Sorting, Tagging, and Ordering
The tags in this blog are a mess. I know. It bothers me.
I've been told I'm a messy person as many times as I've been told I'm obsessed with order, to which I can only come to a conclusion: I love sorting things, but when I slip up it's bad. Especially for me, since I love order! Right now, there are a couple of things on my desk that should not be there, and they're only there because I still haven't decided where to put them.
So, a couple of months ago I came across an organization system called Johnny Decimal: basically you sort anything in a 2-levels-deep structure and assign each level an ID1. How does this sound to you? To me, it sounds like a dream.
But here's the thing: I don't like dreaming2, I like taking action. But in this case, taking action requires commitment. It took me some time to start reading the whole guide and I was done in a couple of hours at most; the actual work has started just a week ago. And at times it was... paralizing. Because, as I was staring at all the post-its I attached to the wall in front of me, wondering how I could group them, I started thinking...
"But what if I do it wrong?"
Who the fuck cares? It's a folder system, I'm not saving lives here; possibly, I'm making mine a bit better. "What if I do it wrong"? Then I just revert back or find another way. This shouldn't activate the same chemical reaction my ancestors had when they saw a tiger in front of them. Sticky notes are certainly not my natural predator3.
Right now I'm still in the middle of it, and it's equally exciting and scary. Yes. Figuring out organization systems. Listen, everyone has their hobbies.
I have the constant nagging feeling that I'm doing something wrong, and that I should look at how other people did it, and then I notice they didn't account for things I need because — guess what! — they're not me. Uncharted territory! That's exciting.
Let's talk probabilities now: what are the chances that my system is 100% unique and never before seen, because I'm special and no one is like me? Very low, probably zero. An infinite amount of people might have a good chunk of their life similar to mine, or they might've encountered something that looks familiar and can provide advice. This is valid for much more than just an organization system. Then, what are the chances that these infinite amount of people would know what I need exactly? Also very low, probably zero. The world is full of advice, both good and awful4, but the only one who can decide if something works for you is yourself.
In conclusion, it seems the trick to getting things right is accumulating advice, learning how to distinguish the good from the bad, trying it out and see what works and doesn't for you.
Seems like such a thing would greatly benefit from an organization system.
It's a bit more complicated than that, but I don't want to explain the concepts of Area, Category and ID when you can just refer to the source.↩
Fake actually, I very much like daydreaming; it's just that if I dream too much, without working towards making that real, I start boiling from the inside.↩
But I might be theirs, since I nearly finished a pack to pull off this experiment.↩
Mostly awful.↩