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.
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.
I'm starting (in my "ample free time") to document them and in a series blog posts help people find systems that will work for them. My experience is that the best systems are the ones that have five characteristics:
1. They're simple
No complex patterns, no "we'll solve everything"
2. They require little or no task switching in the middle
This breaks my ADHD concentration.
3. They're forgiving if you fall off the wagon
You will always have bad days and need to restart. The system must make it easy.
4. The system must be very general, maybe even "too simple" but easy to customize.
There is a natural desire, especially in ADHD people, to over complicate, so the system must allow you to be as simple as possible, but then let you customize later.
5. They don't require any specialized tool (especially not an online tool). No system should be invariably tied to a specific piece of software or hardware. These may be excellent augmentations, but they should never be requirements.
Am I an "organized" person? No, but I'm far better organized than I was. Tasks rarely get missed now. I'm far more productive than I was (and I have stats to back up my assertion). I can almost always retrieve documents I need relatively quickly.
These systems won't change who you are, but they will assist you in being better at being who you are.
Maybe interesting is the evolution of my system:
• 2015 and prior: Sticky notes, calendars, notebooks, sheets of paper, chaos
• 2016-2019: I found the bullet journal method and implemented the most basic form found here: https://bulletjournal.com/blogs/faq (collections, future log, monthly log, daily log) and never really evolved from that utilitarian mode.
• 2019-2025: I signed up for Notion and ported my bullet journal system there. I miss the physical version, but prefer the easy access and easy editing in the online version. In addition to Notion, I heavily use Google Calendar, and also Google Keep as a quicker-access and catch-all of smaller notes. I use Notion for life admin and Obsidian for work notes and files.
OP's Johnny.Decimal system caught my attention since I've been interested in a consistent and proven way to organize the files on my laptop, SSDs, Drive, as well as all my physical docs. I could also see it being a nice way to organize my Notion and Obsidian, but I also tend to rely on search and backlinking as others have commented about for their own systems.
PARA also (and for me primarily) helps with things like documents I get from other places which I then scan in.
Yes, I could probably use a specialized program for this, but this way it's all just files.
What you are building is essentially what Tiago Forte calls a "Second Brain". He has an entire book around Second Brain, as well as the one on PARA.
Ironically, I've found myself using Second Brain less since using PARA because PARA ends up solving my needs without it.
As an example, this week I received a letter from the tax authority where I live. I took the letter, scanned it, and placed it in my PARA/2 Areas/TAXES/2023 folder (since it was in relation to my 2023 taxes). I used a descriptive filename that included what the letter was about and the date.
I didn't need second brain to process the tax letter- what was important is that it was stored quickly and easily, and that I can retrieve it later if need be. I also don't need any complex tagging or keyword systems- the folder and filename help me find the relevant documents, and it takes no more time than adding lots of keywords. I know because I've tried more complex systems, and they ended up being more trouble than they were worth.
But more importantly, I'm not tied to any specific service or software. I'd never use a program that requires me to upload my most sensitive data to a third party service. It would put my data at risk and it would also mean that if the company were to change its business model (like Notion did) or had a breakin, or went out of business, my data would be at risk.
That's why I don't advocate for Second Brain services that do this, even ones with lots of cool features.
I would love automated integrated voice notes (vs what I do now which requires a bit of cut and paste) but the benefits don't outweigh the extremely high cost to me.
Sorry!
I'm eager to learn more about your systems. Where's your blog?
The problem I have is that writing the why is harder than the what.
For example, I use a modified Cycle System, but some of my modifications are around how many tasks I do a day, and how I categorize which tasks I do.
As an example, understanding task limits and why you should use them is important. As I write out my thoughts about them, it feels boring.
Then I put the blog down and don't pick it up again. Maybe I should do it anyway.
I'll forget about it (because ADHD?) and when I open up drive, there it is! :). And I'll use it.
It's a small investment upfront.
Some (not all) of my personal systems are unforgiving in this regard.
Thank you for pointing out this "Best Practice" explicitly!
I know the organization people are probably horrified by all this, but I know myself well enough by now to know that I just won't stick to any system more complicated than this. The most important thing is that all that stuff is there, somewhere, if I really need it. I am essentially saving the effort up-front that I will 100% have to do in exchange for a little more effort later down the line which I probably won't have to do because I usually never need any of that stuff anyway.
