Well, this was bound to happen one day. This is my site. I guess I’ll read the comments here then go take a bath with a bottle of gin. :-)
Edit: yep. As suspected.
Let me just say this, if I may:
1. You don’t have to like every idea, but please consider that some people do.
2. I’ve been using this successfully for a decade. I’m using it right now to organise a project. My boss loves me for it, because guess what? We can find things!
3. I’m not alone. I’ve done essentially nothing to promote this yet still I get multiple emails a week from strangers telling me that they love it and asking for guidance.
Okay, carry on. I’ll answer questions here where doing so feels productive.
It does feel entertaining to read the comments from people who have so obviously never worked for a large (or old) organisation doing an admin related job who think that spotlight or fuzzy search will save them.
In a previous job I had to respond to freedom of information requests for a public sector organisation with more than 20,000 employees, which meant deep diving different departments shared drives and shared inboxes. The vast majority had no real structure at all and good luck finding a system that can search dozens of silo'd shared drives for info in .pdf and .doc files with permission systems that have evolved over decades. Discovering that the R&I division (which had several thousand employees on its own) mostly used johnny.decimal on their shared drives and often in their personal spaces was like discovering a tribe of ray gun wielding supermen in the depths of stone age Norfolk. It just makes life easy.
The HN comments always sting a little. My guess is the cynics are the ones who usually comment while people who are more positive will probably be more likely to just upvote? So my recommendation (having had a couple HN-front pagers) would be to be encouraged by the upvotes and the attention, while keeping your skin thick.. But also learning from the criticism what you can improve.
Really great site! Uncluttered and easy to follow.
I have one question: is there JD best practice on how to handle file sets that are generated frequently and in large-ish numbers? I’m thinking specifically of camera image files. My current approach is to have a directory per year, and then subdirectories (with a YYYMMDD-subject name) for each distinct shoot (typically between 30 and 50) in that year, together containing between 5000 and 20000 new images (depending on how many shoots I do). I maintain a parallel folder structure for the processed images. My current thinking is to keep this photo-library as-is, but put all of my ‘normal’ files into a JD structure.
By the way, and picking up memetherapy’s comment, I’ve also experienced knowledge management problems in large corporations for which JD would be a great answer. The last place I worked moved several years ago from a ‘classic’ system based on servers and file systems to a system based upon numerous per-project sharepoint sites. It didn’t help that the template for the sites was developed from a project lifecycle perspective and had about 70 folders covering every stage from initiating a bid to project shutdown. There was pretty-much a single ‘dev’ folder for the actual work, that techies like myself inevitably populated in inconsistent ways. Something that was never resolved was that all of these silos made searching for old reports, etc really really hard and fundamentally broke knowledge management in the company. Especially when most of the silos had per-project access permissions.
On the point made elsewhere about tagging, in my experience it is extremely hard to get people across a large company to add metadata to content, let alone do it consistently.
Perhaps you could, rather than taking criticism personally, use these comments as an opportunity to get a broader understanding of how others perceive your work.
I imagine it's a minority view here (well, pretty much everywhere), but I relish getting constructive criticism of my works, whether it's on a site like this or a review by my peers/customers/employers.
That's because I have my own perspective, point of view and view of the world. Others have different ones.
When other folks share their opinions/perspective, it gives me an opportunity to examine my own preconceptions -- which usually winds up giving me a better understanding of the topic at hand.
Granted, in a setting like HN, there will be those who will be uncharitable or dismissive, and those voices can be ignored.
However, those who criticize specific stuff and provide the assumptions/reasoning/thought processes behind those criticisms can provide valuable insight into how you and/or your product/service are perceived outside of your small circle of shared views and assumptions.
I hope the bulk of the comments here are of the latter kind rather than the former, and that you get new perspectives that can drive positive growth for your activities.
Thanks for your comments here. They made me see that this is meant for a pretty particular context.
My first reaction was creeping horror, because this feels like a solution to a problem people shouldn't have. But now that I read you talking about the situations you've made this for, I get your point: it's a problem people do have, and one that's not going away any time soon.
Just to save future bathub wear and tear, I'd suggest adding a bit to the top of the website to say who this is for. Just a couple sentences telling the story of your archetypal user would do it. You might also say who it probably isn't for, just so we can get to the dogs wearing clothes images sooner.
This is a bit off-topic, but by any chance did you draw inspiration for the design of the site from Butterick's Practical Typography[0]? I _love_ the beautiful simplicity of this page.
I had a project I'm working on (which I already knew was going to be contentious) hit the front page a few months ago in a big way. After about 5 minutes I had to block the ID in my browser. It wasn't great.
