My Journey with GTD and Document Chaos

For years, I’ve been a practitioner of Getting Things Done (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.

A Fragmented Organizational Mess

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

Orthogonal Classification Systems

In Google Docs, I use broad hierarchical categories like “personal,” “professional,” and “shared.” Trouble is, some documents belong in multiple buckets, creating overlap that in turn creates chaos. It is never easy to find anything except when you happen to know the exact title you saved it with. Then there’s OneDrive, where I take a completely different approach—work: related files sorted by client and project. The lack of alignment between these systems is a headache.

Too Many Platforms

Evernote holds notes and scribbles, physical notebooks tower over my shelves, Notion serves as a wiki and database, and Obsidian powers my Zettelkasten and diary. Photos? They’re split across Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, with each platform tagging faces like they’re swapping notes over beers. I’ve lost count of the places my documents live.

Scale and Complexity

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.

Johnny Decimal as a Potential Solution

Recently, a HackerNews post caught my eye: Johnny Decimal, 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.

What Is It?

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:

Universal Application

The same structure works across all platforms—Google Drive, Notion, you name it. Each item gets an ID, and I just note where it’s stored. Multi-platform IDs? No problem.

Elegant Simplicity

It’s just numbers—two levels of them—and a hefty dose of discipline. That’s it.

Built-In Limits

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.

The Challenges: Potential Pitfalls

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

Time Investment

Implementing this will take dozens of hours—busywork I’d face with any system. My bigger worry? What happens if I abandon it later?

Merging and Maintenance

Merging IDs or categories is part of the process, but it feels manual and clunky—reminiscent of GTD’s “archive everything” or PARA’s vagueness.

Hierarchical Limitations

Hierarchies struggle with overlap. A doctor’s note for work is personal, health-related, work-related, and maybe insurance-related too. Tags solve this; rigid hierarchies don’t.

Collaboration Woes

I can organize my stuff, but convincing others to adopt the same system—let alone the same IDs—is a pipe dream. Shared documents will always deviate, undermining the consistency.

My J.D 2025 Experiment

Johnny Decimal tackles my core issues head-on. A unified structure across platforms could end the orthogonality nightmare. Its simplicity cuts through the clutter, and the numeric constraints force me to think critically about what matters. It’s not a silver bullet, but it’s promising.

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.