Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life (johnnydecimal.com)

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.

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 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.

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Johnny Decimal: A System to Organize Projects (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37506640 - Sept 2023 (118 comments)

Johnny Decimal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36308366 - June 2023 (193 comments)

Johnny.Decimal – A System to Organize Projects - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36300472 - June 2023 (1 comment)

Johnny•Decimal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33683874 - Nov 2022 (1 comment)

Johnny.Decimal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398027 - Dec 2020 (187 comments)

Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise projects - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13770827 - March 2017 (2 comments)

Can I ask what benefit it provides? I'm genuinely curious what it could potentially provide.

You will understand when you get into your 50-60s.

I have a cloud folder where I store pretty much all data I care about, both for work and personal life (with exceptions like photos and videos, for space reasons). It used to be a huge mess and I often had a hard time finding a specific thing. I switched to J.D a few years ago - or rather to a modification of it, it's not strict: I do have a few "out of category" folders that were difficult to neatly categorize, for example - but the principles are there. And now I find it much easier to locate stuff.

In my case, though, looking for specific documents from several years ago is very common. Maybe if you don't have that need and can find things just fine with your current setup, J.D would do nothing for you.

> 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

Preach brother

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

No. It has practically nothing to do with Zettelkasten. For starters, Johnny Decimal says nothing about links.

Similar age. Similar realization.

I agree with your take. I think someone who can/will get organized will do so regardless of which system they use. Someone who can't/won't get organized isn't going to no matter what system is proposed.

The benefits of these organization systems, in my experience, come into play when there are multiple people involved (e.g. a workplace, shared storage, etc.), so that everyone can be organized in the same way rather than having a bunch of competing organization systems created by each person.

I'm not organized by default but I can live or work with organized people. It's possible to fit in and participate in the organization.

I tend to let my brain organize my life for me. The end result is that I don't do many different things but I do the things I care about.

However, A 4-colour pen and a small spiral notebook with a grid can help. The paper and colours allows you to be much more creative than just using an ordered sequence of words or some more complex but still limited note taking system.

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Im kind of like you. My answer to this is what I call "breadcrumbs". I leave them everywhere, and rely on fast searching tools.

In onenote, I make sure things have unique keywords I can search for.

I use "Everything" or "Fsearch" to find files on my harddrive. It even indexes my onedrive.

Emails? Git gud with searching boolean queries. From:fred AND body:football

I've similarly tried various organization methods and I cant seem to maintain them. Focusing on easy search has been my way forward.

They don't need to help everyone, nor solve all problems. Just helping some people to solve some problems is progress. Organization is a spectrum, some parts are more organized, some less. And those systems, tools, whatever, can be a guideline finding your way.

I don't know whether I'm a person with an organized nature (it's probably more on the messy side), but I know that understanding how those tools and systems work, and when, did help me to organize my life a bit better. For me, the main problem is always that I need to have reason for using something and stay with it. Just reading a book and blindly following what it says is not really my thing. But when I find a demand, knowing about those tools and systems did help me to implement solutions for myself which stuck.

It's a bit like not needing all the buttons in a car in the beginning, until it's cold, you want it warm, and you realize that heating might be a good thing for you. You will not know that there is heating in a car, without reading the manual, but if you need it, the knowledge about it will help you find your solution.

as long as you don't get harshly "punished" or judged for being unorganized by others above you in the food chain then you are fine.

I wouldn't say that I was a very chaotic person but after moving several times it felt like it takes longer to find some special tool than buy it new. So I created a little program to keep track of all my stuff [1]. It took quite a while to put everything in there but it helps me to check for a tool if a friend asks for something. Also, I like to be aware of what I own and what I should give away because I don't need it anymore.

[1] https://github.com/mo42/inven

In a similar boat and I'll add another point. Any new system leads to a temporary increase in focus and productivity. Then it steadily drops off. What this told me is that new systems, as long as they don't have a steep entry ramp are good to get that temporary boost. Just don't expect it to last for months. Also, I found a fair number of high performing people are unorganized, but they often have secretaries and coaches who are themselves organized to get things done for them. But if you are not at a point where you can afford one, you have to learn to get these things yourselves.