I too tried many forms of organization and always ended up abandoning them. What has worked with me was being very focused on the main project and using all kinds of gross little ad hoc ways to keep it going.
There is a second version of me for day each day’s tasks and requirements. That person was revolutionized by phones that understand voice input. I use the one from Apple but I think it’s utterly horrible. However, it is still good enough for me to use about 15 alarms per day that say things like “set an alarm to Get the boys’ laundry at 4 PM“. I have daily alarms to remind me to do things like feed the chickens, and monthly alarms to do things like pay bills or change batteries. I have an annual calendar entry with a master list of things I need to do every month or year.
So the long-term project me is pretty good at planning things in my head and a couple of lists in the source code or source code repos. The short term is completely interrupt-driven.
I am not recommending this system for everyone, or anyone at all. All I can say is that it works well for me, even though it is aesthetically brutal.
Every so often I'll decide to track/log my time and activities every 15 minutes over a few days, just to keep tabs on where my time and energy are really going. This app fits the bill: it's silent and unobtrusive to others and it's never failed to perform properly for me. I just wish it had an option to display a countdown timer for the upcoming tap.
[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tap-me-every-x-minutes/id15116...
To take a trivial example, say your problem is that you leave clothes all over your bedroom floor, so you decide to set up a system to solve that.
The naive approach is to design a system like "If it's too dirty to wear again, put it in the laundry basket, coded by light or dark. If it's clean, decide if it should go on a hanger or in a drawer. If it needs a hanger, hang it up, being careful to select the right kind of hanger for the right kind of clothing. If it needs to go in a drawer..."
That's the system I want to design because that's how I want my life to be.
It would feel very unnatural to design a system like "pile all clothes on the chair in the corner and worry about them later", because I don't want my life to be like that, and I don't want to believe that that's the only kind of system I might have a chance of sticking to.
But that is the only kind of system I'll stick to. And ultimately, it's much better to have all your clothes piled on the chair in the corner rather than strewn all over the bedroom floor.
i just tend to order most things on hangers with the most newly washed things to the right, then every time i wear something and put it back it goes a bit closer to the left. then when im putting on a wash i know that its all the things on the very left that need to be washed.
another useful way to keep track of things is to hang up anything thats newly washed with the hook of the hanger facing towards you, then hang it up the normal way once you worn it. and i still order the newly washed things from right to left as well since theres the odd thing i dont wear that often which can go musty if its just sitting there for months, so when im putting on a wash sometimes i check the very left side of the newly washed things as well
Yup. But when it’s t-shirt and shorts, or t-shirt and jeans, I don’t care. I don’t really have any other clothes. I have a jumper somewhere and a cycling top.
Throw it into the dryer while you take a shower. Problem solved!
I understood that my chaotic nature isn’t due to a lack of organization—it’s because I thrive in chaos. I can function well without strict structure because I don’t need it to stay effective.
My manager, on the other hand, is the complete opposite. She needs everything documented and noted, not because she’s inherently more organized, but because the absence of structure creates anxiety and discomfort for her.
She actually complimented me on my ability to navigate uncertainty, to adapt without needing full control, and still feel capable and at ease.
It felt like an epiphany, shifting the way I perceive this entire topic.
At the same time, a disorganized person is still more effective in an organized environment, but probably he hasn't realized this by himself because he doesn't have the internal drive to be organized in the first place.
You could say being organized is Nature's way of setting us up for success in complex and very demanding situations.
I haven't been super organized or consistent in how I use org-mode—org-mode is great at letting me discover my own workflow and adapt the tool to what I need rather than adapting myself to the tool—and I've gone through periods where I lost the habit, but, overall, it's been a concrete improvement to my life. I've found that seeing it as a tool rather than a "system" made a big difference for me. I've never liked productivity systems (especially at work), but having a tool I can use in whatever ways helps me is a qualitatively different—and better!—thing.
(for making it more usable, see: https://babbagefiles.xyz/termux-extra-keys-emacs-org-roam-no... )
In software terms the closest is that I switched to kiss launcher on my phone. It just shows you the apps in the order you used them, plus one horizontal line of faves and one vertical line of widgets. It can also learn what you do but I prefer the basic ordering. I use zoxide in the terminal for navigation and on the desktop I just press Super and search for everything.
