← Back to context

Comment by bluechair

1 day ago

I really appreciate what Johnny Decimal is trying to solve - we're all struggling with digital organization and the appeal of a clean, simple system is undeniable.

Having implemented similar approaches across several teams, I can say it works beautifully for personal projects or well-defined small team efforts. But here's the challenge: most real-world information refuses to fit into single categories. A technical spec might be simultaneously system architecture, compliance documentation, etc. While the Johnny Decimal strength is its rigid simplicity, that's also its weakness when facing actual organizational complexity.

Rather than fighting these natural interconnections, I've found more success embracing them - using approaches that allow documents to exist in multiple contexts while maintaining the Johnny Decimal core goal of findability/searcability. The solution to chaos might not be enforcing a decimal hierarchy, but rather building systems that match how information actually flows in modern organizations.

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.