Meadowhawk Blog

Getting Organized

I'm not very good at organizing, especially in meat space. In the past year I've been spending some time to improve on this issue! The results are a nicely organized electronics work station (more later) and an ever improving digital organization system.

I've tried everything from Evernote to OneNote for work (They cruelly force windows on me). To no avail, it's all been mess. Enter Obsidian, the highly customizable free tool that uses MarkDown for notes. It's got everything I need and I have been loving it for the past couple years.

Now my Obsidian vault, wasn't quite perfect until a few months ago when I got serious about leveraging features like linking an tagging which moved it much closer to the goal! Last week, a good friend who shares my passion for attempting to conquer this issue dropped me a link to Johnny.decimal and that has really locked in my final solution!

The concept is pretty simple, apparently originating from the Dewy Decimal system using metaphoric relationships between shelves boxes and files. It also works perfectly for default sort orders so things say in order. No more prepending names with '_' to get things to the top of a folder, just make it 00.00 and it stays at the top.

Now to be honest, I did not dive all the way down the rabbit hole and I don't use the system exactly as presented, but it's a system of organization not dogma so make use of what you need! As shown in the screenshot, I have organized my notes into what I work on most at the top.

My shelves are organized as follows:

00 Home - Admin stuff
01 Todos
04 Temp - a place to park random notes etc in a spur of the moment and moved later. Use with caution!
10-19 Projects - My top spot when I'm working on Coding projects, its a complex shelf which contains a lot of shelves, boxes, folders and files! This oen is under construction currently.
20-29 Maker - A separate space for electronics and physical projects (I need to move 3D printing here)
30-39 Personal - Private Journal, household stuff, financials etc. (kinda boring stuff really)
40-49 Business - you get it.
50-59 Learning - Notes taken from all sorts of learning and not specific to a project etc.
60+ Unused. - its good to have expansion.

The cool part is that every category number is static so you can develop number relationships to things you do often to simplify finding things. I also have plenty of expansion space though I do wonder if I should be adding a extra 0 to teh first decimal place '11.001' instead of '11.01' there are a few folders where this might become an issue some day, might was well plan for some expansion now right? As you can see this is a garden that needs regular weeding, but with the decimal system I feel like the 'weeding' becomes a lot simpler to manage.

Below Image(My layout with Johnny.Decimal)

My Obsidian note taking app config.

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Software Engineer, Maker, Tiny House builder, artist, hiker, gamer.

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