Thanks for posting. If nothing else the good thing about your system is getting people to think about how to name and nest folders. I quite like one note in that it forces a 2 level heirarchy
I've met your site via your comment on HN about a year ago, on the topic about organizing...something...that I can't remember now.
The idea intrigue me! It's not often you see kind of thing that seems mundane(to general interwebz population) like a system to organizing files and folder. There is some method floating around, but they either too basic or too complex for my need.
That said, back then I give Johnny Decimal a try a bit, but works took toll on me and I eventually give in to my old way of filing things. Maybe it's time to revisited. :)
I really liked your project. It may or may not be useful in my case, but I want to just say that you've put a lot of effort into this and it certainly shows. I have a problem with naming things as well, usually prefer some kind of a systemic way of organizing things. Perhaps, peculiarly I have a fascinationg for how companies name their products! It is similar in a way - organizing information for best possible internal and external communication.
Website is clear cut and to the point, its gorgeous btw. :-)
Thanks for the great site, it's a great reference for new clients when setting up there new file servers etc.
I'm currently doing a Zettlekasten (note/idea organisation) which uses a _similar_ principle, I think between this and johnny.decimal you could build a very custom but efficient system. Will have to ponder further :)
Cheers
Love this idea, and I want to adopt it for our organisation.
Could you advise what you would do in the following situation though?
I imagine one folder called "1 Projects" and immediately stumble upon an issue. We have 100's projects, not 10's.
Do I introduce another decimal point? Like so: "1.123.0"
Thank you for this! I have been working at the same company for 8+ years, and I have accumulated a lot of stuff over the years. I have trouble finding anything these days. The stuff I /can/ find is because I have multiple copies sprinkled in different directories.
After reading this post, I have started to organize my documents and projects according to the description. I feel like this is going to be helpful not only so that I can find what I'm looking for, but so that I don't have 4 copies of every giant source code repo taking up my disk space.
I do have one question: in the examples, the category shows "40-49 BlahBlah", but the subcategory goes "41 Taxes, 42 Expenses, etc." Is there a reason why X0 is skipped? Is this so you have room for something you might have forgotten?
Hi, I'm currently reading the site/guide, my question is, how viable is this for organizing personal files? Is this strictly for business only? I'm currently doing a personal files reorg and this hackernews post came in perfect timing.
I remember when everything was on network drives, and no-one understood the folders other people had created, so they created their own. So you end up with three 'IT Projects' folders, in three different places. And worse, multiple copies of the same document in different places, all slightly different.
Sharepoint should have been able to fix all that, but somehow it just made it the same, but slower. Even after 20 years, I never know where the f__k I am in sharepoint, or when someone sends me a link to a sharepoint doc, I can open the doc, but I don't know where the f__k the document _is_. I dont know quite why sharepoint is so confusing, I think its because it tries hard to pretend to be something other than the document store that it should so obviously be. Just when I get the hang of it, they redesign it all, and add some new front end like Delve.
If I join a project, something that rings alarm bells is if the Project Manager has created sixty empty folders in Sharepoint arranged into a three level hierarchy with different folders for every stage and stream of the project. Most of the time, most of the folders remain empty for the duration.
So yep I really like this Johnny.Decimal idea, simple and workable.
Something jen729w doesn't talk about, but possibly should: if you have two categories that have similar things in them, have the same IDs in both. For example, I'm a low level manager. I've got an area for admin paperwork. One category is Me, other categories are for each of my subordinates. Each of those has a ID for annual performance reports. So mine is 11.01. My subordinates are all 12.01/13.01/14.01. This may result in skipped IDs, as not all subordinates have all of the IDs in use. But this is still helpful, as I know that 01 is always for annual performance reports, 02 is always for training, etc.
Another thing for Johnny: You may not need to get the IT team to make you a Sharepoint list for tracking your IDs. You may have your own little Sharepoint site if they use MS365. OneDrive for MS365 business runs on Sharepoint. So just make your own there.
Admittedly, I don't, because I'm actually using OneNote for that, as well as storing the notes. So every Area is a section group, Category is a section, and every ID is a page. And if I need to make more notes in an ID, I can make a subpage. But normally it's group-section-page. This leads into: the default page is 00.00, which is the table of contents. If you want to go really crazy, you could just embed any files into the pages as well, but I currently think that's a kinda nasty way to do it.
A third thing: if somehow you end up with more than 9 categories (see prior note on categories corresponding to people), nothing stops you from using Base36 for the category numbers. As above, if I became a middle manager, and had to track more than just a few guys, I'd still continue with lexicographic sorting category "numbers". It'd just be non-numeric. This goes into breaking the rules, but rules are there to be broke when necessary and sensible.
