Comment by systemvoltage
4 years ago
This is not a good idea. Here is why:
- It only solves the problem of communicating categories to another person/party with its brevity. 12.03, easy to tell others. But all this at the expense of the following things.
- There is no way to immediately know what 12.03 means. One has to carry a look up table. You can replace it with 2 char code. For example, Finance.Taxes to FN.TX. Why use numbers? Is the ordering important? Why not use char?
- What if categories do overlap? GMail solved this problem in 2005 with labels instead of folders. You can apply multiple tags. Tagging should be enum-like, while tagging it should show what tags already exist so that you dont create two seperate but similar tags, for e.g. Finance and Finances.
- The author dismisses search without giving any reason. Search is amazing for digital documents that is not possible in physical analog documents. The focus should be on tags + keywords or description of the document. Then use something like Algolia search to find stuff - it is extremely forgiving and powerful. Ofcourse, I am just speaking in general about data organization, not specifically about OS-level folders. For that, I think we're stuck with what the OS provides as a search engine. On MacOS, I think Alfred does a better job of searching, haven't used it personally though.
- You can still assign a unique ID to the document, after all thats all the 12.03 scheme does. You can communicate precisely to Jane, "Hey Jane, the document is B75AE2". Jane types that in the search engine and there is no need to weed through folders.
- Additional metadata such as year, author, owner, etc. would help with search.
Instead of making search powerful and contextualizing it, the author expends his arguments on frivolous pursuit of Johnny.Decimal.
> Instead of making search powerful and contextualizing it, the author expends his arguments on frivolous pursuit of Johnny.Decimal.
What do you mean? How do you expect the author to "make search powerful"? This system is clearly in the context of a desktop/NAS filesystem, so they're stuck with whatever search systems exist. I honestly don't plan to use this system, and still feel the need to respond to this critique of it.
> Why use numbers?
Is answered here[0], to intentionally preserve ordering. You don't need to know what a plain ID means, because the only reason to use it is in context.
> What if categories do overlap?
There's nothing to stop you from tagging things in addition to using this system, if you want.
> dismisses search without giving any reason
Again, the author is not building their own document storage system.
> Additional metadata
This system is trying to solve the problem of having to supply a bunch of information to find a specific document.
Overall, there are lots of anecdotes here about how this system is useful in some situations. There's really no reason to sound so incredulous about it, even if it's not for you.
[0]: https://johnnydecimal.com/concepts/areas-categories/
Thanks for the color. I'll add one more thing against my argument:
- Discoverability: How many times have you opened glossary of a book just to explore and discover what else is in this book? Or open up a telephone directory with no specific person or business in mind, but a general category - "Shoe repair"? I think when things are organized by category, it allows for discoverability which would be difficult in a flat-searchable structure. Search works great when you know what you're looking for.
This can be half-solved by listing all items in a tag. Just that they'd appear in multiple tag archives as duplicates.
It seems to me that the purpose of numbers over character codes is to constrain the available identifiers to force you to define a fairly small set of broad areas (you only have ten) and drill down within that. When we release that restriction and go with categories I think that would lead to making more and more categories with fuzzy overlap -- and that overlap is precisely what you don't want in a filing system where (unlike labels or tags) each item must have one and only one location.
You went on to mention labels and tags as a solution there -- but the point here is to implement the structure in a common filing system, isn't it? Your point works fine for email, but for documents on my drive tags don't seem like a great approach because at least on my machine even though tagging is an option, it's not robust and reliable.
It didn't feel totally fair to say that the author needed to address search more; the ability to search doesn't go away when you implement a system like this, it's still a powerful tool available to you if you know what you're searching for. If you don't know, then a system like this is a good way to explore the topics and assets in your file tree in a way that allows you to discover collections of related files.
Lastly, true that you can assign a unique ID -- but again, isn't that introducing and solving a different problem? Uniquely addressing every file might be a really useful thing, but as you mentioned, there's no context clue to help you decode B75AE2 -- you would need a lookup table. Even then, presumably you would want to know which categories and families that file should belong to.
Overall, everything you listed here is thought provoking and I think points out some of the limitations of the way our digital file systems emulate physical ones, but this collection of objections isn't persuasive that the Johnny decimal system isn't a good idea.
> Your point works fine for email
I'm not sure it even works there. I have emails both categorized and tagged and still can't find anything between the thousands of work emails I get a week from coworkers, mailing lists, and automated systems. Any search brings up dozens to thousands of results.
> but for documents on my drive tags don't seem like a great approach because at least on my machine even though tagging is an option, it's not robust and reliable.
Not to mention that most users aren't interested in tagging every file they have. I never tag files. My emails can get auto-tagged by mail rules, but I don't have time to add tags to all of my files.
> For example, Finance.Taxes to FN.TX.
I've tried this (in the context of multiple projects [0]). Believe me, I've tried everything!
The reason the JD site is the way it is is that I've been doing this myself for a decade and this is what I consider to be The Best Way.
[0]: https://play.johnnydecimal.com/johnny.decimal/projects
This magical search system doesn't exist. In reality we have dozens of different search backends searching different stuff in different places with different relevance and UIs and results. And if you're going to use labels then this is the same thing, except picking 1 major label to organize with.
It's why we have street numbers to find buildings. It's why libraries use catalogs to locate books. It's why financial systems use a chart of accounts with numbers and prefixes to organize transactions.
Location is important, and abstracting that away into a giant file share with search only makes things worse.