Johnny Decimal
Decimal organization is a good system... but it&#x27;s explained here in a completely obnoxious way that makes you want to hate it.<p>Firstly, I strongly recommend just reading up on Dewey Decimal[0] (which is what JD cribs almost everything conceptually from), there&#x27;s a decent explanation about it on Wikipedia. Should help you &quot;get&quot; the categories you might want to make a bit more.<p>Secondly, don&#x27;t marry yourself to JDs limitations. The site likes to evangelicize about some things that <i>really</i> aren&#x27;t as important as you might think. Feel free to ignore something if it doesn&#x27;t work for you - in particular the &quot;no subfolders&quot; rule might just... not be worthwhile to follow.<p>Personally I&#x27;ve always pretty much ignored this rule - if you look at Dewey, the left hand of the number is meant to be a classification for the broad <i>category</i> while the number on the right is meant for the broad <i>project</i>. In other words, applying a decimal organization system to specific files? Yeah not what it&#x27;s meant for, don&#x27;t do that.<p>Even in a library, where Dewey is used, an individual books Dewey Classification isn&#x27;t actually unique to that book. For example all books on MySQL will have the same Dewey Class.<p>Build it as a system that works for you, don&#x27;t try to forcefully refit your system to match the explanation of this website. Also, <i>don&#x27;t</i> use it for small projects. That&#x27;ll just make it a bigger mess than it&#x27;s worth. Stick a small project in a bigger folder system, it&#x27;ll work way better that way.<p>As for mental mapping - keep a readme file to just list the broad categories in the top of the structure, it&#x27;ll help a lot. The site recommends spreadsheets but really, that&#x27;s wayy overkill and will just cause dumb overhead each time you have to add a file.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dewey_Decimal_Classification" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dewey_Decimal_Classification</a>