For years, I’ve been a practitioner of [Getting Things Done (GTD)](https://gettingthingsdone.com/what-is-gtd/), a system that has undeniably helped me organize my tasks. It’s far from perfect —its quirks might warrant a future blog post— but it “works” for me. Procrastination still creeps in, though I can hardly blame GTD for that. Where it falls short, however, is in organizing documents. After years of experimenting with various systems, I’m left with a mess of documentation silos—disconnected, complex, and nearly impossible to navigate.

My documents aren’t just scattered; they’re organized (or disorganized) across multiple platforms with conflicting methods. Here’s what I’m dealing with:

With thousands of documents across dozens of platforms, GTD’s vague advice—“archive what you don’t use and call it reference”—feels inadequate. It’s an unwieldy system, and I’ve been searching for a better way.

Recently, a HackerNews post caught my eye: [Johnny Decimal](https://johnnydecimal.com/), pitched as a life-encompassing file organization system. Skeptical? Sure—it’s not the first to make such bold claims. I’ve glanced at Tiago Forte’s PARA method, but its obvious flaws turned me off despite having found some valuable “second brain” concepts in the mix. Johnny Decimal, though, piqued my interest with its simplicity and flexibility.

At its core, Johnny Decimal is a hierarchical numbering system for all your documents. Think tax filings, niece photos, project brainstorms, you name it. It’s agnostic about content; you could have a category like “Pet Food for Allergic Mascots” next to “Life Questions,” and it wouldn’t care. Instead, it offers guidelines to bring order to the chaos. Here’s what I find compelling:

The decimal system caps you at 10 categories per area and 100 IDs per category. At first, I thought, “No way that’s enough.” But as I tested it, I realized that exceeding those limits likely means I’m overcomplicating things.

Of course, no system is perfect. Here are the hurdles I anticipate:

I’m committing to Johnny Decimal for the rest of 2025. It’s a leap, but I’m hopeful. I’ll report back with the struggles (hopefully few) and the wins (hopefully many). For now, it’s a system that promises order in a life overflowing with digital debris. Too good to be true? We’ll see.