y agoThis exactly. Losing a few things pales in comparison to less mental overhead in every single task I do. All I do now is keep a notebook with a rolling to do list where I make a new page every day and write what I have to do. Meeting notes also go there if they don't belong in some project files. The only thing I wish I could do is keep notes from books somehow in an easily referenceable format. Kindle sucks, Obsidian is 180 from TikTok but still brain rot.
- Beestie 2y agoIts a beautiful system but where my head explodes (and has been exploding for 4 decades) is over the following scenario. So in Johnny's system, I assign 21 to automobiles. My VW van gets 21.1, my Citron is 21.2, etc. and the insurance for each car gets a .8 so 21.1.8, 21.2.8, etc. And I assign 13 to Money. Insurance belongs under money so 13.5 is insurance and life insurance gets 13.5.1, E&O insurance gets 13.5.2, etc. I also need a top folder for Medical for doc visits, vaxes, ER visits, Surgeries, the kids' allergies and stuff. So where all this is going is two months later, where is the health insurance policy? Is it under medical or under money? Is the car insurance under Automobiles or Insurance under Money? Back to my head exploding - this is my issue - I can never remember which branch of the tree to find a specific leaf? Does my annual car tax belong with the Money or with the Auto branch? If I want to see the tax for all the cars at the same time, I put it under Money - Taxes - Auto but when I need to know the last time I paid the tax on the VW, I will assume its filed under Auto-VW-Car Tax. This is why I can never find anything. All due respect to Johnny but I'm too retarded to use it properly.
- threecheese 2y agoYou’ve hit the nail on its head here. Almost every piece of information I save has more than one type of contextual relevance, this is not handled by any hierarchical organization system no matter how clever the addressing is. At a certain scale and complexity, I simply cannot remember the magic incantation URL for whatever it is I need. Even search falls apart frequently, because I saved some reference using an abbreviation or synonym to what I think I need. It doesnt take so much “scale” if one has deficient short term memory/recall/adhd or is (as youve elegantly put it) “too retarded”. (hey - samesies) Tags/content classifiers/ontologies are I think the solution here, but require continuously grooming your data to ensure it’s classified correctly - a time investment. My opinion is that modern ML classifiers are helping,l - Ive found some help with tools that recently added auto-tagging - and I think the real magic bullet will be augmenting this capability with relevant personal/activity context. An algorithm can infer much of the contextual relevances that are missing from the current tools if it can match some incoming information to any or all of the areas/topics/projects/horizons/decimal-things that users of organizational tools have decided are important to them.
- Centigonal 2y agoI tried this for a year, but the juice wasn't worth the squeeze for me. I went back to my previous homegrown folder tree.
- ConanRus 2y agoWhat we really need is a personal AI assistant that handles labeling, tagging, and organizing documents by creating categories and connections. The fact that, in 2025, someone would propose doing all of this manually and consider it a good system is just ridiculous.
- NetOpWibby 2y agoI've been attempting to integrate this into my life for a few years now, and failing. Doing this manually is never going to work, HOWEVER, automating it will. I periodically run this script[1] to organize my Downloads folder. Pretty sure I can figure out a way to make macOS watch that folder and run the script but I want to live with this more before doing that. Note that all this does is move stuff around...you still gotta go to the destination folders and continue organizing there but at least half the work is done for you. --- [1]: https://gist.github.com/NetOpWibby/7e39068c1d0209e4412e3a05e800120c https://gist.github.com/NetOpWibby/7e39068c1d0209e4412e3a05e...
- sureIy 2y agoI realized that I'm very good at remembering time and location more than anything. If I want to look at something, I know when I did it more than what it contained. For this purpose the photos app is amazing: "April 2020 cat video" and it's exactly what I was looking for. I really wish file explorers were more consistent with their date management and didn't change "creation date" just because the file was moved or whenever the app/OS decides.
- NetOpWibby 2y agoI wish someone made an OS that just did this for me
- nicebyte 2y agoI bet 90% of the reason this is on the front page is the Berkeley mono font. the system itself sucks.
