Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

What Johnny.Decimal Is Trying to Solve

  • Seen as an attempt to tame growing digital chaos via a shallow, fixed hierarchy and numeric IDs.
  • Works best, according to proponents, when:
    • Domains are relatively stable (small businesses, clearly bounded projects, personal archives).
    • The goal is reliable retrieval and shared mental models across a team or family.
  • Some use it only partially (e.g., just for folder names or a few domains like finances, housing, “life admin”).

Reported Benefits

  • Reduces deep nesting; three levels feel easier to navigate than ad‑hoc trees that sprawl.
  • Once internalized, people report “muscle memory” for IDs and fast navigation (often script- or launcher-assisted).
  • For some, the main value is not the specific scheme, but having any consistent system to copy/steal ideas from.
  • A few ADHD users say JD’s simplicity and “always there” structure help, as long as setup is done once and then mostly left alone.

Critiques and Limits

  • Many find the decimal codes non‑intuitive, hard to remember, or simply unnecessary versus descriptive folder names.
  • Hierarchies fail when items belong in multiple places (e.g., “car insurance” under cars or under money/insurance); this is a core recurring complaint.
  • Critics argue JD is brittle for individuals with changing interests and life areas, and better suited to static domains than personal knowledge management.
  • In shared/team environments, expecting everyone to learn numeric IDs is seen as unrealistic and potentially alienating.
  • Several people tried JD for months or years and reverted to simpler homegrown systems, judging the “juice not worth the squeeze.”

Alternatives People Prefer

  • Search-first, low-organization approaches: flat or lightly structured folders, strong filenames, desktop search tools, grep/Everything/mdfind, OCR’d document archives.
  • Tag- and link-based systems (Obsidian, Logseq, Tana, Capacities, MediaWiki, org-mode, paperless-ngx) that allow multiple contexts per item.
  • PARA, simple yearly folders, or “immutable chronological log” patterns for effortless filing and later discovery.
  • Physical systems (filing cabinets, banker boxes, labeled envelopes) often win for paper.

Meta-Themes: Personality, Aging, and Habits

  • Strong divide between people energized by systems and those overwhelmed or bored by them.
  • ADHD and “naturally messy” users often report intricate systems rapidly collapsing; forgiving, low-friction habits matter more than formal schemes.
  • Several older commenters note that volume of documents and weaker memory make some structure increasingly valuable, but not necessarily JD.
  • Broad consensus: the specific system is less important than:
    • Keeping things minimal, portable, and tool-independent.
    • Making capture and retrieval easy enough that you actually use it.
    • Accepting that no hierarchy perfectly matches real-life complexity.