The Quantum Garden

Life learning, for life

Buy me a coffee

Collating my thoughts on document management

| 5 min read

I was doing some Digital gardening this morning and hit a block with my Johnny.Decimal index. Not yet sure exactly what the problem is, so what better to do than spend time in the afternoon on a 41°C day and do some thinking.

This just another step on the journey of Personal knowledge management. I have overlapping, complementary systems in place (ACE Framework, Johnny.Decimal and Zettelkasten), centered on The Quantum Garden Vault, with external file storage as necessary in Calibre, Zotero and Paperless.

Past thoughts on the topic include:

All of these notes will have to be updated for current thinking, or at least pointed to what I end up doing.

Looking at the Johnny.Decimal forum for some ideas, I came across three relevant threads where I’d contributed that I can’t even remember writing! These would have been around the time I first implemented a JD Index.

Let’s invent a system for me

Ok, after years of this, what are the enduring threads across every system. Clarifying them will help.

It’s about retrieval, not filing

My Future self benefits from being able to find what I’ve stored, and being able to find it quickly. Therefore I need to remove the friction of filing by having structures that tell me where something must be filed (store) and where I should be able to find it (retrieve).

The ACE Framework, with modification, dictates the overall structure of The Quantum Garden Vault. Within that I have situated a Johnny.Decimal index which is currently used mostly for personal life information. I call it my Home Life Index. Although it sits within the vault, I’ve created it in a way that it can refer to other systems. A vault note and externally stored supporting file will be tagged with the same JD-ID in each system.

Flexibility is necessary

If I take the Johnny.Decimal index as rigid (it isn’t) then I very quickly hit examples where I have to break it. I can’t treat the index as a rigid folder structure, even within The Quantum Garden Vault. Instead, I have to treat it as a Map of Content that directs me where to go.

The examples are public notes for The Quantum Garden Website, and pieces of information that need to be split private/public when otherwise could be a single note (this is part of the problem I hit this morning; wanting to store information about Docker containers/13-17 Docker containers both public and private without duplicating note titles).

Knowing where the thing is, is not the same as the thing itself

I’ve gone wrong and (in)conveniently put information in Johnny.Decimal index notes. That’s where this morning’s confusion stemmed from. Is it a note, or a pointer to a note.

Backlinks are important and the fact that Backlinks are not hierarchical give the Johnny.Decimal index the hidden power I need here. My index notes in Obsidian should only be a summary of backlinks1 Some notes will need a bit of fixing up.

Structure can be automated

This ties directly into the point above. Wherever possible I prefer to have large scale Structure notes generate automatically. It helps me get where I need to quicker.

Beware tagging by stealth

There are many ways to bring content together. The principle that Tags are not knowledge will serve to avoid “tagging” every apparently relevant page with a JD-ID. There are other mechanisms (search, Backlinks and Structure notes) which mean I don’t have to link everything. I’d be creating a rod for my back.

I currently have a the following structure:

  • 20-29 Hobbies
    • 22 Miniature Painting
      • 22-01 Nagash

The note My miniature painting hobby already links to My painted miniatures and from there to Painting Nagash which so far is the only page linked to 22-01 or even 22. There are no external files associated with 22-01 so the index structure is impotent. This just shows the complexity of multiple document formats. Johnny.Decimal is great for a file system. Maybe not so necessary in a Commonplace book like The Quantum Garden Vault. I can see many cases within the JD index that are only there as duplicates of notes already in place.

Conclusion: I have more Johnny.Decimal index complexity than I need.

Next actions

  • Cast my eye over the index to make sure what I’m thinking holds
  • Update the notes linked above to a more accurate representation of what I’m doing now (though public, they also serve as internal family documentation on how I’ve structured everything)

Footnotes

  1. Using the Linked mentions function by default. ↩

Recent Blogs

See 567 more →

Graph View