- f1shy 2y agoThe first time it was posted I said: I hate the system, but I like the presentation. The system is great if you like to remember the IPs of the sites you need instead of the urls…
- camkego 2y agoIf this is a system to organize files and folders, rather than physical real life files and folders, it should say so in the first sentence.
- tonymet 2y agothe concept is very good, and i like the approach to distinguish personal , business etc. It's not the system that matters, but the continued practice of inventorying and assessing your library. One approach is to imagine your archives as a physical library and what regular maintenance you would need to keep the library in order for others to enjoy it. These include indexing like the author talked about. but also curating & summarization ( meta-summaries of the catalog). Also disaster preparation (backup) , replication (e.g. keeping repositories in sync between the archive and active work). Every well built engineering system started as a neglected concept that got elevated into a formal area worthy of attention
- dubeye 2y agoI set this up a few weeks ago and it's working great so far. You start to develop muscle memory and now i organise everything to the same order, eg bookmarks i think it's partly that i remember location phsyically. i can remember bookmarks in real books, my remembering where certain words are on a page and flicking through until i find them. i wouldn't stand a chanec ofremembering page number. somehow the JD system recreates thsi for me
- g8oz 2y agoIt doesn't have to be all or nothing for the Johnny decimal system. Start with a life area like home ownership. Ask AI to generate a Johnny decimal system on this topic. I was impressed with the comprehensive structure I got.
- subpixel 2y agoHoly smokes this does not resonate with me. Not the need for organization, but the implementation of some watered down Dewey decimal system.
- f1shy 2y agoSeems to be good for people who prefer to remember the IPs instead of domain names…
- MailleQuiMaille 2y agoI think the key for me, a lifelong messy person, was to find out what I like or don't. Like : -Taking notes on the fly for capturing fleeting ideas. -When working on a project, embracing the mess by having as many documents/spreadsheets as possible. -When a project is over, putting everything in a folder and letting it there. Don't like : -Using fancy tools like Notion, Obsidian and the likes. -Getting stuck on rigid systems, and even worse : tied to a subscription. -Being forced to use a specific device. My solution ? Upnote. Proton Drive. A messy desktop. Am I the most "optimized" I could be ? No. But I can quickly find out everything I need fast, and when I'm working on a project, I know what to do. More than that seems overkill, for me at least.
- mattlondon 2y agoThis seems overly complex? 15.2.234 for example is not remotely memorable or intuitive - no one knows what that is. Why limit yourself to this low-signal approach? It seems deliberately obtuse for no obvious benefits? What has worked for me is a folder per financial year, then just rough semantic groupings in each year folder called e.g. "cars" "health" "house" "tax" etc and just chuck files into those as needed. I usually change the filename to be something descriptive and information dense too like e.g. "<house number + street> Home Insurance Aug 2024-2025.pdf" etc. Store it all on some cloud service (OneDrive or Google Docs or whatever - local backup of your choice) and then you can just drill-down or even better just search. Simples. So e.g. 2024-2025/ --house/ ----123 ABC Street Home Insurance April 2024-2025.pdf ----123 ABC Street Mortgage statement Jan 2024.pdf --cars/ ----Honda repair invoice June 2024.pdf ----Honda insurance Feb 2024-2025.pdf ----BMW insurance Mar 2024-2025 Not rocket science. Anyone reading this understands this "system", and it is trivial to search. No rote memorisation of random numbers needed!
- reedlaw 2y agoI used something similar based on https://karl-voit.at/folder-hierarchy/ https://karl-voit.at/folder-hierarchy/ which I found helpful.
- 0x457 2y agoWell, you only need to remember "00.00 Index" which is where description of all categories is. Your version IMO is awful. Year on root level means you have to remember year that document was created. Unless you constantly need to lookup insurance documents (only thing besides taxes I can remember which year I'm looking for) that's not going to work IMO. Since we threw away core organization principle of this system (limit your choices), why not all documents realted to house1/car1/car2 into corresponding folders? Also, you used 2 different ways to write a month and date. Now I have to remeber is this document on Jan or January, don't want to confuse with documents about my friend Jan and Jane either.