I haven't tried a bunch of different systems, but I admit to liking the principles behind this Johnny.Decimal system and might give it a whirl.
I used to get frustrated that all of the information I'd carted along over the years wasn't "organized". I realized a couple things:
- I really didn't need most of the stuff I thought I did. So I cull/delete and generally try to minimize what is kept from the start.
- For the stuff I do want forever, I use "Archive" for mail and a similar concept for files. One folder per year and the entirety of that year's activities dumped there. I'll use search over this when needed.
- Each year I start somewhat fresh, carrying over current areas still active from the previous year while archiving the rest. I then re-evaluate and try to simplify the current "working index" for the current year and its generally easy to find thing within that narrowed context.
Getting Things Done is good for project management but falls down for organizing.
Marie Kondo is good at organizing and deciding if something is worth keeping or not, but has issues with scale.
Covey/Daytimer was good for time management but didn't do project management all that well.
Jamie Hynaman has a massive wall of transparent boxes for organizing materials for his shop but all the hammers are in one box and you have to go to that box to get the hammer whenever you need one.
Adam Savage's system puts his most needed tools right around each workstation but it's expensive as he had multiple copies of many tools.
Kitchens use mise en place to prep and organize the ingredients for cooking so they can 100-200 plates out to table a day.
There's PARA, and Zettlekasten for organizing information.
There are, all told, tens of thousands of rules for writers.
In the end I see them all as tools for solving problems and not all of them work for all problems and that's okay, if I can find a tool to make solving a problem I am currently working on easier, that's wonderful or I make something myself.
It's a tradeoff. For travel, I obviously don't have multiple passports or high-value items. But it's absolutely worth having some extra cords and toiletries so I have dedicated travel kits for those sorts of items. Not perfect or absolute but being able to more or less grab a couple kits and throw them in my luggage works for a lot of purposes.
For organizing reference material, I have a drawer with files for physical things and cloud storage and notes for digital things. I label it by topic as it seems appropriate/obvious. I review my reference material annually, deleting or destroying anything that’s not still needed.
In practice, I don’t actually engage with my system much. I review it weekly to clear out any next actions I did. It’s there as a backstop (i.e., I use deadlines as appropriate in OmniFocus) and to help keep me aware of my hard and soft landscapes.
(I lost my weekly review habit for a while, and that was bad for me and my system. I’m glad I’ve reestablished it.)
If (for example) I decide to hack on nixpkgs stuff tonight, I don’t need a task for that. I may capture one to resume later, but what’s important is that I know what I’m not doing, and I’m fine with that. If it turns out I’m not, then that’s a sign I need to renegotiate or delegate some of those things.
The biggest win I ever made was getting a small filing cabinet (a banker box works, too) and putting it, a stack of manilla folders, and a marker next to my desk. Then, when I get a piece of mail or have a piece of paper, I file it in the appropriate folder, making a new one if need be. If you have a huge, chaotic pile of papers somewhere, try this. Take that pile and throw it in a box somewhere. Don't try to organize it. You now have a Pile-Of-Papers-In-a-Box. From now on, instead of putting new items on the POPIB, file them in your new proper file system. And if you need to dig something out of the POPIB, when you're done with it, file it away instead of returning it to the POPIB. Soon, the POPIB will shrink to a pile of mostly trash that you can store in a shoebox in the back of a closet.
My biggest loss was trying to digitize my home office with a fancy Fujitsu scanner, Google Drive, and Airtable. It turned out to be a bigger project than I anticipated, and I prematurely abandoned my trusty analog system. Soon, AI will make this trivial, but for the time being, I'm sticking to paper. I also prefer the user experience of physical paper, at least until I can hand over all the paper shuffling to an AI.
Other small gains I've made are using Obsidian on my phone for notes and using Google Calendar religiously for all appointments and scheduled activities.
Filing cabinets, digital calendars, note taking apps--these are all simple, obvious things, but I think being organized is all about acquiring a handful of these small habits and sticking to them. If your system is simple enough to become reflexive, you'll be more likely to stick to it under stress.