The closest I've come is in using an "outliner". I don't have it in me to impose structure on notes.

I like how logseq works, where you don't need to name your files. You just write into the "today" log about whatever. Then if you someday want to create a page on a particular topic, the system combs through your past daylogs for incidences of that phrase and throws a reference to it into the doc for you.

There's no necessary starting structure besides the incidental chronology of when you elect to write. But it's useful to me in the same ways I think structure/organization is meant to afford.

Obsidian works similarly, but its unit of information is a document, vs logseq which uses bullet points. I tend to prefer the latter since even prose is too structured for me when I need to quickly jot things.

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 analogy is that life is an immutable log of records ongoing in chronological order... so a folder for each chronological year. Then index in each year as you see fit... the index/categories/areas for each year don't have to be the same as prior years... they likely won't if life is interesting and changing!

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 have similar inner battles.

I think the key is to come up with a system that takes your natural tendencies into account. Result might not be perfect but it will be less of a disaster than if you had no system at all.

Things like 'slow recycle bin' (where you throw stuff that you probably won't need to look at again, but you might) help with this.

e.g.

I have a lot of 6-quart sterilite bins where I keep various tools/components/junk. Most of them contain specific things and are labeled accordingly. There are also some that are labeled "random crap from my pockets". Not ideal to have "random crap" bins but at least I know which ones they are, and the option is open to go through and better-organize them later.

I have periods where I carefully curate my digital photos and archive them using a specific file structure. Sometimes I don't keep up, so as a backup, I dump all the raw photos to a big hard drive and generate manifest files with filenames, sizes, and bitprint hashes that I keep in Git. This part is of course somewhat automated or it would never happen at all.

Did so, but mostly due to increasing responsibility and general laziness. If it's something in my ecosystem (either digital or real life) I'm strongly against spending much energy to finding stuff and redo things. I'm not against messiness, but things should either be highly visible or arranged in a way that minimize thinking. And if something can be automated, I will do so if the manual way is cumbersome enough.

I try not to burden my memory with remembering trivia. So I note them down, bookmark them in some ways that will resurface contextually. Which is why I never took on with a particular method for all aspects in my life, but will gladly use it within a specific context.

I had to get organized in college because I was doing a lot of additional coursework and still working. Previously I was completely disorganized in terms of planning.

Honestly the best way to do it isn't even a "system" it's to take the most lightweight level of organization and applying it to things you use.

For me the main organizational tool is just google calendar, using an all day event to denote due dates/trip planning/reminders, but even a daily note with what you're looking to do and important dates could be useful.

All these """systems""" have never caught on for me. It takes a lot of time to understand to the system and adjust instead of building a habit of surfacing information.

Get the system out of the way and just start putting stuff down. I get a ton of stuff done now that I couldn't without organizing things particularly when it comes to planning trips or work.

You may have ADHD. Medication helps. A personal support system (the people in your life) helps more.

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.

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.

In terms of organising files over the years I have found that nothing beats good file names and file search.

The best system I've come up with is to timestamp all my notes and sort them chronologically in a filing cabinet. You can link to notes by their timestamp, create indexes, calendars, weekly or daily todos etc, as necessary. The idea is that a note can be whatever you want or need it to be in that moment. Just make it addressable. Timestamps also give temporal context to correlate with emails, phone calls, or any other logged activity.

I found that trying to organize my notes one way or another introduced more work and cognitive load than it saved. Just timestamp it and let the rest happen naturally. Wu wei?

It's similar to a zettlekasten I guess, but without the effort.

There is no voluntary system which can't be sabotaged by your own feelings. Performance anxiety, overthinking, fear of success, etc. And if you let things pile up without processing them, that becomes another snowballing reason to avoid the system. One's thoughts and feelings ABOUT the system seem to have no way to be processed BY the system, so one just avoids all of it. There is also sometimes an expectation that a system will do the hard work for you, instead of just telling you what you should be putting hard work into in a certain time slice.

