A system to organise your life • Johnny.Decimal

Comments

• blarth@thelemmy.club ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  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

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  • MNByChoice@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

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

    Should be a word for that.

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    • gaael@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Adhd?

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• eager_eagle@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  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 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.

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  • QuarterSwede@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

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

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    • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

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

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  • heavydust@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    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.

    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.

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    • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      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.

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• LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

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

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• lupusblackfur@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  🤔

  Dewey Decimal applied life-wide…

  Could be useful… Could be over-complicating…

  🤔

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  • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

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

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

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• xia@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Call me a skeptic, but I think offering “hyper-organization” as a solution to those too lazy to organize is probably a non-starter.

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• UNY0N@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  I tried to usw this for my home folder in my daily driver, but it just did not work for me.

  I’m now trying out the PARA system, and Iike it better.

  I should also add I use obsidian.md for basically everything having to do with files/folders/organization, so I do have all sorts of tags, auto-updated tables, etc. So a simpler file structure suits me better.

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• clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

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

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• pyre@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

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

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• AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  I love the argument that it’s easy to communicate. Then people can ask you what the fuck you’re talking about.

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• Arkhive@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

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

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