I’ve literally just discovered Johnny Decimal this afternoon and I’ve read through the website and forum.
What’s recommended for a file system that incorporates personal and freelance business with many clients and many projects? How do the 100 project number work in relation to the more basic system for personal?
Any advice?
If you have “many clients and many projects” you’ll almost certainly need to use the 3-digit projects.
I’d keep one ‘project’ for your personal life. It should easily fit within one, try to keep it simple.
For the freelance stuff, try to develop a structure that you can just copy/paste when you get a new client/project. I’d guess that each client would get its own project number but this will depend on the nature of your work.
I need to develop/publish some templates for this sort of thing. Am interested in what you come up with if you can share it?
I do wonder whether it would be useful to keep your clients sorted alphabetically while still assigning them a number, a bit like how I explain in this post?
Amazing, thanks for such a detailed response. Going to continue on with my planning phase.
Keeping a template in your file system might be really helpful here, so you could break the rules by having the whole directory structure for a new project in like 000.00.01 project template. Then you can copy that folder to the JD root directory, rename it, and start filling it out without having to remember all the pieces or delete files from another project you copy/pasted.
Totally endorse this outrageous rule-breaking. 