- mattlondon 2y agoWell time is the only constant in life, so it makes sense to me to store by time since that is always moving forwards and things happen at a point in time. But it is a valid that you have to remember the year, but this is why if you store on a cloud service, they all come with excellent search facilities that I expect will continue to improve with AI. So you don't need to remember, you just search for e.g. "insurance" and then you pick the doc with the date in it's filename etc. Sure you could group by theme at the top level too, but again time is a constant - you always have 2024, 2025, 2026 etc, but you don't always have a need to store things about e.g. "car2" in every year etc. so it makes sense to me that if car2 comes into your life in say 2025 and leaves you in 2028 or whatever, that you have car2 folders in those specific years only and not permanently polluting the top-level folders because after car2 leaves you, you don't want it hanging around ~forever at the top level. You're just building up "organisation-debt" for something you'll need to "archive" in the future. I think perhaps we're thinking about different things though. I store documents about day to day life - statements, invoices, insurance certificates, etc etc. These all tend to be dated and repeat monthly/quarterly/annually or thereabouts, and for me the most frequent retrieval need is for the current financial year. I don't store my friend Jane's or Jan's documents, not do I have documents about them either. I don't just have random notes documents about random things. At work where I have non-time-based documents (including random notes documents!) coming out of my ears - both written by me, reviewed by me, read by me, CC'd but I read etc - thousands and thousands etc - I just rely entirely on search and it's never been a problem. No filing system at all - just search. It's fine. Cloud-based storage and search really is key here I think. I can be on calls to utility companies etc and I can search and have my most recent statement up on my screen quicker than the people in the call center folks most of the time.
- marcusestes 2y ago[IQ distribution chart meme] * Just use Apple Notes * No! You can't just use Apple Notes. You need a full ontological graph structure based on an open standard! * Just use Apple Notes
- nilslindemann 2y agoLooks like a task oriented sorting - "for what do I need this?" - and the numbers are a workaround for a shortcoming in file managers, which does not allow giving a user defined sorting to a list of files/folders.
- raajg 2y agoI think that local search, retrieval, and filing will become much easier with LLMs. There are already tools and products in the market that allow you to rename and organize files. I believe this is the future. We have developed various systems over decades, but I anticipate with LLMs it'll be so easy to file and retrieve things that we won't even have to think about it.
- ediwdlrow 2y ago"If you put those boxes in boxes, in boxes, you'd never know which box to open to find the next box. It would be chaos." Not really... If my outermost box says "Tools", a box in that box says "Automotive", and the box in that box says "Trim Removal". There's no chaos, I drill down from the generic to the specific and find what I need. Using Tags (keywords, etc) you can cross reference things too -- for example Tools that may have uses in both the Automotive, Household, Computer realms get those as keywords, and ideally the tool will have a primary role so it can exist in that box, or otherwise if it truly doesn't belong in any one box then it can just be in the Tools box along w/ the boxes that contain all the task-specific stuff...
- groby_b 2y agoFor anybody going to implement it: Good luck, enjoy the journey and learning from it. At the end of the road, there will be a sign. It will say "hierarchical taxonomies never work". You will likely ignore it. (We all do). Ab initio.
- urda 2y agoI'm still working a lot of my internal tribal knowledge out around this, but as I work that blog post out my general flow of organizing information in my life has been as follows: - Starts with a physical Moleskine notebook and fountain pen. This is the most free flowing and easiest way to get information saved. It is literally pen to paper, it does not crash, it does not fail. - From there ideas and notes are migrated, shaped, and restructured in digital ink and text on a Freeform board on my iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision. - Finally, as those ideas become more real and solid, they are formed into well understood wiki pages and saved there. From that point all new and changing information is committed to the wiki. Not all my information needs to flow into the wiki, but it is nice to have a knowledge "funnel" when keeping notes. When I think about information and notes, I always think about my favorite quote: > “For this you keep a lab notebook. Everything gets written down, formally, so that you know at all times where you are, where you’ve been, where you’re going and where you want to get. In scientific work and electronics technology this is necessary because otherwise the problems get so complex you get lost in them and confused and forget what you know and what you don’t know and have to give up.” > Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- whalesalad 2y agoThe aesthetic of this website immediately tells me that this person has no qualifications to tell me how to organize my life.
