Johnny Decimal System

The Johnny Decimal system is a simple method for organising your digital life.

It works like this:

• Divide your life into approximately ten buckets and number them.
• Divide each bucket into another ten.
• Items within each folder get numbered with the folder number, a decimal point and a sequential number eg 03.01 Holiday Packing List. every item therefore has a unique ID that is easy to remember.
• Nothing is ever more than two folders deep.

Add multiple projects with a three digit code: 1 letter, 2 numbers eg A03

Example from the website

10-19 Finance
11 Tax Returns
12 Payroll
12.01 Jan '23 payroll
12.02 Feb '23 payroll
13 Bookkeeping

20-29 Administration
21 Company Registration
22 Contracts
22.01 Cleaning contract
22.02 Office lease
23 Staffing

30-39 Marketing
etc

The hierarchy is as follows:

10-19 Area
11 Category
12 Category
12.01 Unique thing

Additional Advice

00-10 reserve this section for stuff about the filing system.
00 Index
00.00 The Index
01 Inbox
02 Notes
03 To do & Checklists
04 Bookmarks
05 Templates
06
07
08 Someday
09 Archive

10-19 An area of interest
10 reserve for system information about the category
11 First category in this area

I struggled to implement this system for two reasons:

• difficulty dividing my life into ten buckets
• folders ended up more than two deep

Source: https://johnnydecimal.com/