I’m still in the sticky note phase out building out my system. I’m trying to keep the scope small enough that a full 00–99 will cover everything in my life: personal, work, media et al.
I have a big collection of digital files that I’ve collected over the years: cool guides, YouTube shorts, project inspirations, inspirational phrases, words that I like, tutorials, manuals. I could see doing something like…
50 Inbox
51 Manuals
52 Guides and tutorials
53 Collections
…but I worry that having an area that narrow will be the same as not having organization at all. A few things off the top of my unorganized folder:
Illustrated guide of 28 window styles
Collection of 200 5-swatch color palettes
NATO Phonetic Alphabet
Photo of Halloween photo for costume inspiration
It makes me wonder: how would you organize Wikipedia into an area? Is this a situation where I should utilize tagging?
Another way to think/ask about it: should “Illustrated guide of 28 window styles” be stored in a “Inspirations and guides” category inside of my “Homestead” area? Or is it better to keep all of the guides together in their own folder?
“Illustrated guide of 28 window styles” is something that can be easily assigned to something like Homestead, but “NATO Phonetic Alphabet” really doesn’t fit—but I think it’s useful and want to keep it.
I love the framing here. This reveals one of the limitations of JD: it was never designed to organise this sort of thing, really. As in, the scope of what you might want to organise is literally anything about anything in the world.
That’s going to be difficult to fit in to 10 categories. Possible! For sure. But difficult. So this leads us to something like tags.
My problem with tags is that now you just have to organise your tags. You didn’t solve the problem, you just moved it. But that’s okay, as long as we recognise it.
So I wonder if you might use the JD principles – shallow depth, restrictions on numbers of things, attempts at grouping by categorisation – to organise your tags?
I’d probably start with those high-level concepts in mind, and not worry about putting a number to stuff. Later, if it feels like it might help, you could add numbers.