Johnny Decimal

Recently, I’ve gotten into using the Johnny Decimal system for organizing my digital files.

It’s similar, and seems to draw inspiration from, to the classic Dewey Decimal Classification used in libraries. The idea is to be able to classify any and all items down to a single indexable number, such as 20.21.

This seems like a lot of extra memorization because, for example, 20.21 is not semantically connected to “blog-o-matic”. However, it’s actually less memorization. I have learned to connect these numbers with meaning. 2x’s are code, so I immediately know it’s code. I mainly do web stuff, so I put all my web projects in 20. So I know it’s web code. And I reserve 20.2x for tooling, so I know that it’s a tool. Just by using context clues, I know it’s 1 of 2 projects I’m working on. If I were to search for this project, I can start typing 20.2, and it comes up as one of the two suggestions!

Essentially, I’m typing 20.2, but I’m thinking code-web-tool. This way of organization has helped me move around my computer much faster. I don’t want to repeat much more of the work of explaining the benefits and usage of this system, so I’ll direct you to johnnydecimal.com, which has a great introduction to how it all works!

There are a few things I have added to Johnny’s system, that I find useful.

My Additions

Tags #

I layer a level of tags on top of this system as an aid for current events. For instance, I tag something as active when it’s a work-in-progress. This is essentially my “TODO” list. I am still playing around with how I want to use these, but the biggest helps for this are active, and reference. I tag something as active, when I’m currently building it, and tag as reference, if I’m referring back to it, but not adding to it. I also keep an archive tag, that tells me when I’m ready to move something off of my computer into deeper storage (aka external hard drives). Lastly, I have a published tag, which isn’t so much for finding stuff, but more to warn me that if I’m making edits to a file, that I have already published it somewhere.

I use symlinks to point directories that need to be elsewhere into my root JD directory. For example…

ln -s \
"/Users/ben/Library/Mobile Documents/N39PJFAFEV~com~metaclassy~byword/Documents/Blog Posts" \
"/Users/ben/Documents/10-19 Writing/10 Prose/10.10 Blog/posts"

This lets me keep my blog posts in an iCloud-synced directory, while still organizing them in my Johnny Decimal system.

I mainly use one bash script for changing directories in my terminal:

cjd() {
  # If not args, nav to Documents
  if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
    cd ~/Documents; ls

  # If arg has ".", find decimal folder
  elif [ $1 =~ ['.'] ]; then
    cd ~/Documents/*/*/${1}*/

  # If arg has "-", find area folder
  elif [ $1 =~ ['-'] ]; then
    cd ~/Documents/${1}*/; ls

  # If arg is number, find category folder
  else
    cd ~/Documents/*/${1}*/; ls
  fi
}

I added this to basically go cjd 20.21 to cd into Blog-o-Matic, and I can then run code ./ to open it in VSCode. EASY NAVIGATION.

Anyways…

I have enjoyed using the Johnny Decimal System, and recommend giving it a try! Johnny’s site is very clean, and makes it really easy to learn, so I recommend checking it out. Stay organized, everybody!