This system started when I ran a dance production. We were touring to multiple venues in multiple states, but they all have ticketing, seating plans, merch sales, etc.
I can still remember that system and I literally haven’t looked at it in ten years.
Regarding the bash script [0] to jump to Johnny Decimal directories, you can also use the CDPATH feature that's built into bash (and other POSIX shells, including dash and zsh) so that you can jump directly to a category using the normal `cd` command, with tab completion:
$ CDPATH=$(find /path/to/cjd/* -maxdepth 0 -type d -print0 | xargs -0 printf "%s:")
$ cd 34[tab]
$ cd 34\ Events\34.[tab]
34.18 Product Launch
34.19 Company All-Hands
34.20 Holiday Party
$ cd 34\ Events\34.18[tab]
$ cd 34\ Events\34.18\ Product\ Launch
- It only solves the problem of communicating categories to another person/party with its brevity. 12.03, easy to tell others. But all this at the expense of the following things.
- There is no way to immediately know what 12.03 means. One has to carry a look up table. You can replace it with 2 char code. For example, Finance.Taxes to FN.TX. Why use numbers? Is the ordering important? Why not use char?
- What if categories do overlap? GMail solved this problem in 2005 with labels instead of folders. You can apply multiple tags. Tagging should be enum-like, while tagging it should show what tags already exist so that you dont create two seperate but similar tags, for e.g. Finance and Finances.
- The author dismisses search without giving any reason. Search is amazing for digital documents that is not possible in physical analog documents. The focus should be on tags + keywords or description of the document. Then use something like Algolia search to find stuff - it is extremely forgiving and powerful. Ofcourse, I am just speaking in general about data organization, not specifically about OS-level folders. For that, I think we're stuck with what the OS provides as a search engine. On MacOS, I think Alfred does a better job of searching, haven't used it personally though.
- You can still assign a unique ID to the document, after all thats all the 12.03 scheme does. You can communicate precisely to Jane, "Hey Jane, the document is B75AE2". Jane types that in the search engine and there is no need to weed through folders.
- Additional metadata such as year, author, owner, etc. would help with search.
Instead of making search powerful and contextualizing it, the author expends his arguments on frivolous pursuit of Johnny.Decimal.
> Instead of making search powerful and contextualizing it, the author expends his arguments on frivolous pursuit of Johnny.Decimal.
What do you mean? How do you expect the author to "make search powerful"? This system is clearly in the context of a desktop/NAS filesystem, so they're stuck with whatever search systems exist. I honestly don't plan to use this system, and still feel the need to respond to this critique of it.
> Why use numbers?
Is answered here[0], to intentionally preserve ordering. You don't need to know what a plain ID means, because the only reason to use it is in context.
> What if categories do overlap?
There's nothing to stop you from tagging things in addition to using this system, if you want.
> dismisses search without giving any reason
Again, the author is not building their own document storage system.
> Additional metadata
This system is trying to solve the problem of having to supply a bunch of information to find a specific document.
Overall, there are lots of anecdotes here about how this system is useful in some situations. There's really no reason to sound so incredulous about it, even if it's not for you.
It seems to me that the purpose of numbers over character codes is to constrain the available identifiers to force you to define a fairly small set of broad areas (you only have ten) and drill down within that. When we release that restriction and go with categories I think that would lead to making more and more categories with fuzzy overlap -- and that overlap is precisely what you don't want in a filing system where (unlike labels or tags) each item must have one and only one location.
You went on to mention labels and tags as a solution there -- but the point here is to implement the structure in a common filing system, isn't it? Your point works fine for email, but for documents on my drive tags don't seem like a great approach because at least on my machine even though tagging is an option, it's not robust and reliable.
It didn't feel totally fair to say that the author needed to address search more; the ability to search doesn't go away when you implement a system like this, it's still a powerful tool available to you if you know what you're searching for. If you don't know, then a system like this is a good way to explore the topics and assets in your file tree in a way that allows you to discover collections of related files.
Lastly, true that you can assign a unique ID -- but again, isn't that introducing and solving a different problem? Uniquely addressing every file might be a really useful thing, but as you mentioned, there's no context clue to help you decode B75AE2 -- you would need a lookup table. Even then, presumably you would want to know which categories and families that file should belong to.
Overall, everything you listed here is thought provoking and I think points out some of the limitations of the way our digital file systems emulate physical ones, but this collection of objections isn't persuasive that the Johnny decimal system isn't a good idea.