I am not betting my life that there is no one who is psychologically incapable of working with certain systems without intractable distress. But I doubt it.

These two older HN comments might relate to your lines of thinking. I found both of these very insightful when I got stuck with trying out all sorts of rigid systems, outliners, zettelkasten etc:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17893139

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8807252

I have been an extraordinarily unorganized university student until the begining of this year - I am still not fully organized, but doing a lot better.

What helped me was looking at the "atomic concepts"

* What do I need to get done? (Tasks)

* When will I work on what? (Calendar)

* How do I keep information around? (Notes)

My "evergreen" information (like lecture notes, book notes) was happily living in Obsidian the past years, so criteria three was already "satisfied". I never found a true "system", so most of my notes are in a Zettelkasten-esque style.

I was stunned to discover that I didn't have a proper solution for "Tasks" or "Calendar". As an immediate fix I simply bought a DIN A6 notebook and a pen. Eventually, I started using the Apple Calendar with a Shortcut that could tally up the time for me - it was insightful. I went from >20 hours of social media a week to nothing (except HN) within a month.

I am still experimenting, currently I am trying to move the "Tasks" into a "daily note" in Obsidian. I have also tried to do some "Journaling", but I found it to not be effective. What I have found to be absolutely necessary though is having a dedicated time in the morning and evening to review everything, plan the day, defer tasks etc.

Same. A very simplified version of bullet journaling does quite a bit for me to track tasks. I basically just use three bullets ( - for information, * for an item requiring action, and > to indicate i need to keep moving that task forward).

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.

Same. My file system gets "cleaned up" every two years when I buy a new macbook.

I challenge the "organized person" thing already.

I'm very organized in some areas and make the biggest mess in others.

Also what does "unorganized" even mean? I usually don't forget work TODOs but I regularly forget non-work TODOs. One has me have a text file open on the same computer, and in the other area stuff comes up left and right, and if I have my phone to jot it down it doesn't mean I will look at my phone on time...

the process of trying to organize is helpful, even if the organization system itself fails. I think people resent organizing because they expect magic to happen once they try. but like exercise, learning, playing music, cooking -- it's the practice of the habit that develops results . Everything great takes repetition

The best approach I’ve found so far is to just have a single master “event log” where I dump everything that I want to save by default. I have specific places to put things but if I can’t be bothered to decide where or am not sure it’ll just go to the event log. I’m using Notion for this where each entry is its own page in a “database” list. Adding a new page is trivial though through the site or app. I have an iOS shortcut setup too to open the entry creation

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 found GTD had a few basic concepts I try--sometimes even successfully--to follow. But I've basically never been an "organizational system" person.

There is some level of organization you have to achieve to be at least somewhat successful.

I think these sort of more complex systems are there to help you if your problem is being overwhelmed, or if you have need to have things classified and under control.

If your problem is the baseline fact that sticking to any sort of system is hard ... haha, same, and then you need a system that is simple.

I currently live by my google-calendar. Alerts in advance, trying to put everything there, to a point I https://sectograph.com/ as my watchface on my smartwatch, just so that I won't forget what I need to do today.

Also, writing out my daily todo-list in a ~private-ish channel I have on friend's discord suprisingly works better just having a todolist. Because my friends see that and that makes my brain actually care :)

So, yeah, "just need to figure out ways to handle my general messiness and get it to work" is right on the money.

It is like with that Bullet Journal thing. You see the elaborate ones from people that love their melticulous templates. But when I used it for a month or so successfully, it was just about the simple bulet-points, sometimes with dates, review once a day. I stopped because I lost the notebook, so ... oversharing on discord it is - I probably am procrastinating there anyway :D

Recently I have been thinking about this, because I feel I have managed to become way more organized than I ever thought it was possible.

