Organizing the things in our life

Life happens.

As it happens, we accumulate things, artifacts, things we create, things we buy, things we get. Some of this is, digital. Some is things outside our computers. When it comes to finding these things, we are dependent on search, or our memories.

Life happens. Things accumulate. We must organize things, on a fairly regular basis, if we are to have any sense of the things we own. And, if we are to have any chance of finding these things when needed.

If you have a empty chair at home, it will accumulate things on it. It may start with a bag, or a shirt you just put on it. In no time, it would accumulate all sorts of crap on it. And you would think. What happened here?

I remember reading an article about college students being unaware of what a filesystem was. They were just saving things by default on their desktops, or documents or whatever. And they had no way of finding these things. They would just search. They had no concept of a filesystem, of hierarchy, of folders and files and so on.

I shuddered when I read it. No, really.

I work in IT, so I assume that I would know things a bit deeper than the rest. But people don't know about file systems, and I'm worried about making sure everything is organized just the perfect way?

my digital garden(s)

I have an Obsidian vault. This is where I write, everything. This is where I think about things. I have worked on organizing it. I recently changed [[202503062203 How I use Obsidian|How I use Obsidian]].

I also have a 2TB iCloud drive. I tried, as I did with my Google Drive before it, to make sure things stayed where they should. I named things. I moved things around. Eventually, now, it is in a state now, where I have to search things. I don't know where my passport scan is! It's preposterous!

Enter, the [[202504061625 Johnny Decimal System|Johnny Decimal System]]. I first came across it on [[2025-02-21 Fri]], wrote about it in [[202502161708 NL48]] and again came across it on Installer#76.

The first time I had read about it, I had thought, this is interesting, but I did not make any changes. The second time, while reading Installer, I thought, well why not.

[[202504061625 Johnny Decimal System|Johnny Decimal System]] is a way to organize the things in your life. You assign an ID to everything. Then store everything where it should go. Once you do, you can either have an index which helps you get where you need to go, or you search for it. You would know where something is supposed to be. And that thing will be there.

The magic of the system is that each level of hierarchy you can have a maximum of 10 things at each level. This means you avoid the problem of having too many sub-folders under a folder, which is one step away from you not wanting to organize.

the struggle

The thing that I am struggling with, is this: I like the way my Obsidian vault is. There are things I would like to change, like for example having an easier way to track all the things I have posted to my blog. But I like how it works, I like how it gets out of the way.

I don't like where the iCloud drive is. It is a mess. As I said earlier, I don't know where my passport scan is. I need to know where it is. I need to know where to go. I hate searching for it in Finder, Notes, whatever.

JDS is supposed to incorporate everything. The Obsidian vault has a few things, which should exist in this JDS somewhere. There is overlap, is what I am trying to say.

I'm overthinking this, ain't I?

I should just start creating this structure and leave the obsidian vault as it is.