Over the years, my archive outgrew folders, tags, and good intentions. Writing, notes, drafts, photos, references, half-finished ideas, and finished ideas pretending they weren’t finished yet. Everything piled up. Search helped. Tags helped. But neither answered a simple question.
What is this thing, really, and why does it exist?
The Denbow Decimal System is my answer. It’s a personal classification system designed to describe the function of an item inside the archive, not its format, not its mood, not its future potential. Each piece of work gets a place based on what it actually does right now. Drafts live as drafts. References stay references. Administrative debris gets acknowledged instead of hidden.
It’s not trying to impress librarians or solve knowledge organization for anyone else. It exists to support a living archive built over decades, where unfinished work is allowed to remain unfinished and supplemental material doesn’t pretend to be more important than it is.
The DDS currently lives inside my private archive. What you see here is the surface explanation, not the machinery underneath. The system evolves. Categories shift. Some things are filed incorrectly on purpose. That’s not a flaw. That’s a record of how thinking actually happens.