It's also the case that you may legitimately need something out of the POPIB sometime over the next 12 months. Assuming you've been smart about it (I did have an old doc I needed a while ago but I had actually kept it in my fire box because it seemed like something I might need) if something is a few years old, it can probably go in the trash.
The problem with scanning is that there's work involved and if you don't do a decent job with metadata, it's going to be pretty much useless anyway. For a lot of people, file cabinet with folders is probably a good system unless they really are on-the-go or have multiple residences a lot of the time.
I like how logseq works, where you don't need to name your files. You just write into the "today" log about whatever. Then if you someday want to create a page on a particular topic, the system combs through your past daylogs for incidences of that phrase and throws a reference to it into the doc for you.
There's no necessary starting structure besides the incidental chronology of when you elect to write. But it's useful to me in the same ways I think structure/organization is meant to afford.
Obsidian works similarly, but its unit of information is a document, vs logseq which uses bullet points. I tend to prefer the latter since even prose is too structured for me when I need to quickly jot things.
Every time the Johnny.Decimal system resurfaces on HN, though, I'll admit to spending a couple weeks revisiting the task of finally systematizing the decades of old files stored on my hard drive, until I remember that I haven't looked for any of them in many years, never mind opened them, so it's probably not worth any effort after all.
Most of the existing workflows remain the same and the DB version opens up many more workflows. Would recommend trying it out if you haven't already with https://test.logseq.com/ and https://github.com/logseq/docs/blob/feat/db/db-version.md. If you have tried it out, please give us feedback :)
For example, I like just popping "TODO" on the front of a line, but the database version adds a bunch of stuff I don't want. I don't want to have a drop-down list pop up with distracting icons that don't even have a cohesive color scheme. I don't want to have to move my cursor down a list. I just want to click where it says TODO and have it change to DOING and then change back when I click it again, and then change to DONE when I click the box. I don't want tags on the ends of my lines. I like having the status right at the front, not singled out as just one more property, but just there, where I would put them if I were writing things down without software. I don't want to have to set properties, and I don't even use tags as a separate thing to be attached to my blocks, certainly not right-aligned.
What made Logseq elegant in its simplicity is absolutely ruined for me with the database version. It is the most concerted effort I've ever seen to destroy the best parts of the product to make it into something entirely different.
And it's fine that you're going to do it anyway. I'm just disappointed I'll be stuck sitting on a version that never moves forward, because there was SO much room for improvement, especially on mobile, which now won't ever happen to the product I actually love.
Unless there's another set of reasons you're worried about it?
If my brain worked like a database, I'd already be using one of the dozens of products that depended on a database structure. I don't doubt that this will be more mainstream because of the decision, but it will ruin what made the product useful for me.
I found that trying to organize my notes one way or another introduced more work and cognitive load than it saved. Just timestamp it and let the rest happen naturally. Wu wei?
It's similar to a zettlekasten I guess, but without the effort.
I go to Staples and buy some bankers boxes. These are cardboard boxes that come in a flat pack and you fold the flaps in and make a box. It's sized to hold file folders, but I don't use file folders.
I write the year on the side and top of the box. Every imporant piece of paper, paid bill, receipt, credit card and bank statements, anything I want to hang on to goes into the box. That's it. No other organization. On January 1, I start a new box, and I put the old box on a shelf.
If I need something (which is much more rare than you might expect) I go through the box and find it. It's in roughly chronological order and generally doesn't take more than a few minutes.
After 5 years the oldest box goes in the shredder.
OK there are a few exceptions. Stuff I need to save longer than that (car titles, etc.) goes in a fireproof document safe. But all the common stuff goes in the box.
I went from being unorganized to somewhat organized, then went back and now it's a case of "I'll keep things organized when it makes sense, but the rest is up to my memory, the natural way of doing things and wherever I left it."
I'm just going to try the next thing, see and adopt whatever works, but if it doesn't, I'll just stick to whatever does.
At the end of the day, it's up to our brains on whether to use systems or not and if they fit our needs or if it doesn't.
In onenote, I make sure things have unique keywords I can search for.
I use "Everything" or "Fsearch" to find files on my harddrive. It even indexes my onedrive.
Emails? Git gud with searching boolean queries. From:fred AND body:football
I've similarly tried various organization methods and I cant seem to maintain them. Focusing on easy search has been my way forward.