- hnclimategroup 2y ago[flagged]
- mattfrommars 2y agoAnother system to organize my life? I JUST got started with BulletJournal :) Tbh, a person with ADHD and in my mid 30s, the biggest problem I have faced and none of these system [haven't tried Johnny.Decimal] yet is 'given my current situation, be it career and life, what should I prioritize' and the second hard part if keep track/progress. I do miss school/university days where we had a curriculum to follow with deadline and all. That brought structure and with fixed milestone. But in personal life, with unknowns everywhere, it is challenging. I have tried multiple strategies but they don't seem to work or eventually are forgotten. From two minute rule to this, I can't remember the exact details but something like invest x hours and if it doesn't work out, move on.
- dmje 2y agoBeen using JD for ~5 years or so. It’s great. Sufficient structure to make sense of chaos, not too much to create more
- davikr 2y agoThis is so obtuse - why does "15.22 Checklists" start at ID 22 instead of 11?
- projektfu 2y agoIt took me about 2 hours to organize a disorganized syncthing folder for my business into this system as I understood it. Now to see if it helps. I am diagnosed with ADHD. For what it is worth, some tools actively work against the use of folders on Windows now, including Office. Acrobat is another offender. (Not using Windows is not currently possible, too many assume Windows use in my industry). Even Google Drive hides the folders and makes you go through hoops to get to them each time. Reading the comments here, putting everything in one directory and relying on search seems to be the most popular filing system. In my space, I feel like everything gets lost as a result of that "system", and work is constantly duplicated because people don't know where to look. This system, at least, doesn't require much to keep organized. The ontology is shallow and it doesn't require me to constantly worry about where something should go best.
- fonema 2y agoOn Windows for many years now I've been putting things anywhere and then relying on a program called "Everything" to find stuff. I'm very happy with this set up. It allows extremely quick file system searches. I've tried to work with neatly organized folders at times but I would always get lost in them and things end up in the wrong place anyway.
- Terretta 2y agoHey, anyone who can't/won't/doesn't stick with a system... THIS IS FOR YOU. Most organization methods predate search. PARA, for example, can be a decent first cut (active Projects, Areas of responsibility, Reference(research/reading/recreation/really anything), Archive, and you could use that with the below, but don't need to thanks to search.* The real reason we're still trying systems instead of search is we don't remember what to look for, and hope we'll find it where we should have filed it. Turns out we don't always file it there... Usually we don't file it at all. So: whether you use PARA at the top or not, within that... DON'T ORGANIZE! Don't even try. Instead, "journal" or "log" by simply saving all files to your desktop, then using a tool such as Hazel for Mac (or a python script, or whatever) "log sort" by renaming files once you haven't modified them for a while (I like once untouched for 7 days) into folders and filename like "./YYYY/WW/YYYY-MM-DD - Original Title.ext". Pay attention to WW, that means Week Number. Month folders get too many files in them, day folders are too sparse. Life and ideas tend to cluster by the week, so week folders are a natural fit, with only 50 of them in a year, so you can see them all in one window. Why this works is you can find anything that goes with anything you worked on at the time by searching for anything you can remember from the time. Heck, you don't even have to remember anything, just, roughly when. The things from then will be adjacent. When you find anything at all from then, what you want will be in that week's folder, or at most go back a couple weeks before or after, and you see what you created or modified around then. Boost your odds by stuffing some other keywords into (parens) in the end of the filename when you first save it, there's no downside. If you can't even find by week, use YYYY-MM* and file type to see everything for a given month... Auto log sort is low (zero) effort day over day, week over week, but when you start being able to resurface anything you want, even if you can't remember it only things around the same time as it, you may be amazed you ever bothered any other way. --- * Note: If you collab with others, try to organize everyone by responsibilty areas managed by known owners of those responsibilities, then let them organize in their area, and just deal with figuring out whose thing this is and let them file it if it's not evident where it should go in their scheme. But still rename files by date last changed, since most file systems don't keep dates intact when, say, emailing files, etc., and it's still helpful to see what was being modified along with what. Because of the temporal order, the "sorts" tend to cluster things better than alphabetic sort.
