Johnny Decimal System

Goal:: Organisation von digitalen Ressourcen
Known or created by:: John Noble

Description

Framework to organize digital stuff, not only for PKM, also for documents and other files.

divide everything into at most then buckets
- create at most 10 areas, each wich at most 10 categories
add a prefix of a decimal number to every area, category and item
- areas:
  - two-digit code
  - start at 10
  - increase by 10 (e.g., 10, 20, 30, ...)
- categories:
  - two-digit code
  - start at area number + 1 (e.g. 11 for area 10)
  - increase by 1
- items (optional):
  - <category identifier>.<item identifier> <name>
- Example: 10 Administration | 11 Contracts | 11.01 Office lease
you should not create folders below the categories

Recommendations:

order the areas and categories in the same order as frequency of access
create an index of your areas and categories (Tracking your numbers)
if it makes sense, it's ok to use dates as prefix (Exceptions to the rules)
it should be obvious which folder a files goes into → if a file could conceivably fit in two different folder, change the folders