When you said, “ 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 wanted to share my experience.
I’d consider myself a somewhat organized person. But I only stick with a particular system for a few months at most.
I find what’s most helpful to me is to keep writing down top of mind stuff and focus on getting it done. Sometimes that’s in a text doc, sometimes it’s in a bullet list, sometimes in a spreadsheet. Just whatever feels right in the moment.
Also I have a wide gap between my professional life and personal life. I almost never miss commitments at work. In personal I’m always intending to do stuff and not getting it done. More competing priorities / less urgency.
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.
The benefits of these organization systems, in my experience, come into play when there are multiple people involved (e.g. a workplace, shared storage, etc.), so that everyone can be organized in the same way rather than having a bunch of competing organization systems created by each person.
But when dealing with shared storage, if everyone makes the system "theirs" to some degree, you end up with a disorganized mess. Which is where a rigorously defined system (this, something else, something custom) is required to keep any sanity.
What helped me was looking at the "atomic concepts"
* What do I need to get done? (Tasks)
* When will I work on what? (Calendar)
* How do I keep information around? (Notes)
My "evergreen" information (like lecture notes, book notes) was happily living in Obsidian the past years, so criteria three was already "satisfied". I never found a true "system", so most of my notes are in a Zettelkasten-esque style.
I was stunned to discover that I didn't have a proper solution for "Tasks" or "Calendar". As an immediate fix I simply bought a DIN A6 notebook and a pen. Eventually, I started using the Apple Calendar with a Shortcut that could tally up the time for me - it was insightful. I went from >20 hours of social media a week to nothing (except HN) within a month.
I am still experimenting, currently I am trying to move the "Tasks" into a "daily note" in Obsidian. I have also tried to do some "Journaling", but I found it to not be effective. What I have found to be absolutely necessary though is having a dedicated time in the morning and evening to review everything, plan the day, defer tasks etc.
I don't know whether I'm a person with an organized nature (it's probably more on the messy side), but I know that understanding how those tools and systems work, and when, did help me to organize my life a bit better. For me, the main problem is always that I need to have reason for using something and stay with it. Just reading a book and blindly following what it says is not really my thing. But when I find a demand, knowing about those tools and systems did help me to implement solutions for myself which stuck.
It's a bit like not needing all the buttons in a car in the beginning, until it's cold, you want it warm, and you realize that heating might be a good thing for you. You will not know that there is heating in a car, without reading the manual, but if you need it, the knowledge about it will help you find your solution.
Honestly the best way to do it isn't even a "system" it's to take the most lightweight level of organization and applying it to things you use.
For me the main organizational tool is just google calendar, using an all day event to denote due dates/trip planning/reminders, but even a daily note with what you're looking to do and important dates could be useful.
All these """systems""" have never caught on for me. It takes a lot of time to understand to the system and adjust instead of building a habit of surfacing information.
Get the system out of the way and just start putting stuff down. I get a ton of stuff done now that I couldn't without organizing things particularly when it comes to planning trips or work.
I recently read the book Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman.
Resonates a lot with my experience and struggle with trying to stay productive.
I may not have learnt any new skills from this book but at least feel a tad bit more at peace with things as they as and as they unfold.
I'm very organized in some areas and make the biggest mess in others.
Also what does "unorganized" even mean? I usually don't forget work TODOs but I regularly forget non-work TODOs. One has me have a text file open on the same computer, and in the other area stuff comes up left and right, and if I have my phone to jot it down it doesn't mean I will look at my phone on time...
What is working for me right now is noting everything in a calendar so I cannot forget it or as TODO in a somewhat heavy personalized Obsidian configuration.
A few years ago (5-6 aprox) I started copying my older co-workers habits to see myself improve. Physical notebooks were soon discarded because I never remember where I wrote down things.
I used a TODO plugin in sublime which worked for several months, until I felt I needed screenshots so I moved to OneNote. After a while I became frustrated with not being able to customize it enough, so I started trying out different things. I saw a coworker using Obsidian, watched a couple long YouTube videos to learn how to customize, and I'm never going back.
My team this week told me they are impressed with how much info I write down and it was a very proud moment for me!
I am not betting my life that there is no one who is psychologically incapable of working with certain systems without intractable distress. But I doubt it.
