I’m wanting to set up Johnny.Decimal for future school notes as well as for stuff like worldbuilding. Unfortunately, I can’t always predict whether something needs to be a category or a bucket, and usually by the time I know that a certain subject requires far more than a single category’s space (i.e. the files in the category are getting close to/above 100), it’s too late to change the category.
The current solution is to change the files in the category from JD.ID Filename
to JD.YYMMDD Filename
schema, but this is
- Ugly
- A bit of a time commitment
How have you handled similar situations?
In this scenario, which is hopefully fairly unusual, I think just going past .99
up to .100
and onwards is okay.
The only thing this breaks is the neatness of the numbers: two, decimal, two. But when you think about it semantically, logically, nothing has actually changed. Really my limit of 99 on IDs is kinda arbitrary. It’s borne of neatness.
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I think the JD system is powerfully elegant: the problem is applying it to our digital, multi-platform world. I routinely store stuff in evernote, apple notes, todoist, etc.
I just had this happen to me. I kept going past 100. However, that messed up the folder structure, because the .100 file came after .10, and not after .99. I had to renumber my folders to say, 52.0001 - 52.0099 and then did 52.0100. I’ve dealt with 100 situations here but I can honestly deal in the next year with 1000 actions that will need a folder number, so I just went ahead and put the 3 0s. I’ll give you that it’s not pretty, but it is what it is….and helps me keep a chronological order.
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Something that just occurred to me is that I could start using letters. Not really changing it to hexadecimal, but letting the tens column be a letter will keep the sort order in my file explorer while keeping the two-digit system and not having to reformat all my prior notes.
- 10 Some Bucket
- 11 Some Category
- 11.01 - 11.99
- 11.a0 - 11.a9
- 11.b0 - 11.b9
- 11.c0 - 11.z9
Of course, I’ll have to do a massive rewrite to my Obsidian Templater scripts because int.toString()
won’t get me so close to what I want, but I think that’s worth it.
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