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Comment by bytelane

4 years ago

Thank you for this! I have been working at the same company for 8+ years, and I have accumulated a lot of stuff over the years. I have trouble finding anything these days. The stuff I /can/ find is because I have multiple copies sprinkled in different directories.

After reading this post, I have started to organize my documents and projects according to the description. I feel like this is going to be helpful not only so that I can find what I'm looking for, but so that I don't have 4 copies of every giant source code repo taking up my disk space.

I do have one question: in the examples, the category shows "40-49 BlahBlah", but the subcategory goes "41 Taxes, 42 Expenses, etc." Is there a reason why X0 is skipped? Is this so you have room for something you might have forgotten?

> In the example we’ve been using, 20-29 was Administration but our first category was 21 Company registration. What happened to 20?

> We reserve these numbers for ‘management & meta’ information about the category. Although I hardly ever use them, it’s rare that I have more than nine categories in an area. I don’t miss the wasted number, but I always appreciate it when I need it.

[0]: https://johnnydecimal.com/concepts/what-about-00-09/

  • :-)

    Also recently I’ve been starting my IDs at `.11`. Same idea — sometimes you really want stuff to always appear ‘at the front’ and this lets you achieve that.

    In the project system I’m setting up now, for example, we’re using the PMP methodology [0]. This very neatly divides up in to:

        21 Scope
        22 Schedule
        23 Cost
        ...
        29 Stakeholder
    

    For each of these, you have a [x] Management Plan. They always sit at `2x.01`. Other mandatory artefacts will live in the zeros.

    Then I won’t fill up the zeros, I’ll skip straight to .11 in each category for the things that are ‘personal’ to this particular project. I’m expecting that they will not be standard across projects.

    [0]: https://www.pmi.org/certifications/project-management-pmp