How would this work?

Halloo! Just signed up for this group because I’m so intrigued. So far, I’m pretty sure I understand the way everything might be structured with personal reference files, client and work projects, but I’m scratching my head with how I might organise my current writing directory.

In there, I have folders for each year (and a pre-2000 folder), folders for courses, writing work, reference documents, etc. I have some duplication of files already as occasionally I will copy a file over from one year to the next as I continue to work on a story, or even grab one from the past. I need a way of organising these files so I can easily find things but also avoid duplication. How would you organise, for example, a short story that was written on a course? I’d want to keep it with the other course notes but also potentially have it more discoverable as a short story to work on in its own right.

Even though Johnny decimal seems like a great system I’m wondering if a basic index might better serve my purpose, though the thought of adding so many files into an index doesn’t exactly make me want to leap to it!

Hey Jess! Good to have you here.

Hmmmmmm this is an interesting one. I tend to think – but by no means am I decided – that JD is a better fit where you’ve got a system with all sorts of stuff going on. That’s why most of us often can’t find stuff, right? Like on a project at work there’s so many different parts to it so you have to be structured or you’re bound to be lost.

Your case is a little more domain-bound. It’s a little bit like the case where people say “how should I organise my movies?”, and I always say, “like you always have! Use the alphabet”.

I think let’s try to re-frame your question: do you currently have a problem, and if so, what is the primary problem that you’re trying to solve?

I guess that’s it. So let’s ask … does the overall JD concept, with categories of things (which we then group by area, but really it’s the category that does the heavy lifting), make sense for your thing?

Or does your thing feel more like a mesh network where everything potentially connects to everything else? Less like a tree and more like a web? In which case something like tags might be more appropriate?

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Hi Johnny! Thanks for your quick reply. I was intrigued by the system but wasn’t sure if there was another way I could envisage the structure I already had, that I just wasn’t seeing! Tags seems like a good way; I’ll need to look into that to see how I could make that happen. I guess you could potentially set up tags using a decimal system so that your searching / tagging would be more consistent. I’ll need to ponder this further! :grinning:
In any case, looking forward to learning more here in the forums.

Thanks again!
Jess

@Jess look into Obsidian.md. It’s a software that allows you to create a personal knowledge repository. So, e.g. you’d have your course notes that link to your story which is also stored centrally to avoid duplication. If you want to include your story in another close or story you’d just link to it.

The Obsidian community is very active and would find lots of help there. In fact that’s how I learned about JD in the first place.

@ks84 Thanks for the suggestion! I had looked at Obsidian a while ago, but hadn’t considered it as a way of managing my notes and other “digital artefacts” :smiley: – I’ll go take another look!

@Jess You might find this video interesting https://youtu.be/kfyA1UTo1sI

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@ks84 Thanks heaps for that link, it looks really great! (Watching it now :D)

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