This is why fzf is so great in my mind. The longer a file path is, the better chance I have of finding it later (whereas deeply nested file paths make it harder to find files using something like Finder or ls)
These days I hardly ever bring up file naming in code reviews—fzf just makes it so easy to find everything.
Great to see this here! I came across it maybe a year or two ago and I love how it lines up with my thinking. I rely on search as well but over and over I come back to the basic issue that search only offers up things you know to search for. A category system like this one resolves some of the anxiety that comes along with trying to establish a universal category system, while also organizing things to support future exploration and discovery.
One thing that stuck with me when I wanted to experiment with this system is the fear of exhausting the top level namespace: the system as described blocks the first number into areas of ten. I remember feeling like it would be pretty normal to need more subcategories in some areas than others and worrying about running out.
On reflection I think that's probably more of an academic problem, and that if I took the dive things would work out. I would be curious about whether there are any suggestions around for how to handle it if you're running short on areas to assign.
The officer in charge of operations and plans for a warship can sit in an office with "N3/N5" on the door and everybody in NATO will understand what's going on.
I have a creeping feeling that systems like this (one of the most famous of them is GTD, but there are many, many others) are designed by people with a certain temperament: they are organized anyway, and their ability to continually keep things neat and orderly, following the same algorithm day after day, is what really helps them, and what particular system they choose to follow, doesn't really matter much.
But then they are unsuccessfully applied by people with a completely different, chaotic temperament, which are not able to maintain any such system for a significant amount of time anyway. We (as I'm certainly from the second kind) try one system after another, hoping that this will be the one that finally saves us from ourselves, but the real difference lies not in the system, but in something very fundamental in our psyche. It doesn't matter how beautiful the system is, or how fancy are the pens that we buy each september (school memories are the best example of this) - a couple of months later it will lie abandoned and forgotten.
May be I'm wrong? Has there been a single HN user that has been unorganized and chaotic most of his life, but then have actually turned things around because of such a system? Would love to hear about it.
I've seriously considered making a file/folder organizer based on an old program called "animal" that I saw on some mainframe in the '80s.
Animal asked you to think of an animal, then it tried to identify it by asking you yes/no questions. Let's say it asked you if it has four legs (no), does it have wings (yes), and then it guesses that you are thinking of a hummingbird.
That's wrong, because you were thinking of a penguin. It would then ask you what yes/no question it could have asked to tell a penguin from a hummingbird, and you could tell it to ask "Does it fly?" and the answer is "no" for a penguin.
It would add that question to its decision tree, so if anyone else thought of a penguin it would get it.
For much of my stuff at work, I use an unfiled filing system. I started this one day when I was asked to write some one time report to solve some mystery.
I spent a half hour with the line "mkdir " typed into my terminal window unable to think of a good name for the directory to do this task in. Finally I gave up on naming the thing, and did "mkdir unfiled". Then in unfiled I did "mkdir 1", and "vi directory.txt". In "directory.txt" I added something like this:
"1 Report for Alice and Bob to identify source of unexpected load on main website"
and then went into the "1" directory and wrote the code to gather the data and analyze it and produce that report.
I intended to figure out a real name for the thing later and rename/move it.
I never got around to figuring out a real name, and unfiled/1 is still there. Along with unfiled/2, unfiled/3, ..., unfiled/314.
This has actually worked out well for me. Suppose I run into some kind of issue with UTF-8 handling in MySQL. I remember I've dealt with that before, and grep in directory.txt for terms like mysql and utf. That turns up that the work for those earlier problems is in unfiled/258, and so that's where I go to find the programs I wrote for investigating that kind of issue.
Not everything goes in unfiled, of course. A good rule of thumb is that if it is something my replacement would need to takeover if I got hit by a bus, it should not be in unfiled. It should be in a well named repo on my department's git server.
It seems that for this to work, existing directories can't be renamed. However with time the initial structure might turn out (or become) not optimal. In general I like the idea but not having a way to rotate the structure is a significant downside to me.
"At the June 2019 conference of the American Library Association the Council voted to remove Dewey's name from its top honor, the Melvil Dewey Medal; the resolution cited Dewey's history of racism, anti-Semitism, and sexual harassment. The resolution was passed overwhelmingly with no debate. The award was renamed the ALA Medal of Excellence at the Association's January 2020 conference"
> “Hey Kristy, where can I find the payroll schedule?”
> “Twelve dot oh-three.”
Or, you know, don't encumber the brains of people with useless numbers, and use computers for what they are actually good are, at least better than people, e.g. use the search feature of your file browser for "payroll schedule".
When my team started moving everything over to shared drives I made it a point that the top folder on every share would be the year. So the top of the hierarchy is just folders named '2019', '2020', etc.
