Johnny.Decimal is a system to organise your life. Find things, quickly, with more confidence, and less stress. It's free to use and the concepts are the same at home or work.
It’s obviously not for every body but I hate tags because they are so random and I would forget what I used. I’ve been successfully using the Johnny decimal guide for a few years because it’s intuitive for me. Your examples are obvious for me: health expense goes into “Receipts > Health” and travel expense goes into “Receipts > Travel.” If I had to use tags I would think of “health, personal, money, receipts, bank, medication, etc.” and it would be a real mental struggle to categorize everything and remember all the tags I have ever used. Also I use Joplin and Obsidian which make this kind of organization easier.
The “no more than ten” principles forces me to put everything in the most generic category I can think of. And if I need more than 10, it’s a new project or a new something. But I agree it’s not for everyone, it just happens to be suited with how I’m organized and how I think.
I get what you mean because I was the same way. I prefered a folder structure but I recently came around. Thing is that you don’t need to remember all tags. It will just help it narrow the field in a search but everything tagged health will be in the health bucket (folder) and everything in bank is in bank. if you filter for everything in bank and health you will get a smaller return to find what you want so basically remember more tags will help you find the item but just remembering a few will be good enough.
It’s obviously not for every body but I hate tags because they are so random and I would forget what I used. I’ve been successfully using the Johnny decimal guide for a few years because it’s intuitive for me. Your examples are obvious for me: health expense goes into “Receipts > Health” and travel expense goes into “Receipts > Travel.” If I had to use tags I would think of “health, personal, money, receipts, bank, medication, etc.” and it would be a real mental struggle to categorize everything and remember all the tags I have ever used. Also I use Joplin and Obsidian which make this kind of organization easier.
The “no more than ten” principles forces me to put everything in the most generic category I can think of. And if I need more than 10, it’s a new project or a new something. But I agree it’s not for everyone, it just happens to be suited with how I’m organized and how I think.
I get what you mean because I was the same way. I prefered a folder structure but I recently came around. Thing is that you don’t need to remember all tags. It will just help it narrow the field in a search but everything tagged health will be in the health bucket (folder) and everything in bank is in bank. if you filter for everything in bank and health you will get a smaller return to find what you want so basically remember more tags will help you find the item but just remembering a few will be good enough.