What is working for me right now is noting everything in a calendar so I cannot forget it or as TODO in a somewhat heavy personalized Obsidian configuration.

A few years ago (5-6 aprox) I started copying my older co-workers habits to see myself improve. Physical notebooks were soon discarded because I never remember where I wrote down things.

I used a TODO plugin in sublime which worked for several months, until I felt I needed screenshots so I moved to OneNote. After a while I became frustrated with not being able to customize it enough, so I started trying out different things. I saw a coworker using Obsidian, watched a couple long YouTube videos to learn how to customize, and I'm never going back.

My team this week told me they are impressed with how much info I write down and it was a very proud moment for me!

I'm the same - just turned 50.

The lightbulb moment for me was when I found out my HBDI [1] profile - my thinking preferences are heavily skewed toward analytical and experimental, and away from practical / relational.

My management team compliment me by being a) orgasnised and b) relationship focused.

[1] https://www.thinkherrmann.com/hbdi

I wouldn't say I'm organized, but org-mode is the only tool I've ever really used to keep track of what I am doing. I've been using org-mode for >= 15 years.

I'm a big fan of the Jibun Techo system of planners. I have a yearly planner that I get a new one every year that handles all of my every day things. I move the "LIFE" book around to each new year which holds things that matter on a yearly/longer than yearly basis.

This system is beautifully not tied to any software or thing that I have to manage. It's helped me ensure that my basic yearly needs are always handled

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.

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.

Similar situation, my cure is to do less and slow down. For example after a day on the slopes I make a habit of just putting all my stuff away carefully. To do this I need more time (do less) and slow things down.

Thanks for sharing.

When you said, “ I mean, I can certainly be organized for sizable stretches of time, but whenever I start getting pressed for time, or stressed, or lose my motivation for some other reason, it always reverts to the mean.”, I wanted to share my experience.

I’d consider myself a somewhat organized person. But I only stick with a particular system for a few months at most.

I find what’s most helpful to me is to keep writing down top of mind stuff and focus on getting it done. Sometimes that’s in a text doc, sometimes it’s in a bullet list, sometimes in a spreadsheet. Just whatever feels right in the moment.

Also I have a wide gap between my professional life and personal life. I almost never miss commitments at work. In personal I’m always intending to do stuff and not getting it done. More competing priorities / less urgency.

I'm roughly the same. Here's what I do.

I go to Staples and buy some bankers boxes. These are cardboard boxes that come in a flat pack and you fold the flaps in and make a box. It's sized to hold file folders, but I don't use file folders.

I write the year on the side and top of the box. Every imporant piece of paper, paid bill, receipt, credit card and bank statements, anything I want to hang on to goes into the box. That's it. No other organization. On January 1, I start a new box, and I put the old box on a shelf.

If I need something (which is much more rare than you might expect) I go through the box and find it. It's in roughly chronological order and generally doesn't take more than a few minutes.

After 5 years the oldest box goes in the shredder.

OK there are a few exceptions. Stuff I need to save longer than that (car titles, etc.) goes in a fireproof document safe. But all the common stuff goes in the box.

I am an unorganized person who has a job that requires a certain amount of organization to allow me to stay on top of what I am doing and gives me very little time to do said organization.

The following things work for me:

1. Whenever you leave a project you leave with it all the info to quickly get started again. If it is physical that can be a paper note, if it is digital thats a readme note (or a note directly in the thing). This is not just for documentation, it means the shelved project requires zero mental capacity as everything I need to remember is shelved as well.

2. Lists for ephemeral todos. There are so many ways of organizing to do lists, the only thing that worked for me over long and intense periods was a little notebook where every Monday of a week I write down what needs to be done in principle. This typically just contains urgent things and the occasional lkng term project.

3. Digital Calendar: everything that is an appointment or some preparation for an appointment goes in here. Appointments do not land in the todos unless they are majorly crucial ones.

