Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life

I'm in my mid-40s and have severe ADHD and I've tried many many techniques and systems over the years. Over the last ~15 years I've come to evolve a set of systems that work for me.

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.

I’m well past 60 and seem to have something approximating bad ADHD. I became financially very successful by being fairly obsessed with one thing at a time: software and services companies, real estate, etc. For many years, this meant leaving extra things like guitar practice to the middle of the night. My goal since before marriage was to balance my primary jobs out with family time, which also means caring for handicapped family members. I succeeded. I have never been able to balance work, life, and health altogether, unfortunately. So I’m diabetic and overweight.

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.

I am pretty ADD. For me, moving to a system using org-mode helped a lot. It didn't make me an "organized" person (hah!), but it has repeatedly kept me from losing track of important things and has given me a place to take tasks/reminders/notes/etc off my mind. Being able to write something down and trust that it will surface back when I need it has reduced my mental load and general anxiety.

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 me, part of the tension stems from being unwilling to design a system crappy enough that I will actually stick to.

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.

Similar age, slightly different experience.

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.

My brother claims to have achieved that transformation with GTD. My personal experience is that complex rigid systems like GTD require high initial investments in effort and can be brittle. They are sort of like doing a total rewrite of a codebase. My biggest wins have come from making small incremental changes.

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.

I love exploring different organizational systems.

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.

I’m in my mid-40s. I’ve been practicing GTD for about a decade. My system used to be fairly elaborate in the beginning, but now it’s fairly simple. However, I don’t view it as an organizational system. It’s a tool for me to be confident that I’m doing the right thing right now.

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.

After years of searching for an organizational solution myself, switching between countless applications, numerous applications, and a concoufany of feedback, insights and ideas from xyz influencer, this is exactly the same path i've settled on, despite not being diagnosed with ADHD myself -- though, the signs are all there.

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.

> 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

I don’t have ADHD (that I know of) and still love Logseq. For me, it’s the perfect mix of notetaking, journaling, outlining, task tracking, and lightweight hierarchy/linking.

I find that if I have to organize or categorize entries in a system, entries just don’t get logged at all.

This is why I love Capacities. It's object oriented with properties and tags. No folders.

Exactly. 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.

You might want to take a look athttps://www.limitless.ai/#pendant

We've received great feedback from ADHD users about how it has helped them throughout their lives

most stuff don't work, and don't stand the test of time.

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.

Preach brother

I 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.

This! i prefer tags over folders for this reason. All notes go into single folder , no sub directories . Because a note can have multiple classifications a tree structure is not natural way to organize them. Add tags , if you have note taking program will show you all possible existing tags you it makes this easier.

Johnny here. This is the canonical example, and I quote it myself: is it `Insurance > Car` or `Car > Insurance`?

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`.

https://share.icloud.com/photos/0afQRa-furBCpa9rOIc3r3Q7g

This is why I like Obsidian (or some other linked-documents wiki type of system), because it makes linking things easy, so you can take multiple routes to find a thing. I have a health note and a finances note. Which one does health insurance go under? I pick whichever one seems to make the most sense at the time. Then, in the future, if I'm looking for health insurance and look in the wrong place first, I can easily make a link there to the "health insurance" note/section. Now, I will find health insurance whether I look under health or finances.

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.

I've had this problem for a long time. My solution was to keep my organization as flat as possible. This means everything insurance-related would go to 13.

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 had exactly this issue before, an I blame overthinking things. Trying to put in place a system where none is needed.

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.

What you need is a tree where the items can be in multiple places.

Bear does this really well with its hierarchical tags.

Most filesystems can do this with hardlinks (but the UX mostly sucks).

symlinks or hardlinks might help with that, depending on your needs. With hardlinks you will see the same file in both locations, and if you change or remove the file it will be removed in the other directory as well

it's only going to be one of a few places though, and the key thing is you know where those places are and can get to them quickly

You 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.

For 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.

On 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.

I have found that after multiple migrations from one computer to another, some of my file creation dates are incorrect. I don't use JD but I do have a lot of stuff in yearly folders and some of it's clearly wrong. Like I know that I started one of my graphic novels in 2012 but some of the first few pages have dates in 2014 and 2019. Did a computer migration change the dates? Did some edit I did later on save it as a new file? I don't know. I just know the date's way off.

I agree that the choice to have any system is important.

Allowing 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.

Agree. The benefit of posts like these is that someone has documented their system and iterated on it. You can then steal ideas that work for you.

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.

I 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.

> 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 in this thread.

Truly ZERO effort, yet a backup way to find things without search.

I kind of agree with you! But still wanted to take a shot at it:

https://thoughtscape.app/