When we kept everything on paper, organised people had these things called filing cabinets. They stored all of their documents in them in a structured way so that they could find them again.
Now those same people store all of their files in arbitrarily named folders on their company’s shared drive and wonder why they can’t find anything.
Thousands of emails. Hundreds of files. File structures created on a whim and six layers deep. Duplicated content, lost content. We thought search would save us from this nightmare, but we were wrong.
There are a couple of core concepts, and they’re so simple you’ll wonder why you haven’t thought of them before.
It’s worth mentioning at this point that all of this is free, and it’s possible to implement it without any additional tools.
You should be familiar with this section before you attempt to start your own Johnny.Decimal system.
Areas & categories group similar things together, and appear before the decimal.
Within each category, each item has a unique ID. It comes after the decimal.
How to use Johnny.Decimal to organise your file system.
Using the J.D system to keep simple text notes.
How (and why) to track the numbers within your system.
Ready to start? Here’s how you develop your own J.D system.