This means that every year we get to recategorize the stuff underneath it and we learn as we go. Most of the sub-folders have stayed the same year to year, but some are different. It lets people see what works and what doesn't, and it prevents the cruft of ages to accumulate. Sometimes work bleeds from one year into the next, but if you're starting something new, create it in this year's folder.
Having been the victim of lots of shared folder catastrophes in the past, this simple rule has really worked out well for my team so far.
This idea looks great, and it would be great if it worked: I've been struggling to keep all my documents organized many times, and I think I've followed basically the same system (except for the number.mapping).
This is my gotcha: how do you decide where a document go? The categories might be clearly split, but documents typically won't fall in exactly one category.
How do you manage temporary tags? That is: how do you operate on the documents? You might be having some documents for your "2020 tax return" in several categories of your system. And what now? Do you duplicate them in another category (tax return?)? Do you tag them? How do you keep track that you moved them? (In case they're real objects, like pieces of paper).
Eh, I'm not convinced. This might be nice for a static hierarchy of not too many office documents, but for the very heterogenous files I deal with, I'm happy with the first level of division being a "project". There are only ever a handful of projects I'm working on at a time, and different projects' files are usually suited to very different directory structures.
That said, the only documents I need to keep in long-term storage are invoices and contracts, which I can just put into two directories. If I ever get too many of such official documents, I might look into a structure like this.
Such systems help you get the structure of things up into YOUR head, so it becomes a mental ladder for YOU.
The main shared network folder for my company is organised like this, it makes it easy to figure out "do we have X/anything about X", and it makes it easy to figure out where to put stuff.
We have other systems, e.g. a wiki, but cruft accumulates in the wiki, because no employee can grasp what's in it, the wiki is just a black bag of "lots of stuff someone put in there at some point". Because the clutter isn't visible, nobody feels an urge to clean it up.
[+] [-] jen729w|5 years ago|reply
Edit: yep. As suspected.
Let me just say this, if I may:
1. You don’t have to like every idea, but please consider that some people do.
2. I’ve been using this successfully for a decade. I’m using it right now to organise a project. My boss loves me for it, because guess what? We can find things!
3. I’m not alone. I’ve done essentially nothing to promote this yet still I get multiple emails a week from strangers telling me that they love it and asking for guidance.
Okay, carry on. I’ll answer questions here where doing so feels productive.
[+] [-] memetherapy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ozzie_osman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KineticLensman|5 years ago|reply
I have one question: is there JD best practice on how to handle file sets that are generated frequently and in large-ish numbers? I’m thinking specifically of camera image files. My current approach is to have a directory per year, and then subdirectories (with a YYYMMDD-subject name) for each distinct shoot (typically between 30 and 50) in that year, together containing between 5000 and 20000 new images (depending on how many shoots I do). I maintain a parallel folder structure for the processed images. My current thinking is to keep this photo-library as-is, but put all of my ‘normal’ files into a JD structure.
By the way, and picking up memetherapy’s comment, I’ve also experienced knowledge management problems in large corporations for which JD would be a great answer. The last place I worked moved several years ago from a ‘classic’ system based on servers and file systems to a system based upon numerous per-project sharepoint sites. It didn’t help that the template for the sites was developed from a project lifecycle perspective and had about 70 folders covering every stage from initiating a bid to project shutdown. There was pretty-much a single ‘dev’ folder for the actual work, that techies like myself inevitably populated in inconsistent ways. Something that was never resolved was that all of these silos made searching for old reports, etc really really hard and fundamentally broke knowledge management in the company. Especially when most of the silos had per-project access permissions.
On the point made elsewhere about tagging, in my experience it is extremely hard to get people across a large company to add metadata to content, let alone do it consistently.
[+] [-] nobody9999|5 years ago|reply
I imagine it's a minority view here (well, pretty much everywhere), but I relish getting constructive criticism of my works, whether it's on a site like this or a review by my peers/customers/employers.
That's because I have my own perspective, point of view and view of the world. Others have different ones.
When other folks share their opinions/perspective, it gives me an opportunity to examine my own preconceptions -- which usually winds up giving me a better understanding of the topic at hand.
Granted, in a setting like HN, there will be those who will be uncharitable or dismissive, and those voices can be ignored.
However, those who criticize specific stuff and provide the assumptions/reasoning/thought processes behind those criticisms can provide valuable insight into how you and/or your product/service are perceived outside of your small circle of shared views and assumptions.
I hope the bulk of the comments here are of the latter kind rather than the former, and that you get new perspectives that can drive positive growth for your activities.