I try not to burden my memory with remembering trivia. So I note them down, bookmark them in some ways that will resurface contextually. Which is why I never took on with a particular method for all aspects in my life, but will gladly use it within a specific context.
This system is beautifully not tied to any software or thing that I have to manage. It's helped me ensure that my basic yearly needs are always handled
I used to try to be very organized and adopt different systems to do so. Unfortunately due to the variety of things I do, I ended up creating the XKCD "you now have 14 competing standards" problem. My efforts to impose order only created more chaos. I have since just created a big monolithic txt file for notes, and a directory sorted by date modified. Delete old things, rename new things appropriately, and then use proper search tools like Voidtools Everything. When a project is complete, that's when I start organizing it, because that's when I know what it should look like. I don't understand how people can work with inconsistent and constantly changing structure.
The lightbulb moment for me was when I found out my HBDI [1] profile - my thinking preferences are heavily skewed toward analytical and experimental, and away from practical / relational.
My management team compliment me by being a) orgasnised and b) relationship focused.
I also have a tendency to go through everything I own once every couple of years and get rid of anything a past version of me thought a future version of me might want to do, but future me does not want to do, though, so the total amount of "stuff" I have is pretty manageable to start out with.
I don't know whether I'm more worried for her, that her work is somehow disorganized enough for this not to be screaming obvious, repeatedly, throughout her blog, or worried for the state of my ability to search the internet anymore, when I used to find it to easy to find specific things like lists of rules online.
Still haven't actually found the list, but I'm done trying.
I tend to let my brain organize my life for me. The end result is that I don't do many different things but I do the things I care about.
However, A 4-colour pen and a small spiral notebook with a grid can help. The paper and colours allows you to be much more creative than just using an ordered sequence of words or some more complex but still limited note taking system.
The secret is to set up a weekly reminder to review tasks.
I think these sort of more complex systems are there to help you if your problem is being overwhelmed, or if you have need to have things classified and under control.
If your problem is the baseline fact that sticking to any sort of system is hard ... haha, same, and then you need a system that is simple.
I currently live by my google-calendar. Alerts in advance, trying to put everything there, to a point I https://sectograph.com/ as my watchface on my smartwatch, just so that I won't forget what I need to do today.
Also, writing out my daily todo-list in a ~private-ish channel I have on friend's discord suprisingly works better just having a todolist. Because my friends see that and that makes my brain actually care :)
So, yeah, "just need to figure out ways to handle my general messiness and get it to work" is right on the money.
It is like with that Bullet Journal thing. You see the elaborate ones from people that love their melticulous templates. But when I used it for a month or so successfully, it was just about the simple bulet-points, sometimes with dates, review once a day. I stopped because I lost the notebook, so ... oversharing on discord it is - I probably am procrastinating there anyway :D
I don't consider myself an organised person (my calendar is chaotic, I don't clean out my inbox and use it as a pseudo to-do list with priorities, I don't have enough time and energy and constantly feel like I'm being a shit friend/family/mentor, etc.) but everyone I have worked with see me as a very organised person: I document every piece of my work in detail that others can understand, I have good estimates on tasks I'm assigned and very rarely miss deadline, I remember when important events are without needing a calendar and am always on time.
The thing is, GTD doesn't work for me. I have also worked with many mangers who tried to shove the framework du jour onto everyone and never had any success with it despite putting in a lot of effort into "meeting expectations".
The cynical me now thinks that people who tells everyone certain system work is because:
1. Someone published a popular book that managed to sell well from the business section.
2. It just happened to work for some people. Even 2 out of 10 people you meet talk about it is enough to make you think about it, now imagine 6 out of 10 managers you meet knows about that system.
3. Most managers I have met (whose jobs are to get others to get things done) don't really have time to understand you, that includes most of them who say they care about my career (they didn't, they cared about their own careers more than mine). If there is something existing they can manage you with they'll use it because when it doesn't work it's either your problem or the framework's problem, not theirs.
4. (Cynical opinion) It's mostly just a facade for people who have authority over you (especially the ones who are technically less capable but somehow moved up) to show their bosses they are doing _something_. Like the new lead designer who decided to change the company brand color or the new head of department who thinks that changing the department's name is going to invigorate everyone's passion to do better work.
