Applying JD System to Email Organization

10-19 Concepts 11 Core Concepts
1

Hello everyone,

I hope you’re all doing well.

I’ve recently started using the Johnny Decimal (JD) system, and it’s been working wonderfully! However, I’ve encountered some design challenges while trying to apply it to my email accounts.

The Problem:

When organizing emails using the JD system, I’ve found that two levels of depth may not be sufficient. For instance, I attend multiple conferences each year, categorized under [XX] Conferences & Events. Each conference is assigned an ID, such as [XX.YY].

The challenge arises with the variety of emails related to each conference — hotel bookings, flight reservations, registration confirmations, etc. On my computer, this isn’t an issue, as I can name the files appropriately within a single ID folder. However, grouping all these emails into just one ID folder in my email account makes it difficult to find specific information quickly.

Creating a separate category for each conference seems excessive, as I attend more than five conferences annually.

Proposed Solution:

To address this, I’ve come up with the following approach.

I would organize my email folders like the JD system (with Areas, Categories, and IDs), but add an additional folder level to represent specific actions or documents. For example:

Category: XX Conferences & Events
ID: XX.YY Johnny Decimal Conference (this would be a great idea btw!!)
Action Folders:
    Hotel Reservation
    Flight Reservation
    Registration
    Etc.

Each new email folder would have like 1 or 2 email conversations. Doing it this way would mean that there shouldn’t be any emails in the ID folder, but in the “action” folders.

This would mimic the traditional JD folder structure on my computer:

Category: XX Conferences & Events
ID: XX.YY Johnny Decimal Conference
Files inside ID folder:
    Hotel_Reservation.pdf
    Flight_Reservation.jpg
    Registration.pdf
    Etc.

Suggestions:

I’m reaching out because I’m open to any suggestions on how to improve my email organization. As I don’t receive a massive volume of emails, I believe the JD system is well-suited for my needs.

One problem I’ve encountered when applying this solution is that the Outlook managing email solution proposed here (12.01 Managing email • Johnny.Decimal) will not work as the emails are under a new folder and not their ID folder.

I’ve considered adding an additional ID layer [XX.YY.ZZ], but I’m trying to keep my JD system as orthodox as possible.

Thank you in advance for your insights!

2

This sounds okay to me. As long as you’re fine with the overhead of that extra folder: creating it, navigating to it. But the end result for sure is neater.

In fact we did essentially this in the life admin pack, under travel:

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For some reason in Outlook I always just created category folders at the top level, i.e. I didn’t put them in an area folder. They sort fine, and I found one less click to be useful in that context. Perhaps because in Outlook you’re dealing with so much volume — way more volume than your file system — that extra folder felt like it was getting in the way. So that might help.

3

I have a controversial view on this, but here me out as I’ve been using email since 1990 and I’ve had my own registered domains since 1996, so I’ve been doing this a long time.

The best advice I can give with email is not to sort it at all.

The model I’ve been using for nearly 35 years has worked pretty much flawlessly, and it’s actually the model that gmail uses under the hood.

Basically you create a rule to dump a copy of every email you receive and every email you send into a single folder called “Archive”. You can then use the extremely powerful search functions in most email clients when you need to find something. Gmail, the old Outlook and the Mac’s mail.app all do this very well.

Then as you deal with each email in your inbox, you just delete it. Simple and instant. You know that you’ve got a copy of everything in your archive and now you have removed two large cognitive loads.

  1. You don’t need to think about where to put a particular email, but more importantly…
  2. You don’t even need to decide if you need to keep a particular email.

The power of this approach can’t be understated. If there’s an email in your inbox, you deal with it and if not, you must have already dealt with it and you know it’s in the archive if you need it again.

While you can set this up with a local email rule, you need to be sure that it works for all your devices. If you have a rule on your laptop that does the archiving and then you delete an email from your phone before the laptop had a chance to grab the email and put it in the archive, you could be in trouble. You can deal with this in two ways.

  1. Setup the rule on the server (gmail, your ISP’s web mail service, etc) and have the archive sit in the cloud alongside your inbox. This is the easiest and this is how gmail actually works already. (It keeps everything in a big archive and when you delete the email you just remove it from the inbox “view”, but it’s still there.)
  2. You create a second email account with your ISP or Gmail or any other mail service and configure a rule on your main email service to forward a copy of everything that arrives in the inbox to the new account. You can then pull that email from your new account to one archive location - like on your laptop.

The disadvantage of 1) is that you are limited by how much space your email service gives you, but the advantage is you have access to your email everywhere.

The disadvantage of 2) is that you can only search your archive from your laptop, but the advantage is that you’ll never run out of space. This is what I do and I rarely find that I really need something from my archive when I’m out and about and I always keep the last year in the cloud anyway - this is advanced mode.

