A system to organise your life • Johnny.Decimal (johnnydecimal.com)
from tinosaurier@feddit.org to technology@lemmy.world on 21 Feb 17:53
https://feddit.org/post/8277849

#technology

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lupusblackfur@lemmy.world on 21 Feb 17:59 next collapse

🤔

Dewey Decimal applied life-wide…

Could be useful… Could be over-complicating…

🤔

Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works on 21 Feb 23:21 collapse

78.47 things I tried to make myself more organised that failed because I’m inherently disorganized and have the memory of a goldfish.

97.34 things I tried to make myself more organized that failed because I’m not great at organizing and Im pretty sure I already made a folder like this somewhere but I probably spelled something wrong and I can’t find the damn thing.

eager_eagle@lemmy.world on 21 Feb 18:13 next collapse

idk, it seems I’ll have a similar set of problems I already have with organizing files. If I have health expense documents, is that “health”, “me”, or “money”? What about travel expense receipts? Or [pick any two categories that may overlap]?

That’s why I prefer using tags or labels: they don’t force you to make a mutually exclusive choice.

I like the “no more than ten” principle though; when organizing a file tree I try to aim for up to 5 or 6 items in a given directory, as I tend to notice the friction when choosing among more than a handful.

QuarterSwede@lemmy.world on 21 Feb 19:34 next collapse

Bingo. I really wish Explorer, OneDrive, and Microsoft’s office stuff would support tags. It would actually help me in the workplace unlike the CoPilot initiative.

Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works on 21 Feb 23:16 collapse

Don’t have an agenda and already mentioned it here but consider looking at “Tagspaces” newer versions got a little enshittified, I forget right now what version I parked at, but I think you can still find older builds that have almost all the best features for free. Your files / tagging infrastructure will not fall apart if you switch OS or ditch the app which I think is really important for longevity. It would be really easy to code something new that’s compatible with the tagging structure if you ever wanted too.

heavydust@sh.itjust.works on 21 Feb 19:38 collapse

It’s obviously not for every body but I hate tags because they are so random and I would forget what I used. I’ve been successfully using the Johnny decimal guide for a few years because it’s intuitive for me. Your examples are obvious for me: health expense goes into “Receipts > Health” and travel expense goes into “Receipts > Travel.” If I had to use tags I would think of “health, personal, money, receipts, bank, medication, etc.” and it would be a real mental struggle to categorize everything and remember all the tags I have ever used. Also I use Joplin and Obsidian which make this kind of organization easier.

The “no more than ten” principles forces me to put everything in the most generic category I can think of. And if I need more than 10, it’s a new project or a new something. But I agree it’s not for everyone, it just happens to be suited with how I’m organized and how I think.

HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com on 21 Feb 19:58 next collapse

I get what you mean because I was the same way. I prefered a folder structure but I recently came around. Thing is that you don't need to remember all tags. It will just help it narrow the field in a search but everything tagged health will be in the health bucket (folder) and everything in bank is in bank. if you filter for everything in bank and health you will get a smaller return to find what you want so basically remember more tags will help you find the item but just remembering a few will be good enough.

Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works on 21 Feb 23:11 collapse

This is why you need a tagging system that limits your choices and can easily sort across folders by tags. I prefer Tagspaces because it just adds the tags directly to the end of filenames so I never lose the tags and if I am on a system where it’s not installed I do always have the option of just manually adding a tag. I keep things in folders too and 8/10 times the folder structure does the trick, but boy it’s nice to have those tags when I’m either looking for something or need to see a lot of similar things all at once. Never more applicable than tax time. Can pull up receipts w2s, loan stuff, medical stuff all by just pulling the (tax) tag.

blarth@thelemmy.club on 21 Feb 19:57 next collapse

Today: reorganize all your files according to this ✨ new✨ system

Tomorrow: forget everything you did yesterday. Your spouse can’t find shit.

50 years later: your kids and grandkids can’t find a fucking thing, wonder what the hell you were thinking

MNByChoice@midwest.social on 21 Feb 21:42 collapse

Every month I throw out the old system and start over.

Should be a word for that.

gaael@lemm.ee on 21 Feb 22:56 collapse

Adhd?

MNByChoice@midwest.social on 22 Feb 02:59 collapse

No. That is something else.

_cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 22 Feb 03:15 collapse

ADHD?

clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works on 21 Feb 20:46 next collapse

This makes sense for some kind of files. I just don’t keep a lot of receipts and forms, I guess. The decimal as shorthand makes sense if you’re in those folders often.

LodeMike@lemmy.today on 21 Feb 21:51 next collapse

This is literally just adding opaque numbers to file/folder names to make [computer algorithm] searching faster, instead of good file organization.

pyre@lemmy.world on 22 Feb 03:44 next collapse

The category part makes sense, but I don’t understand why the second number is better than alphabetical order. It mentions a muscle memory but you can already sort things by date. Use that, and have alphabetical sort as an option when needed. All this does is force date order for both sorts.

Arkhive@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 22 Feb 04:03 collapse

Been using this for years, it’s good, but probably not for everyone. I like being able to manually sort the order of my folders, and it forces a maximum folder depth of like 3 or 4 depending on how you interpret one part. This makes it very quick to navigate, particularly from the command line. Add something like Zoxide on top and I can fly through all my notes and projects.