One thing that I have learned from the people who are smart and productive is that they have actually spent time to continuously develop and refine a system that works for them over time. They also try new things and just move on if it doesn't.
You probably have met a lot of amazing people if you have mostly been working with others so far. Just think about what the people you truly admire professionally do -- I'd bet that they don't talk about GTD and even if they do it's just an introduction to something remotely similar to what they do and have refined over time.
I know it can be difficult at work sometimes when (whether you know at that moment or not) people are offloading their responsibilities and pressure onto you (it's particularly bad if you are a very responsible person). However, if you believe that you usually have a reasonable amount of time to get things done, just ask yourself if you have done your job well and and delivered things on time. If you have, then the problem probably isn't you or GTD or some other framework that doesn't work for you.
The following things work for me:
1. Whenever you leave a project you leave with it all the info to quickly get started again. If it is physical that can be a paper note, if it is digital thats a readme note (or a note directly in the thing). This is not just for documentation, it means the shelved project requires zero mental capacity as everything I need to remember is shelved as well.
2. Lists for ephemeral todos. There are so many ways of organizing to do lists, the only thing that worked for me over long and intense periods was a little notebook where every Monday of a week I write down what needs to be done in principle. This typically just contains urgent things and the occasional lkng term project.
3. Digital Calendar: everything that is an appointment or some preparation for an appointment goes in here. Appointments do not land in the todos unless they are majorly crucial ones.
4. Travel stuff: most of the travel info will be in the calendar as well, for notes/tickets I add them either in the calendar or in my obsidian notes
5.Knowledgebase: everything that has long form relevance is either in my password manager (surprisingly good for storing info like your tax ID) or into the obsidian notebook
That is roughly it.
I think the key is to come up with a system that takes your natural tendencies into account. Result might not be perfect but it will be less of a disaster than if you had no system at all.
Things like 'slow recycle bin' (where you throw stuff that you probably won't need to look at again, but you might) help with this.
e.g.
I have a lot of 6-quart sterilite bins where I keep various tools/components/junk. Most of them contain specific things and are labeled accordingly. There are also some that are labeled "random crap from my pockets". Not ideal to have "random crap" bins but at least I know which ones they are, and the option is open to go through and better-organize them later.
I have periods where I carefully curate my digital photos and archive them using a specific file structure. Sometimes I don't keep up, so as a backup, I dump all the raw photos to a big hard drive and generate manifest files with filenames, sizes, and bitprint hashes that I keep in Git. This part is of course somewhat automated or it would never happen at all.
A structure loosely connected to past notes via a weekly 'cleaning/review' process in my "PKS", where I'll /search/ for tags, filenames, file contents and loosely link things together.
It's saved me countless hours, but more importantly its drastically reduced analysis paralysis and kept me focused on the most important thing -- writing.
cacophany?
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
I find that if I have to organize or categorize entries in a system, entries just don’t get logged at all.
Only bad thing is their mobile app, it's so bad.
I would love it if one of these KMS companies would give up trying to create a mobile app w/ feature parity, and expend energy making something way simpler. All I really want is a solid UX for:
1. Quickly capturing multi-modal thoughts 2. Easily surfacing specofic KMS items
Thinking of my experience with Obsidian mobile... I don't want markdown, I don't want finicky two-way sync that randomly deletes directories, I don't want an entire file tree to tediously navigate.
I just want to be able to hatily jam a thought into the system, and to find specific items in the system, both as quickly as humanly possible.
I have loads of epub books that I want to read on my Android eInk reader (Boox Note 2 Color). I can convert them to PDF no problem, if that's the only option, but man I wish I could read them right in Logseq on Android. I've tried various syncing solutions to export KOreader highlights, and it's just not nearly as good. Even tried buying a ChromeOS tablet so I could run Linux Logseq on it, but the form factor sucks compared to the Boox.
Anyway, I'll give a better try. Thanks.
Wow, I'm sold.
Here are some possible alternatives: https://selfh.st/alternatives/notion/
Capacities has one-click export of all of your objects (notes/pages) with a sensible folder structure that produces markdown with frontmatter and includes all media attachments. That's good enough for me.
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.
