I know what you are going to say, and you are right. Do I need The Denbow Decimal System? Maybe. It actually came out of necessity. I’ve accumulated drafts, notes, fragments, dead-end ideas, half-built stories, decades of blog posts, and things that once mattered deeply but never made it to the finish line. They weren’t trash, they just didn’t belong anywhere recognizable and so I built them a place of their own.
DDS gives structure to my kind of creative debris. It’s a catalog for the in progress works, the unresolved, and the deliberately unfinished. Each number corresponds to a general category: story drafts, research notes, zines, annotations, personal reflections, and more. It doesn’t try to erase the mess, it simply makes the mess more accessible.
The system is practical, and it’s also a form of care instead of neglect. Filing something under DDS isn’t a dismissal it’s a quiet way of saying “This mattered enough to archive.”
There are rules, sure, but they’re mine and like the archive itself, they’re flexible.
DDS doesn’t look like a library catalog, it looks like a drawer you open when you’re ready to remember what you nearly forgot.
Let’s be honest, it is really something to go back over your archives and restore those forgotten memories.
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