4. Travel stuff: most of the travel info will be in the calendar as well, for notes/tickets I add them either in the calendar or in my obsidian notes

5.Knowledgebase: everything that has long form relevance is either in my password manager (surprisingly good for storing info like your tax ID) or into the obsidian notebook

That is roughly it.

I am in same camp.

I recently read the book Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman.

Resonates a lot with my experience and struggle with trying to stay productive.

I may not have learnt any new skills from this book but at least feel a tad bit more at peace with things as they as and as they unfold.

Just personal experience, read with a grain of salt.

I don't consider myself an organised person (my calendar is chaotic, I don't clean out my inbox and use it as a pseudo to-do list with priorities, I don't have enough time and energy and constantly feel like I'm being a shit friend/family/mentor, etc.) but everyone I have worked with see me as a very organised person: I document every piece of my work in detail that others can understand, I have good estimates on tasks I'm assigned and very rarely miss deadline, I remember when important events are without needing a calendar and am always on time.

The thing is, GTD doesn't work for me. I have also worked with many mangers who tried to shove the framework du jour onto everyone and never had any success with it despite putting in a lot of effort into "meeting expectations".

The cynical me now thinks that people who tells everyone certain system work is because:

1. Someone published a popular book that managed to sell well from the business section.

2. It just happened to work for some people. Even 2 out of 10 people you meet talk about it is enough to make you think about it, now imagine 6 out of 10 managers you meet knows about that system.

3. Most managers I have met (whose jobs are to get others to get things done) don't really have time to understand you, that includes most of them who say they care about my career (they didn't, they cared about their own careers more than mine). If there is something existing they can manage you with they'll use it because when it doesn't work it's either your problem or the framework's problem, not theirs.

4. (Cynical opinion) It's mostly just a facade for people who have authority over you (especially the ones who are technically less capable but somehow moved up) to show their bosses they are doing _something_. Like the new lead designer who decided to change the company brand color or the new head of department who thinks that changing the department's name is going to invigorate everyone's passion to do better work.

One thing that I have learned from the people who are smart and productive is that they have actually spent time to continuously develop and refine a system that works for them over time. They also try new things and just move on if it doesn't.

You probably have met a lot of amazing people if you have mostly been working with others so far. Just think about what the people you truly admire professionally do -- I'd bet that they don't talk about GTD and even if they do it's just an introduction to something remotely similar to what they do and have refined over time.

I know it can be difficult at work sometimes when (whether you know at that moment or not) people are offloading their responsibilities and pressure onto you (it's particularly bad if you are a very responsible person). However, if you believe that you usually have a reasonable amount of time to get things done, just ask yourself if you have done your job well and and delivered things on time. If you have, then the problem probably isn't you or GTD or some other framework that doesn't work for you.

A few weeks ago, during a one-on-one with my manager, I had an interesting realization about this topic.

I understood that my chaotic nature isn’t due to a lack of organization—it’s because I thrive in chaos. I can function well without strict structure because I don’t need it to stay effective.

My manager, on the other hand, is the complete opposite. She needs everything documented and noted, not because she’s inherently more organized, but because the absence of structure creates anxiety and discomfort for her.

She actually complimented me on my ability to navigate uncertainty, to adapt without needing full control, and still feel capable and at ease.

It felt like an epiphany, shifting the way I perceive this entire topic.

I am on the same boat, passed 40 and after trying everything, I peaked with Obsidian. Just MD files and a lightweight notes IDE

You have many great replies about specific methods - but I found the most important tip wasn't where I was looking. Tools, software, books, methods all can come later. The most important part for me was creating the time for cleanup and organization. Physically and mentally.

Jumping from thing to thing without time set aside for "stop, reflect, adjust" makes it very challenging to make changes. I realized that you don't become organized if you don't spend time on it. Picking up physical messes. Thinking about what was important in your day vs what you got done. How the week went. Writing it down.

I found it was only after I started consistently putting time aside to catchup, think and adjust that I started being able to consider if any particular methods would be helpful. Parts of GTD have helped me (capture first) - but the aha moment really came before that.

