A system to organise your life
Johnny.Decimal is designed to help you find things quickly, with more confidence, and less stress.
You assign a unique ID to everything in your life.
![A diagram showing the structure of a Johnny.Decimal number. The number is 16.37 and it explains how the '1' is an area, which groups related categories in sets of 10. The '16' is the category, in this case 'travel'. And '37' is just an ID; they start at 01. The title of this, our 37th travel thing, is 'Trip to NYC'.](/img/_new/11.01.00-trip-to-nyc-mobile-1591x1697.png)
![A diagram showing the structure of a Johnny.Decimal number. The number is 16.37 and it explains how the '1' is an area, which groups related categories in sets of 10. The '16' is the category, in this case 'travel'. And '37' is just an ID; they start at 01. The title of this, our 37th travel thing, is 'Trip to NYC'.](/img/_new/11.01.00-trip-to-nyc-desktop-2825x1694.png)
These IDs help you stay organised. They impose constraints that make it harder to get lost. And you create your own index to link everything in your digital life together.
The system is free to use. There’s a website — which you’re reading — a blog, and a really helpful forum. I answer every email personally.
Quick Start: ‘Life admin’
In July 2024 we released the Quick Start: ‘Life admin’ pack. We all have ‘life admin’ to organise: the day-to-day stuff that isn’t a hobby, isn’t your job, it’s just … life.
We spent a hundred hours figuring this out so that you don’t have to.
![A screenshot of my Finder, showing the folders as described in this article.](/img/_new/11.01.00-life-admin-1266x710.png)
The problem
In real life, if you stored your stuff in piles of badly-labelled boxes you’d never find anything again.
If you put those boxes in boxes, in boxes, you’d never know which box to open to find the next box. It would be chaos.
But I just described how you save your computer files.
![A screenshot of a MacOS Finder window showing a bunch of folders, nested terribly, all named similarly. It's a confusing mess.](/img/_new/11.01.01-susans-messy-files-862x1856@2x.png)
The solution
Imagine your computer as a physical storage space. We can’t put everything on the floor, so we buy some shelves.
If we had a limitless number of shelves, we wouldn’t know which one to look on when we wanted to find something. So we get ten shelves.
We decide to dedicate each shelf to an area of our life.
The first will contain everything to do with our life administration
. The second is for our home business
, and the third covers our music
hobby.
(Notice that we don’t try to use all ten shelves. There’s room to grow.)
![A drawing of three storage shelves. Think your classic Ikea 'Billy' bookshelf. At the top they're labelled 'life administration', 'home business', and 'music'. They're empty.](/img/_new/11.01.02-shelvesx3-empty-900x700.png)
Each shelf has space for ten boxes. So we need to decide how to categorise the things that we’re going to store.
In life administration
we decide on a box each for finance
, health
, house
, education
, technology
, and travel
.
![The first shelf, labelled 'life administration'. It now holds six storage boxes, labelled 'finance', 'health', 'house', 'education', 'technology', and 'travel'. There's room for 4 more boxes.](/img/_new/11.01.03-shelf-no-numbers-with-boxesx6-700x900.png)
Your categories might be different. Maybe you own a car, or have kids. You design your system to suit your life.
Our boxes have space for a number, so we label everything neatly.
![The same shelf and boxes, but now the labels have numbers at the front. The shelf is labelled '10-19 Life administration', and the boxes are labelled '11 Finance', '12 Health', '13 House', '14 Education', '15 Technology', and '16 Travel'.](/img/_new/11.01.04-shelf1019-with-numbered-boxesx6-700x900.png)
(I’ll explain on a later page why the first box isn’t number 01
or 10
.)
File your stuff in folders
Now we have categorised boxes. Let’s organise our travel insurance.
We put our documents in folders, and store those folders in the boxes.
![Drawing of a manila folder. It's labelled '16.02 Travel insurance' and contains two documents, labelled 'Policy 2022 - GoSafeTravel.pdf' and 'Policy 2023 - WorldCover.pdf'.](/img/_new/11.01.05-folder-1602-with-documents-698x725.png)
Every folder gets a number. This helps us keep track of them. We start at 01
, and give each new folder the next available number.
So the first item in our 16 Travel
category might be a trip we took: 16.01 Singapore, Jun 2022
.
The next item we file is 16.02 Travel insurance
.
![Drawing of a blue archive box. It contains our manila folders as labelled above. The box is labelled '16 Travel'.](/img/_new/11.01.06-box-16Travel-with-3-folders-699x574.png)
And this is exactly how we structure our file system.
![An annotated screenshot of the macOS Finder. It shows a neat folder structure with a parent folder '10-19 Life administration' containing the category folders as described above. Folder '16 Travel' is expanded to show it contains folder '16.02 Travel insurance'. Boxes are drawn around the area, category, and ID folders to show how they directly relate to the analogy of shelves, boxes, and manila folders.](/img/_new/11.01.07-susans-tidy-files-700x900.png)
The Johnny.Decimal ID
Each of our items now has a number. They’re always two digits, a decimal, and two digits.
16.02
22.06
31.17
This number is really useful.
It provides structure
The Johnny.Decimal ID tells us exactly where a thing is. The numbers before the decimal are the item’s category, and they define the structure of your system.
At a glance, you know what sort of thing the item contains. You’ll be astonished at how many of your category numbers you remember.
They’re easy to communicate
They’re short, memorable, and can be spoken out loud. Say it like “sixteen oh-two” or “thirty-one dot seventeen”.
This is really handy when you want to tell someone (including your future self) where a thing is.
Things stay where they are
The alphabet is a great way to organise a dictionary, but it’s a terrible way to organise your files.
Alphabetically, things move around as you create other things. So you never get a chance to develop muscle memory: you’re always hunting for what you want.
Numbers solve this problem. In our example above, the categories in area 10-19
aren’t alphabetical. They sort by the category number.
And so when we create a new category, 17 Aardvark collection
, nothing moves.
It imposes limits
Your computer will let you create any number of folders, anywhere you want.
It turns out this is a terrible idea.
The ‘no more than ten’ concept is at the heart of Johnny.Decimal.
When you start looking for a thing, you have no more than ten areas to choose from. Your thing must be in one of them: select the most appropriate and now you can ignore the others.
Now you have no more than ten categories to choose from. Repeat the process.
We’ve arrived in a folder with no more than one hundred IDs. If you created your thing recently, it’ll be one of the higher numbers. If you created it a while ago, it’ll be one of the lower numbers.
And things that you created together, stick together. The alphabet isn’t around to ruin the party.
Is this for home or work?
Anywhere you want. The concepts are the same no matter what you want to organise.
I like it! What next?
The rest of this website contains a detailed description of the system.
I’ve recorded a comprehensive video workshop with my partner Lucy. We use the 120+ page workbook to create her system from scratch.
If you ever need help there’s a forum, Discord, or you can contact me directly. I answer every message personally.
Click the link below to learn more about areas and categories. And welcome to the Johnny.Decimal family.