- 2y ago
- thallukrish 2y agoThe problem with organizing is not the lack of tools or techniques. It is simply not possible to devise a system which works automatically with little effort. Everything requires varying levels of discipline which is hard to keep up with time and a different situation.
- Terretta 2y ago> It is simply not possible to devise a system which works automatically with little effort. I use one. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43135927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43135927 in this thread. Truly ZERO effort, yet a backup way to find things without search.
- Appsmith 2y agoI kind of agree with you! But still wanted to take a shot at it: https://thoughtscape.app/ https://thoughtscape.app/
- noisy_boy 2y ago> an area is a shelf, a category is a box, and an ID is a manila folder. I mean isn't that almost the 101 of organization? I have N big clear plastic bags for each member of my family - each has smaller bags for educational certificates, birth certificates and other legal documents. All of these are in a shelf together. I can immediately produce any of those. I have been thinking of another low-effort system for other lesser important documents that can be annoying to find. Put a box in each room and dump any lesser important papers in it, just dump it - whoever stays in that room dumps their such papers in it. Periodically clean as needed. Main rule is to not dump such papers _anywhere_ else.
- linhns 2y agoI tried this. Simply does not work for me. In the end more time will be spent looking for the box
- asasidh 2y agosearch, don't sort
- kovek 2y agoI like to have a category (folder, list, document, etc.) per entity that I am interacting with. That entity can be a government, a company, a person, an object, or other. What do you think?
- kras143 2y agoThe more I tried to control and organize my life, the more stressed I became. Digitizing and organizing my knowledge base, in particular, wasted countless precious hours. Recently, I decided to let go of that rigid structure and instead focus on naturally prioritizing the most important tasks for the day, week, and month. So far, this approach has been working well, or at least it feels like it is.
- kkoncevicius 2y agoI had the same experience with using a paper notebook. There are various systems and tips about how and what to write in a notebook to become more productive. But the best way for me was just to use it as a sheet of paper and write about what feels necessary at the moment with no structure whatever.
- stevage 2y agoThis seems to solve a problem I don't have, in a way that seems particularly irritating. In their example of travel as a category, I just have a folder called adventures, and underneath it, one folder per year. Is anyone really storing that many folders these days?
- krykp 2y agoI think this gets the 'imposed limits' part right. What I've found is that I am unable to be organized or keep things organized if I have too much stuff. It doesn't matter if I organize by 'category' then 'thing' or 'thing' then 'category' or if I keep myself to 2 levels of nesting or 3. I have been decluttering every now and then, say, I will dedicate a weekend once every 6 months. I have started by getting rid of what is _obviously_ not necessary. By necessity I'm not talking in a materialistic sense, I find joy in the tiny statues I own and a physical photo album, even if they are not _vital_ for my life. I started by getting rid of things that are useful but just wasn't up to par anymore. Like old clothes. I would wear old clothes inside the home and justify their existence, but I have come to value myself enough to wear my nicer clothes, which are honestly still just relatively cheap shirts, inside the home too. After that, it was getting rid of things that are working, in good condition, but I had no use for anymore. For example I had built a computer, this meant ending up with a stock cooler, stock fans, stock thermal paste, my old PSU that was still very much working, all that. I wouldn't throw these away as they had no issues, but wasn't of use to me anymore. For these donating was easiest for me, as I would feel bad about getting rid of tons of in-working-situation hardware. I must note, all this requires certain privileges in life. Just getting rid of things you don't use but might, by some low chance, need, requires you to be wealthy enough to replace that without worrying about the price tag. I have also come to find out gender also matters. My clothes fit in a single-side wardrobe, and no one pays enough attention to my clothes to realize I'm cycling through 10 t-shirts and 5 shirts. Or if they did, that's plenty anyway. For women there's a certain social expectation and imposed necessity and a deeper sense of fashion. For a man a dress-shirt functions well in the workplace just as it functions in a job interview and it functions just as well in a wedding. For a women what they can wear to a wedding and what they can wear to work are very different, so there is a natural difference of expectation and necessity. But I digress.