If you want to be organized, put time into reflecting and adjusting (eg. organizing) the critical parts of your life. Once a day, every day. Maybe more than once a day. Then use one of those to reflect on the week. Not reading about it or endlessly sorting the books on your shelf, but focusing intently on stuff you'll remember 20 years from now.

The problem everyone are trying to solve is ”I have too much to do”.

All these solutions are band-aids akin to sticking a queue in your backend to try and cope with constant overload.

The simplest way to get organized I think is to say ”no” more often, and stop caring about crap.

GTD has one good idea, and that is that first step ”can you do it in under five minutes, do it now” or however it’s written. The rest is procrastination.

After seeing this and the stories after this comment, I... can relate to this.

I went from being unorganized to somewhat organized, then went back and now it's a case of "I'll keep things organized when it makes sense, but the rest is up to my memory, the natural way of doing things and wherever I left it."

I'm just going to try the next thing, see and adopt whatever works, but if it doesn't, I'll just stick to whatever does.

At the end of the day, it's up to our brains on whether to use systems or not and if they fit our needs or if it doesn't.

I think you're right and I have a few systems I've implemented that work with me not against me. For example I organise my kitchen drawers by putting things in higher drawers if I use them a lot and lower if I don't. If I "mess up" it doesn't matter: things I use more will naturally rise to the top. Similarly spices, I return the spices to the cupboard at the front of the shelf and a natural ordering by usage develops over time.

In software terms the closest is that I switched to kiss launcher on my phone. It just shows you the apps in the order you used them, plus one horizontal line of faves and one vertical line of widgets. It can also learn what you do but I prefer the basic ordering. I use zoxide in the terminal for navigation and on the desktop I just press Super and search for everything.

I'm the same way. I just send myself emails when I need to save or keep track of something. I throw in some keywords that I'll know I'll search for in the future if/when I need to reference back. This works 95%+ of the time. For physical documents I need to save, I'll just keep it in a stack and periodically throw them in my scanner and save them in one PDF file and put it in a google drive folder for searching (using AI or otherwise) later. Most of these documents I never need again anyway, but at least they're there.

I know the organization people are probably horrified by all this, but I know myself well enough by now to know that I just won't stick to any system more complicated than this. The most important thing is that all that stuff is there, somewhere, if I really need it. I am essentially saving the effort up-front that I will 100% have to do in exchange for a little more effort later down the line which I probably won't have to do because I usually never need any of that stuff anyway.

I gave up. find and grep work really well together, so that's what I use now. I try to add keywords to filenames of important files so I have a chance of finding them again. I do the search incrementally, e.g. find ./ | grep -i insurance. then if there's a load of stuff, I'll try to narrow it down with further greps or with -v.

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>can handle GTD occasionally but reverts to chaos

Same. So I ended up "inventing" what I call miniGTD.

My system got so big and unwieldy, that I threw it away, and just wrote down the most important stuff from memory.

Then I realized that I can just do that every morning. Fill half a page with the most relevant goals and their associated Next Actions. And that's the whole system.

Here's a screenshot: https://files.catbox.moe/jq0u8z.png

It certainly doesn't meet David Allen's criterion of 100%-ing it. But it gives you 80% of the bang for under 20% of the buck!

Rewriting from memory works as a natural filter for priority and urgency. Stuff might slip through the cracks, so when I'm done writing, I just turn to the previous day's page to see if I forgot anything.

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Also, you might want to read Leo Babauta's Zen to Done (ZTD), which fixes most of the issues I've had with GTD. I ended up reinventing most of ZTD on my own, and then smacked myself when I finally read the book, because I had downloaded it 15 years earlier and failed to read it ...

...Also also worth mentioning Scott Young's Weekly/Daily Goals (ZTD has this too) and Cal Newport's system (based entirely around the calendar). They would make David Allen cringe, but they work really well for a lot of people!

no, he is selling lifestyle