After 35 years of never deleting a single email, ever, my archive, including attachments is now sitting at 115.1 Gigabytes! I have one folder for every year. As I’m using mail.app on a Mac, search is still almost instant, because everything is indexed by Spotlight. If I select all the archives for every year to render one massive view of everything I’ve ever sent or reviewed, it looks like this…

Alex's Combined Email Archives

Using this approach I very, very, very rarely can’t find an email I know I’ve received (maybe once every few years it will happen) and as Johnny can testify, it’s like a superpower having access to everything going back to the 1990s.

This is the real benefit of this approach - you won’t know what you need until you need it and if you decided not to file it years earlier, you’re out of luck. You would be surprised how often you can search for things you never would have kept if you had to choose to keep it. I have some great examples if anyone is interested.

If you want more information on how to make this all work, more examples of what the superpower looks like in real life, more information on some advanced concepts like categories in your inbox, how to do advanced searches so you can find anything, or anything else, just shout out here.

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2 Likes
4

I like this!

  • I have all emails in one folder, with tags (Simplytag).
  • And I use search when I need to find something, often in combination with tag.
  • But this approach - the way you describe it @Alex - would give me a leg up in terms of spending less time tagging, and more time getting things out of the way. I might try it this. :slight_smile:
  • The only “downside” is - that with tags, I can pull out complete history of something related to an case/issue or a product. (Sometimes I need to export / take out the history of an issue). But that requires that I’m up to speed with tagging (which is not always the case). And it’s maybe 1 out of 100. So I might just invest a little more time tracking down relevant emails from that issue, and I’ll still be ahead.
5

Your last point is very interesting and I’d be keen to explore it further. I posit that with a good knowledge of the search syntax you can pretty much find anything you need. I’m happy to share some examples, and I’d love to see some of your examples too.

6

I use Outlook.

I always type my searches. It’s fast enough, and I’m used to it. I see my co-workers are using the mouse to edit search criteria, but I experience it faster by typing.

As in:

from:“me” to:“recipient” things I want to search for

(if I know/remember specific words from the email og subject)

  • or I know that there was an attachement, I’ll add

hasattachments:yes

and if I also remember it was a pdf, I add

ext:pdf

That should narrow down the search.

I am also able to leverage Simplytag to combine with what I type.

By invoking hotkey Ctrl+Shift+S - Simplytag opens a dialog where I can quickly (with keyboard) insert one or more tags to further narrow down the search.

Example; i can add tags “ProductA” and/or “FacilityB” to the search. What happens then is that Outlook adds this in the search query.

If I want to go really wild, I have an Excel sheet (cheat to avoid having to type out the entire query with Outlook search operators) where I can enter dates, and I can search only for emails SENT or RECEIVED within a certain range of dates.

I then use XYPlorer to drag-and-drop the e-mails I wish to extract as .msg files to a folder.

XYPlorer manipulates the filename, so I get the exported files in chronological order:
Described in page 62, here

(Syntax of filename when drag-dropping messages can be customized in XYPlorer.)

The use-case for such export is if I need to send/show somebody else the history of some correspondence regarding some issue. I then drop it to a OneDrive folder and share the .msg files in chronological order - instead of bombarding them with forwarded e-mails.

7

Would you mind sharing that with the community?

8

Here is an English version - with comments.

(The date format might need to be adapted to whatever your Outlook uses. I use English, hence I query “sent:” and “received:”, but these words might need to be adapted to whatever language you are using in Outlook)

EDIT: Download link:
See johnny’s post below

9

The link is dead?

The transfer you requested has been deleted.

10

@fender Shoot this over by email and I’ll put it on my server.

11

@trintera > I tried updating the link.

EDIT: Now realized it says “File will be deleted after download”

I’ll send it to Johnny.

@johnnydecimal > Done, mail sent.

12

https://files.johnnydecimal.com/D85/33/33.16/OUTLOOK_DATE_RANGE_SEARCH_QUERY-cheat-sheet.xlsx

2 Likes
13

I’ve just started using JD, so I might be off base, but what I currently do is I have rules for every category in my system that’s relevant in emails (11 - Operations, 12 - Inventory, 15 - Staff and so on) and some IDs as well (12.03 - Inventory Problems).
The types of email I get at work are fairly unchanging (I’m in retail) so the rules work really well to shape my inbox.
At home, I use Superhuman (though my deal will expire in a couple of months and I will stop because 30$ US per month is just outrageous even if it is amazing) and the keyboard shortcuts allow me to go through my stuff so quick I don’t need sorting at all honestly.