We've received great feedback from ADHD users about how it has helped them throughout their lives
anyway, here is what's has been working for me:
for physical stuff (documents, printouts etc): a dumb file organizer box, one of those where you can hang those hanging manila folders. and of course a few such folders. I bought fifty such folders some years ago, have used about half so far?
for digital stuff: a simple mediawiki installation. it's hosted at home and it's not accessible from the public internet. the visual editor makes it low-friction to edit, the categories system works well enough, a page can belong to more than one category and there's always a search function that works well enough.
the nice thing about mediawiki is that you can upload and embed images, you can link to other systems (like files in nextcloud) and you can upload whole files and link to them from various pages.
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.
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.
In reality you just decide. One feels better to your brain. And you tend to remember that.
It helps of course if you remain consistent. In the systems we design we’ve realised that most people want the insurance close to the thing being insured.
So in our life admin system we have health, pet, home, motor, and travel insurance as IDs alongside your records for those things. Seems to suit most people.
And don’t forget you’ve got your index as a fallback. I don’t remember most of these numbers but I just launched Bear, typed `insurance` in the search field, and there they are. Now in three clicks I can get to my home insurance which, turns out, is at `12.12`.
Haha, nope. Different brains work differently. One day I genuinely prefer one, a week later another.
The benefit of file structures is that things have to have a place, you can't not put something in a folder, so for car insurance, it might be in "insurance" or "cars" but it's definitely one or the other. With tags, it could be "insurance", "finance", "cars", "automobiles", "vehicles", "veihcles", etc.
Any tips of how to funnel some strictness into tags so that they're actually usable?
The "Obsidian way" that many people recommend is notes that are as small as possible to maximize this kind of effect, but that's not how I like to do it. I prefer bigger notes with lots of headings (that can be nested up to 6 levels), and lots of links within a note and between notes to specific headings. I find this to be a nice blend of hierarchical navigation and link navigation.
Non-text files (like receipts or pictures) get linked from the relevant note or section, and many types of media can be viewed inline in the WYSIWYG editor.
A flat structure seems less organized, since you are “mixing” stuff, but as long as there isn't too much stuff inside, going through stuff one-by-one is faster than you think. If I do have a lot of stuff in a section, I either split into several sections in the top structure (so 13 is life insurance, 14 is other...), or go one level deeper (not preferred, but I do it when it's very clear and there is too much stuff, like photos, which btw sorting chronologically works best for me).
It is really not much of an issue having 50 top sections. It makes the organization transparent, and indexing, sorting and going one-by-one remains easy.
I ended up with a box, in the box there are large plastic envelopes, and each envelope is labelled.
I have:
- "assets" (cars, warrantees, service records, purchase invoices etc)
- "health" (all medical related things)
- "insurance" (everything insurance related)
- "guns" (I like guns... so licenses, legal paperwork, etc etc)
The best thing is, this is a box. So worst case, even if I misfiled something, all I need to do is rifle through a box. The box is portable and universal, and if my wife needs something, I can easily guide her to where to find it.
Bear does this really well with its hierarchical tags.
Most filesystems can do this with hardlinks (but the UX mostly sucks).
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."
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.
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.
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.
I agree that the choice to have any system is important.
As a not very organized person, and having struggled with getting personal systems running, guides like this help quite a bit. I've only improved by taking bits that stick for me (https://www.hanselman.com/blog/one-email-rule-have-a-separat...). Anytime I tried a whole system, it failed to get going at all causing me more stress.
>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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In my case, though, looking for specific documents from several years ago is very common. Maybe if you don't have that need and can find things just fine with your current setup, J.D would do nothing for you.
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.
- 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
I use one.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43135927 in this thread.
Truly ZERO effort, yet a backup way to find things without search.
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/
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.
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)
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.
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.
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/7e39068c1d0209e4412e3a05e...
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?
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
What do you think?
* 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
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...
I'll buy those shelves and boxes and just grit my teeth for another 15 years, and then it should be a lot better.
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
Oh the curse of knowing what one requires, but always having it out of reach due to misfiring dopamine regulators/receptors.
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.
If you are putting in daily effort you will automatically find a system which suits your needs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That said, I do like PARA so built this centered around it, with a few GTD and ZK additions:
The system is great if you like to remember the IPs of the sites you need instead of the urls…
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.
Yes, I used to think tags were so neat, but I was fooling myself.
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.