becoming a morning person / in defense of tinkering with your tools
😺 finally came home last night. on our cameras, you can see him saunter up to the door before dramatically howling at the top of his little lungs. he’s fine, but off his food schedule, and he woke me up around 6:30 this morning. i think i’m becoming – and i truly, from my core hate to say it – a morning person. there’s some pretty common advice that says if you want to start waking up earlier, you need to find something that excites you to get out of bed; more days than not lately, i wake up buzzing to start working. unfortunately, that’s exclusively true when it means i can sit at my computer for hours uninterrupted. (i’m trying to articulate my problem with this to my new therapist, who seems to lean toward the “why do you care so much if it isn’t hurting anyone” end of the spectrum – an exciting challenge!)
i spent the past hour tending to my notes – and tending really is what it feels: pruning, weeding, planting. my new structure is much more relaxed. it isn’t perfect, but i think i figured out the root of my issue.
there are a few camps with strong opinions on what you should use to organize your notes and other artifacts: there are people who think a standard folder directory is most intuitive and future-proof; some people think tags are inherently sturdier tools, in that folders are already outdated and an artifact can only live in one at a time as opposed to being able to have multiple tags; others, mostly the obsidian / logseq / roam research crowd, prefer the flexibility of organizing via bidirectional links. there are others, including a branch of thinking that exists in all three of these main camps – that of object-based organization, be it in folders, via tags, in databases, etc.
i think a lot is lost in translation re: “best practices” in “notetaking”, and i think the language we have to discuss the cornucopia of data we manage and engage with, physically and digitally, is extremely limited (i.e, not everything is “pkm”, a zettelkasten, or a “second brain”). a lot of principles and frameworks come from developers, which makes sense, but can exacerbate the learning curve of notetaking tools for people who don’t already think that way or work with people who do.
if someone has been using folder hierarchies everywhere, on and off computers, for their entire life, telling them that’s wrong in a very big way but then explaining it so flippantly with, “files can only go in one folder”, well – yeah. a lot of us think that’s the point.
that’s a soapbox for a different day.
anyway: i exclusively organized my stuff via folders and databases until i moved to obsidian; there, i introduced tags and links, but i find them both unruly and have remained team-folders. tags especially – i can never get into a good rhythm with them and they accumulate, um, quickly. (although, as i understand it, some people have the opposite problem.)
over many many many years of experimenting with every popular framework – PARA, PPV, LYT – my god, the acronyms – and returning to the same general structure with the same recurring problems, i came across ‧₊˚✧the johnny decimal system✧˚₊‧.
this is a system that’s meant to be used across devices, platforms, even between your digital ecosystem and physical filing cabinet. long and short is that you get up to ten areas (00 - 09, 10 - 19 … 90 - 99), each holding up to ten categories (00, 01 … 09 in 00 - 09), each holding up to 100 items (00 - 99).
the area determines the category; the category number and item number make up the i.d. that is, an item with the i.d 22.13 would be the 13th item added to category 22, which is in the area 20 - 29.
what makes it interesting is the index. you can use the same i.ds and structure across all of your apps, but your index is the source of truth for all of your items. read more on the website, it’s worth it, but that’s the gist.
i’m really turning this into a Thing; i was trying to be short.
my setup was too big. it’s not that it was overly structured, or even that it was too-encompassing – it was literally too much, too many.
you’re supposed to start with only what you need – which you determine by what you actually, currently have – and allow it to build itself over time, creating new i.ds only when necessary. the idea isn’t for you to “fill” up the available space, and you shouldn’t try to. i don’t think i overdid it, but i did let myself stretch out and get a little comfortable.
i also disliked that something as banal as my marriott member number was accessed as easily – easier! – than my writing drafts. and, again, this isn’t the j.d system’s fault; it isn’t a writing project manager.
but i loved the i.ds and that i could add new ones as needed, so i essentially removed the top layer of the hierarchy and limited the items. instead of having up to ten areas, the idea now is that i have up to ten categories (00 - 09) with up to ten i.ds (00, 10 ... 90). there’s no limit to the number of files within an i.d (neither is there in the original j.d structure), and many of my current i.ds overlap with the last iteration of my setup. it’s more that instead of letting the general maintenance of being a person claim multiple ““areas””, my work – not my tasks, but my writing, my experiments, my curiosities – now spreads across the bulk of my system.
people chastise each other online a lot about spending too much time tinkering with their systems as opposed to actually using them and working within them. i think this is valuable, and not even with a handwringing qualification that it’s only valuable if you don’t “overdo it”, whatever that means. if your system is designed in such a way that it is not intrinsically leading you to do the thing it’s supposed to aid you in doing, perhaps the natural response is to tinker, to mold it ever closer to a structural shape that will actually provide the support you need.
all of that to say: it’s easy to get up early now because it’s easy to write early; there’s no friction to learning and thinking, and then getting distracted for [redacted] hours talking about it. (still work to do)