I’ve been using JD for a while now (as an anthropology professor) and am mostly happy with how it’s working for me, with a couple sticking points. Here’s the organization I’ve ended up with (and some notes along the way). This is all in my Dropbox, and I use the folder structure there as my index (I know, bad, but it works for me!).
The key challenge I’ve found is figuring out how to match levels of abstraction between AC.IDs and actual stuff. What has worked best for me is, where I can, setting things up so that an AC.ID corresponds to some meaningful unit of work: so 41.01, 41.02, etc. are all articles I’ve worked on; 31.01 et al. are peer reviews; 34.01 and co. are each students I advise. That doesn’t really apply everywhere, but I think my system works best where I’ve found some “natural” mapping between AC.IDs and my work stuff. Also, this is totally not future-proofed, as I expect many of these things to pass 100 eventually; given how MacOS sorts, it’s not really a problem, and I’ve basically decided that I don’t care. An added bonus(?) is that the incrementing IDs give me a sense of how much work I’ve done, so I could easily tell you how many peer reviews I’ve done, how many articles I’ve published, etc. A lot of this ended up being modeled on how I need to divide things up for reporting back to the university on my CV, for reviews, etc.
One other thing is that there are some very big academic work differences when it comes to research and publishing structure—I’m in a field with much slower, larger publications than something like computer science, where people may be peer reviewing way more stuff, having different research inputs, collaboration structures, etc. People in my field typically have one or two huge projects going at any given time, which may last for nearly a decade, depending on how you count. So I haven’t really figured out a good way to manage that in JD, as you’ll see below (in 50-60).
00 Meta
00 Inbox
## various folders to hold things that need to be filed or dealt with
01 Notes
## Obsidian vault lives here, sort of reproduces some of my JD hierarchy
02 Publications
## Easily-accessible folder of my publications for sharing
... Other stuff that I want easy access to or that's about the system
10 Admin
11 CV
## Versions of my CV (dated, not AC.IDed; I maintain these in a Pages file that I continually update and print to PDF in here when needed)
... Various work documents, related to the departments I'm affiliated with
15 Student evaluations
## After each term, I dump them in here
16 Grants
16.01 [Each grant application; do these really belong in the project areas below? idk]
18 Tenure & Promotion
## Each formal review gets an ID in here; if I make it to Full Prof and never change institutions, this will only ever have 4 AC.IDs in it
19 Misc
20 Teaching
21 [Class name]
21.01 [One iteration of the class]
... et cetera, this will break once I develop more than 9 unique classes, but I usually teach the same 4 in rotation, so it should last me plenty long
30 Service
31 Peer reviews
31.01 [Each manuscript]
32 Rec Letters
32.01 [Each person who asks]
33 T+P Letters
33.01 [Each person I'm writing for]
34 Advising
34.01 [Each advisee]
35 Friendly feedback
## When people ask me for feedback on their work, I give it a slot in here
36 Committees
## Any service obligation committee, like hiring, prizes, etc., whether internal or external
... etc (includes consulting work, media appearances)
40 Writing [should probably be called "output"]
41 Articles + Chapters
41.01 [Each article or book chapter]
42 Talks
42.01 [Each invited talk]
43 Conference papers
43.01 [Each presentation—separate from 42 because they go in different sections of my CV]
44 Editing and organizing
## If I edit a special issue of a journal or organize a conference panel, that goes in here
45 Blog posts
## Was for things I write for other people's blogs, but I don't do that really anymore, so it's dead
47 Books
47.01 [Each book; won't be many of these, they might be better off as a higher-order thing that can have more internal structure?]
48 Events
## For things I don't need to write for, like roundtables, workshops, etc.
49 Miscellaneous
50 [Big project 1]
51 Admin
52 IRB
## Human subjects protection docs in here
53 Documents
## Stuff I collect from the field
54 Recordings
## Audio and transcripts of interviews, dated instead of AC.IDed
55 Notes
## Field notes and research memos, also dated
... And so on (the structure in here is probably the most discipline-specific thing, and I think I need to ask other anthropologists how they do it)
60 [Big project 2; same as 50 inside]
70 Personal
## Categories for things I do for fun, personal development stuff
80 Family [shared with my spouse]
81 IDs
82 Taxes
83 Medical [everyone has an ID in here]
84 Kids school stuff
... etc
90 House [also shared with spouse]
91 Property docs
92 Insurance
93 Home improvement projects
94 Mortgage stuff
95 Car
100 Archive
## The morass of things that I want to keep but don't want to re-sort
My big issue now is organizing those project areas, 50 & 60. The first one was done pre-JD, so I was just filing old work away. I don’t know if it’s actually that useful for organizing the work while I do it. Those huge projects are, in PARA terms, somewhere between a project and an area—they can last for a very long time and sort of subsume a lot of other things, but they do eventually end. Because they last so long, my instinct was to give them top-level status, and then just retire them when they’re done. So, I worked on 50 for the last decade; 60 is in progress. Now that 50 is wrapped, it will get shuffled off to my archive folder; whenever I start up a new big project (probably not for at least five years), it will get to be 50. So long as my pace stays about the same, I’ll never need more than 2 at once, and there won’t really be collisions, since each area will be dormant for several years between uses. I think that’s basically fine, but the internal structure isn’t that useful for me, and I mostly manage that stuff in Airtable now. But that’s an anthropology-specific thing.
Whew. Hope that’s useful (though obviously I was mostly doing it to try and wrap my own head around what I’ve been doing here…).
The pressure of the decimal system is actually great because it forces me to think about logical grouping of things rather than spreading out too much and having flat hierarchies.