- SoftTalker 2y agoI feel like if you are disciplined and organized enough to use a system like this, you probably don't need it.
- PeterStuer 2y agoAfter having tried to be organised for decades, I gave in to my inner holistic self and gave up on (most) explicit organization and just became very good at searching/finding things. I could theorize about how no taxonomy deals with multiple contexts or remains valid over time, how filing errors will always happen so you will need search anyway, how unstructured scales to seamless incorporate outside sources etc., but thruth be told big piles of unorganised stuff with keen finding skills more naturally allign with my nature. Ymmv, and that's just fine.
- meander_water 2y agoThis is a neat system, but like many others here I doubt I could be disciplined enough to maintain it. Organising a second brain appears to be something that people have been grappling with for ages. For e.g. here's John Locke's system for organising his commonplace book - https://fs.blog/john-locke-common-place-book/ https://fs.blog/john-locke-common-place-book/
- ySteeK 2y agoI was on a search for the 'perfect' system all my life. And I found it after 40 years : The No-System System... and it's the exactly opposite of op's suggestion :-) All together in somewhat chaotic folders and subfolders... the clou is that I use "recoll" everytime i search something. It's an Index based search engine. Take a look... I never missed something since I use just recoll and throw things just anywhere in the huge black box. The main pro: it costs me no time to "sort" things into things.
- mock-possum 2y ago> You assign a unique ID to everything in your life. Ah - that’s fun, but no. Using codes to organize stuff like that is unnecessary complication. Just label them robustly, and search for what you want, when you want it. > In real life, if you stored your stuff in piles of badly-labelled boxes you'd never find anything again. Okay but this isn’t real life, this is a computer. The robot’s entire job is to process data automatically in a way that would be tedious for you to accomplish manually. Forcing a user to remember an indexing system that matches concepts describable in plain English to esoteric numeral codes is just - why, why are you doing this to yourself. It’s not better.
- ss64 2y agoUsing numerical prefixes like the 'Johnny Decimal' system for folder organization is fine for personal files, if that floats your boat, but trying to implement it in a shared team area can be a recipe for strife. At best people will think you are slightly mad expecting them to memorise lists of numbers just to file things.
- binbag 2y agoI must be missing something. This is recommending folders are numbered. Is that it? Is this a "system" now? I think that may have been used previously - for example by humanity for the last 5,000 years or so.
- casey2 2y agoSomething I've always disliked about "Dewey" and now "Johnny" decimal is that they intentionally put a human name on the system. I'm not sure who it helps, confusing a system for a human, but it certainly isn't the user. Also this doesn't work faster than search, I would be open to evidence to the contrary, but obviously none will be provided cause it's simply false. By the time search becomes slow no single human will need to access or read all those files anyways. The only exception to this is when a few categories have many files, in which case you can just make directories for them.
- dack 2y agoMan, I completely recoiled when reading this. I spent a bunch of time in my 20s and early 30s trying out different organizational systems but I realized I just don't care. I care about doing interesting things, not organizing them. Also computers are pretty good at full-text searching for things, or tagging so you don't have to come up with a perfect hierarchy. And I think LLMs will make it even easier to find stuff using fuzzy language. Life's too short to spend it organizing.
- keepamovin 2y agoI love the website design: the IBM code page 437 block characters and text styles are fantastic.
- 41d 2y agoI think it's an interesting observation, and I understand that there are pros and cons to this. I like organized designs, grid styles, neatly arranged bookshelves, things that fit together perfectly, and clean environments, and I was always thinking about how to keep folders neat and avoid a state where I get tired of looking at them every time. And it's true that there are many people who don't particularly mind that. Is it similar to the location of a remote control, which looks messy but is perfectly placed for that person? Anyway, I really like it, and the introduction is very easy to understand. I also like the design of the WEB site. And your WEB tool is very useful for making the hierarchy easy to see at a glance (because it's very difficult to build it suddenly and edit it later).