[+] [-] pizza|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wpietri|5 years ago|reply
My first reaction was creeping horror, because this feels like a solution to a problem people shouldn't have. But now that I read you talking about the situations you've made this for, I get your point: it's a problem people do have, and one that's not going away any time soon.
Just to save future bathub wear and tear, I'd suggest adding a bit to the top of the website to say who this is for. Just a couple sentences telling the story of your archetypal user would do it. You might also say who it probably isn't for, just so we can get to the dogs wearing clothes images sooner.
[+] [-] m463|5 years ago|reply
https://johnnydecimal.com/privacy/
[+] [-] clusmore|5 years ago|reply
[0]: https://practicaltypography.com/
[+] [-] msaharia|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedimastert|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quickthrower2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raindropm|5 years ago|reply
The idea intrigue me! It's not often you see kind of thing that seems mundane(to general interwebz population) like a system to organizing files and folder. There is some method floating around, but they either too basic or too complex for my need.
That said, back then I give Johnny Decimal a try a bit, but works took toll on me and I eventually give in to my old way of filing things. Maybe it's time to revisited. :)
[+] [-] neilpanchal|5 years ago|reply
Website is clear cut and to the point, its gorgeous btw. :-)
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|5 years ago|reply
Second, have you experienced any of the problems outlined in MetaCrap https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm
[+] [-] mickduprez|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eckesicle|5 years ago|reply
Do I introduce another decimal point? Like so: "1.123.0"
[+] [-] bytelane|5 years ago|reply
After reading this post, I have started to organize my documents and projects according to the description. I feel like this is going to be helpful not only so that I can find what I'm looking for, but so that I don't have 4 copies of every giant source code repo taking up my disk space.
I do have one question: in the examples, the category shows "40-49 BlahBlah", but the subcategory goes "41 Taxes, 42 Expenses, etc." Is there a reason why X0 is skipped? Is this so you have room for something you might have forgotten?
[+] [-] _ix|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] supercanuck|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b0afc375b5|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] systemvoltage|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] naikrovek|5 years ago|reply
I'm gonna organize my 2TB thumb drive this way tomorrow (I'll at least start) and see how it goes...
[+] [-] izhak|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] born2web|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelcampbell|5 years ago|reply
Given how the system is setup, I find this amusing in a meta-way.
[+] [-] surfsvammel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codeulike|5 years ago|reply
Sharepoint should have been able to fix all that, but somehow it just made it the same, but slower. Even after 20 years, I never know where the f__k I am in sharepoint, or when someone sends me a link to a sharepoint doc, I can open the doc, but I don't know where the f__k the document _is_. I dont know quite why sharepoint is so confusing, I think its because it tries hard to pretend to be something other than the document store that it should so obviously be. Just when I get the hang of it, they redesign it all, and add some new front end like Delve.
If I join a project, something that rings alarm bells is if the Project Manager has created sixty empty folders in Sharepoint arranged into a three level hierarchy with different folders for every stage and stream of the project. Most of the time, most of the folders remain empty for the duration.
So yep I really like this Johnny.Decimal idea, simple and workable.
[+] [-] chipsa|5 years ago|reply
Another thing for Johnny: You may not need to get the IT team to make you a Sharepoint list for tracking your IDs. You may have your own little Sharepoint site if they use MS365. OneDrive for MS365 business runs on Sharepoint. So just make your own there.
Admittedly, I don't, because I'm actually using OneNote for that, as well as storing the notes. So every Area is a section group, Category is a section, and every ID is a page. And if I need to make more notes in an ID, I can make a subpage. But normally it's group-section-page. This leads into: the default page is 00.00, which is the table of contents. If you want to go really crazy, you could just embed any files into the pages as well, but I currently think that's a kinda nasty way to do it.
A third thing: if somehow you end up with more than 9 categories (see prior note on categories corresponding to people), nothing stops you from using Base36 for the category numbers. As above, if I became a middle manager, and had to track more than just a few guys, I'd still continue with lexicographic sorting category "numbers". It'd just be non-numeric. This goes into breaking the rules, but rules are there to be broke when necessary and sensible.
[+] [-] jen729w|5 years ago|reply
This system started when I ran a dance production. We were touring to multiple venues in multiple states, but they all have ticketing, seating plans, merch sales, etc.
I can still remember that system and I literally haven’t looked at it in ten years.
- 40-49 Venues
And yes, I also have dabbled with category A0, A1 etc. I’d rather not, but you’re right, there are edge cases where it’ll work.[+] [-] pimlottc|5 years ago|reply
1: https://linux.101hacks.com/cd-command/cdpath/
[+] [-] jen729w|5 years ago|reply
Happy to link it back to this comment or any other profile you send my way.
