Note #4 - Spring Cleaning for New Year

Chinese New Year ended a week ago. 新年快樂！There are many traditions associated with the New Year, some of which are widely known: fireworks, gifting of hongbao, and playing loud music to scare away Nian.

One less known New Year tradition is spring cleaning, which removes bad luck, negative energy, and evil spririts from the household.

Most people will travel to reunite with their extended family in the New Year period, in much the same way as Christmas or Thanksgiving. As a foreigner I do not have extended family nearby to visit, so I usually have a lot of free time. The last few years I burned my vacation time by working on side projects, but this year I went travelling with my partner and restricted myself to 'spring cleaning' existing projects.

Adopting Johnny Decimal

I've been using plaintext note-taking tools for a few years, starting with Obsidian and later migrating to NeoVim and bespoke tools.

One repeated frustration I have had with my notes is how to organize them efficiently. Given I have an MA in a humanities subject (Digital Culture) you would think I'd already be good at this. Not so - it turns out Information Science is a complex subject, which I am very far from mastering.

I got through my MA using Evernote notebooks, which have the main advantage that they're ordered by date and can be tagged. Tags are flexible and easy to query, but lead to various frustrations:

• Tags tend to ambiguity and repetition: should my meal plan be #groceries or #cooking or #home or all three?
• Without a strict indexing scheme and frequent maintenance, you end up with duplicate tags like #groceries, #grocery, and #food.
• Even if you have a strict tag indexing scheme, you have accepted the burden of maintaining this ontology indefinitely.

Tags are a good fit for a metadata and hypertext based system like Evernote, or the Zettelkasten method. But I am a busy, lazy and chaotic note-taker, so I never bother to maintain those systems. In particular, I tend to end up with 10 different index pages (or Map of Contents) split across 5 folders, none of which I actually use.

Clearly I needed a lower-maintenance system. Enter Johnny Decimal, a more traditional cataloguing system. Rather than relying on metadata stored in notes, Johnny Decimal (JD) relies on numerical indexing and has a single index file at 00.00 Index.

Johnny Decimal allows for some deviations from its structure. This was helpful for me because I maintain a journal using daily-notes.nvim, which is ordered but not according to any Zettelkasten or decimal scheme.

The nice thing about Johnny Decimal is that most of the time investment seems to be up-front, in planning areas and categories. Unlike tag-based systems, there is limited ongoing maintenance and my notes stay organized.

Neovim Improvements

As a result of adopting Johnny Decimal, I saw that my NeoVim configuration could be improved.

I've made some improvements to my NeoVim setup for note-taking and organization. These have not been incorporated into freak.nvim because they use too many external tools and plugins, but I may provide writing tools as some sort of 'add-on' pack.

• Added navigation starting from a given file, not the system date, to daily-notes.nvim
• Wrote a custom mini.pick picker which selects from oldfiles, so that I can get back to recent files easily even if I don't remember their name.
• Restored use of marksman in my LSP config so that I can use internal links between notes, get backlinks, etc.
• Reinstalled zen-mode. It doesn't really affect my ability to focus but I like its ability to center the current note.