[+] [-] systemvoltage|5 years ago|reply
- It only solves the problem of communicating categories to another person/party with its brevity. 12.03, easy to tell others. But all this at the expense of the following things.
- There is no way to immediately know what 12.03 means. One has to carry a look up table. You can replace it with 2 char code. For example, Finance.Taxes to FN.TX. Why use numbers? Is the ordering important? Why not use char?
- What if categories do overlap? GMail solved this problem in 2005 with labels instead of folders. You can apply multiple tags. Tagging should be enum-like, while tagging it should show what tags already exist so that you dont create two seperate but similar tags, for e.g. Finance and Finances.
- The author dismisses search without giving any reason. Search is amazing for digital documents that is not possible in physical analog documents. The focus should be on tags + keywords or description of the document. Then use something like Algolia search to find stuff - it is extremely forgiving and powerful. Ofcourse, I am just speaking in general about data organization, not specifically about OS-level folders. For that, I think we're stuck with what the OS provides as a search engine. On MacOS, I think Alfred does a better job of searching, haven't used it personally though.
- You can still assign a unique ID to the document, after all thats all the 12.03 scheme does. You can communicate precisely to Jane, "Hey Jane, the document is B75AE2". Jane types that in the search engine and there is no need to weed through folders.
- Additional metadata such as year, author, owner, etc. would help with search.
Instead of making search powerful and contextualizing it, the author expends his arguments on frivolous pursuit of Johnny.Decimal.
[+] [-] tkzed49|5 years ago|reply
What do you mean? How do you expect the author to "make search powerful"? This system is clearly in the context of a desktop/NAS filesystem, so they're stuck with whatever search systems exist. I honestly don't plan to use this system, and still feel the need to respond to this critique of it.
> Why use numbers?
Is answered here[0], to intentionally preserve ordering. You don't need to know what a plain ID means, because the only reason to use it is in context.
> What if categories do overlap?
There's nothing to stop you from tagging things in addition to using this system, if you want.
> dismisses search without giving any reason
Again, the author is not building their own document storage system.
> Additional metadata
This system is trying to solve the problem of having to supply a bunch of information to find a specific document.
Overall, there are lots of anecdotes here about how this system is useful in some situations. There's really no reason to sound so incredulous about it, even if it's not for you.
[0]: https://johnnydecimal.com/concepts/areas-categories/
[+] [-] bnj|5 years ago|reply
You went on to mention labels and tags as a solution there -- but the point here is to implement the structure in a common filing system, isn't it? Your point works fine for email, but for documents on my drive tags don't seem like a great approach because at least on my machine even though tagging is an option, it's not robust and reliable.
It didn't feel totally fair to say that the author needed to address search more; the ability to search doesn't go away when you implement a system like this, it's still a powerful tool available to you if you know what you're searching for. If you don't know, then a system like this is a good way to explore the topics and assets in your file tree in a way that allows you to discover collections of related files.
Lastly, true that you can assign a unique ID -- but again, isn't that introducing and solving a different problem? Uniquely addressing every file might be a really useful thing, but as you mentioned, there's no context clue to help you decode B75AE2 -- you would need a lookup table. Even then, presumably you would want to know which categories and families that file should belong to.
Overall, everything you listed here is thought provoking and I think points out some of the limitations of the way our digital file systems emulate physical ones, but this collection of objections isn't persuasive that the Johnny decimal system isn't a good idea.
[+] [-] jez|5 years ago|reply
These days I hardly ever bring up file naming in code reviews—fzf just makes it so easy to find everything.
https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
[+] [-] Waterluvian|5 years ago|reply
I search "driveway" and get all the photos my wife and I ever took that shows our driveway. Ah yes the cracks are getting worse.
I search email for "driveway repair" and find that old recommendation from a friend despite the word driveway having never been mentioned.
I don't need a sorting system. I need a big pile of all my data ever with a fantastic search engine.
I'd prefer if it wasn't google.
[+] [-] oezi|5 years ago|reply
In my previous org we did this but had a couple of things which were hard to file:
- Where to put templates (letters, powerpoints to be used by more than one department/function). Is it marketing or communication or management?
- Should we put products or processes on top-level?
- How to split access control?
- How to archive (old/backup folders)?
[+] [-] bnj|5 years ago|reply
One thing that stuck with me when I wanted to experiment with this system is the fear of exhausting the top level namespace: the system as described blocks the first number into areas of ten. I remember feeling like it would be pretty normal to need more subcategories in some areas than others and worrying about running out.
On reflection I think that's probably more of an academic problem, and that if I took the dive things would work out. I would be curious about whether there are any suggestions around for how to handle it if you're running short on areas to assign.
[+] [-] mjlee|5 years ago|reply
The officer in charge of operations and plans for a warship can sit in an office with "N3/N5" on the door and everybody in NATO will understand what's going on.
[+] [-] golergka|5 years ago|reply
But then they are unsuccessfully applied by people with a completely different, chaotic temperament, which are not able to maintain any such system for a significant amount of time anyway. We (as I'm certainly from the second kind) try one system after another, hoping that this will be the one that finally saves us from ourselves, but the real difference lies not in the system, but in something very fundamental in our psyche. It doesn't matter how beautiful the system is, or how fancy are the pens that we buy each september (school memories are the best example of this) - a couple of months later it will lie abandoned and forgotten.
May be I'm wrong? Has there been a single HN user that has been unorganized and chaotic most of his life, but then have actually turned things around because of such a system? Would love to hear about it.
[+] [-] tzs|5 years ago|reply
Animal asked you to think of an animal, then it tried to identify it by asking you yes/no questions. Let's say it asked you if it has four legs (no), does it have wings (yes), and then it guesses that you are thinking of a hummingbird.
That's wrong, because you were thinking of a penguin. It would then ask you what yes/no question it could have asked to tell a penguin from a hummingbird, and you could tell it to ask "Does it fly?" and the answer is "no" for a penguin.
It would add that question to its decision tree, so if anyone else thought of a penguin it would get it.
For much of my stuff at work, I use an unfiled filing system. I started this one day when I was asked to write some one time report to solve some mystery.
I spent a half hour with the line "mkdir " typed into my terminal window unable to think of a good name for the directory to do this task in. Finally I gave up on naming the thing, and did "mkdir unfiled". Then in unfiled I did "mkdir 1", and "vi directory.txt". In "directory.txt" I added something like this:
"1 Report for Alice and Bob to identify source of unexpected load on main website"
and then went into the "1" directory and wrote the code to gather the data and analyze it and produce that report.
I intended to figure out a real name for the thing later and rename/move it.
I never got around to figuring out a real name, and unfiled/1 is still there. Along with unfiled/2, unfiled/3, ..., unfiled/314.
This has actually worked out well for me. Suppose I run into some kind of issue with UTF-8 handling in MySQL. I remember I've dealt with that before, and grep in directory.txt for terms like mysql and utf. That turns up that the work for those earlier problems is in unfiled/258, and so that's where I go to find the programs I wrote for investigating that kind of issue.
Not everything goes in unfiled, of course. A good rule of thumb is that if it is something my replacement would need to takeover if I got hit by a bus, it should not be in unfiled. It should be in a well named repo on my department's git server.
[+] [-] thih9|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blakesterz|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dewey_Decimal_classes
You probably don't know much about Dewey, he's got a pretty "interesting" life story:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melvil_Dewey
"At the June 2019 conference of the American Library Association the Council voted to remove Dewey's name from its top honor, the Melvil Dewey Medal; the resolution cited Dewey's history of racism, anti-Semitism, and sexual harassment. The resolution was passed overwhelmingly with no debate. The award was renamed the ALA Medal of Excellence at the Association's January 2020 conference"
[+] [-] temac|5 years ago|reply
Or, you know, don't encumber the brains of people with useless numbers, and use computers for what they are actually good are, at least better than people, e.g. use the search feature of your file browser for "payroll schedule".
[+] [-] AndyMcConachie|5 years ago|reply
This means that every year we get to recategorize the stuff underneath it and we learn as we go. Most of the sub-folders have stayed the same year to year, but some are different. It lets people see what works and what doesn't, and it prevents the cruft of ages to accumulate. Sometimes work bleeds from one year into the next, but if you're starting something new, create it in this year's folder.
Having been the victim of lots of shared folder catastrophes in the past, this simple rule has really worked out well for my team so far.
[+] [-] etamponi|5 years ago|reply
This is my gotcha: how do you decide where a document go? The categories might be clearly split, but documents typically won't fall in exactly one category.
How do you manage temporary tags? That is: how do you operate on the documents? You might be having some documents for your "2020 tax return" in several categories of your system. And what now? Do you duplicate them in another category (tax return?)? Do you tag them? How do you keep track that you moved them? (In case they're real objects, like pieces of paper).
[+] [-] dvdkon|5 years ago|reply
That said, the only documents I need to keep in long-term storage are invoices and contracts, which I can just put into two directories. If I ever get too many of such official documents, I might look into a structure like this.
[+] [-] fifticon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IshKebab|5 years ago|reply
Exactly unlike actual documents. Where do I put the sales figures we use for marketing?