The Small Business System

After 6 months of work, the Small Business System has launched. Here's why it took that long, what's in it, and what's next.

Why'd it take so long?

Firstly, if you signed up a long time ago: thank you. Some of you gave us money ... let me see ... back on the 10th November. (Anthony in Reading, you were first!) That's a long time, and that money has kept us going. It's allowed us to focus on creating this thing and to not worry about promoting everything else. That's massive, so thank you. You literally made it possible.

So, we followed the process and went deep on discovery. MindNode was, as always, indispensable. Here's an early version, once we'd given at least some shape to the initially-random thoughts.

That took about a month. Many whiteboards, mind maps, walks, chats over a beer. What would it contain? Who was it for? What's a 'small business' and what does it contain?

What's a small business?

A question worth answering. We had a couple of ideal businesses that we kept coming back to. There's person who makes candles and sells them at local market. There's small hairdressing salon like my best friend Berry.

There's personal trainer who meets you at 6am and makes you skip rope and do weights. We've got Jeff from Lovett Sundries who make their own natural cosmetics. Or my mate George who runs a fleet of high-end taxis in Melbourne.

And then classic businesses that we can all relate to. Restaurant. Bakery. Professional services. Consultant. Freelancer. Farmer. Dog groomer.

So you can see, there's a lot to consider. Do you have premises? A vehicle? Staff? Do you keep stock? Do you have a handful of customers or thousands? Do you make a thing, deliver a service, or a bit of both?

We think we've designed something that fits everyone. If you run any sort of business and you have between 1-10 staff -- maybe more, we'll have to test it out -- we think we can accommodate you.

Complete and consistent

The design phase took so long because we checked, again and again, that this thing met our two main design goals: that it be complete and consistent.

We think there's a place for everything. It might not feel like exactly the right place to you, but we learned with Life Admin that it's more important just to pick a place, and get on with it. This is a tool, not art.

And Lucy has gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure that it's internally consistent. How she holds it all in her mind I'll never know. I'd write something and she'd say, but up here we said..., and we'd revisit that and line it all up.

What's in it?

So what's in it is hopefully a structure that will accommodate all those types of business. Some of you will use more of it than others. That's by design.

We've ended up with 5 areas containing about 20 categories and about 200 pre-defined IDs. Some of the areas are designed for you to create your own IDs as we can't know, for example, how your list of products should be structured. So you'll end up with more over time.

There's guidance on how to do this. Suggested templates (which are included in your download). A whole help system. And user settings: you log in to this thing. Initially that's just do you want to use emoji, but this gives me the ability do to more over time. See below.

Lucy's master document clocked over 46,000 words; about 340 pages. She wrote essentially all of it, while I built the site. (I should rename this thing Jucy.Decimal.)

What do I get?

We learned a lesson with the Life Admin System: manually creating PDFs and folders full of text files is a nightmare. It's difficult, unwieldy, and unmaintainable.

So I've built a website. I think it's pretty neat. Think of it as your business operations dashboard. From there, you download a set of folders and JDex files that are generated on-the-fly. So we can update the system really, really easily. Constantly. Frictionless. We update it, you refresh the page, you see it. It's a joy.

A shared language

This is the natural evolution of Johnny.Decimal which is, of course, inspired by the Dewey Decimal system. In that system, every library doesn't invent its own scheme. That'd be madness. Rather, I can tell you 152.42 LEMB and that'll guide you to the book I'm reading in any library on Earth.

Now imagine this same power in your business life. If you want help with your IT backups, you don't have to explain the scope first: just tell someone you're at 14.23. Now we know exactly what we're referring to, and we can reference (and contribute to) the same set of resources. And you can chat in a channel dedicated to that part of the system. Targeted. Focused. Efficient.

What's next?

We can't emphasise enough that this is version 1.0. As well as constantly upgrading the content, I'd love to build this to be a fully-featured app.

Here's a small example. One of the things we've defined is an ops manual that tells you how to configure and then test your IT backups. So how can we help you do that?

Well, I can build a system of reminders. You tested your backups yet? Check the box and we'll automatically make a log in your JDex. Don't check the box and I'll nag you. Maybe this can feed in to your calendar. This is all fairly easy, I just need the time to build it.

So that's the next couple of years for us. Assuming this is successful enough to keep us off the streets, we'll be working on it full time.

The vision

Because here's my long-term vision. You start a business. Let's say you're making those candles. Maybe this is something you do on the side, so you don't have a lot of spare time. And it's your first crack at being indie.

Today, you have to figure everything out yourself. From business registration to insurance to calculating your taxes and backing up your IT systems, tracking your customers, orders, stock, your marketing, setting up a website and email, all of it. That's wild, right? It's 2025 and unless you go and do a business course at your local tertiary education place, there isn't one place that you can go and find all this information.

I want you to be able to log in to the Small Business System and for that all to be taken care of. I mean, you still have to do the work! But we'll guide you all the way. I want this to feel like you've got us -- and the rest of the community -- on your staff.

The community

I'd also love this to become a genuinely useful community of like-minded business people. You've already self-selected in to a group of people who are actively trying to be more organised. Imagine what that community can do for each other.

I know all about IT. Ask me: I'll help. But marketing? Clueless. Well one of you reading this is a marketing expert. Hi! Let's help each other. Let's swap skills and knowledge, and buy stuff from each other, and support and recommend each other.

I'm in other 'small business' communities. The quality of discourse is ... low. Because it's mostly full of dudes trying to get rich quick on a lazy internet idea. This is not for them. This is for people who are getting on with making a thing. Your time will be respected here.

'Preview mode'

When I built the site I had an idea: what if there wasn't one site with all fancy graphics (lol, me?) that tried to sell you the site, then entirely another site once you were in?

What if it was all the same site?

So that's what I built: one site. If you're signed up, you see it all. If you're not, you see the ░░░░░░░░░░ version. I really like how it turned out.

Check it out at https://sbs.johnnydecimal.com. Now if you'll excuse me I think I might have a few days off.

My data storage & backup strategy

By email, Dylan asked about my data storage and backup strategy. In answering, I thought it'd be useful enough to formalise here.

The 'problem'

Here's what I'm working with. The scope of this is mine & Lucy's personal stuff, and the Johnny.Decimal business.

We each have a laptop. Mine only has 500GB of storage so I'm severely limited. Lucy's has 1TB but this is still smaller than the … checks … ah not quite, 787GB that is the entire D85 Johnny.Decimal business folder.

That folder contains all of the raw footage from the workshop. That's 641GB just there. I probably don't need to keep that now, but whatever. I certainly don't need to keep it all on a laptop.

So we also have a Mac mini. The 'server', even though it just runs plain macOS. The point is that it's always powered on.

Mac minis are great for this. I ran a 2010 version until 2023. It was sold as a server, back when Apple did that. 13 years isn't bad from a ~$1,000 computer.

I replaced it with a refurb M1 mini, lowest spec. Also ~$1,000. Should also last well over a decade.

These machines don't need to do much. No data is stored on them -- we'll get to that. Processor wise, they do next to nothing. They serve files. So don't spend money on anything fancy.

NAS vs DAS

Okay, so where's all the data? The difference between NAS & DAS is both subtle and vitally important. I'll assume you're not a storage expert, so I'll spell it out.

'NAS' stands for 'network-attached storage'. This means that the device itself attaches to your network. It is a tiny server: it has its own smarts. Synology and QNAP are the ones you've heard of.

The advantage of these devices is that you don't need another server. Like a Mac mini. They do it all themselves: you configure them on your network, then you can connect to their storage from any computer. That can be really convenient, and I still have an old Synology in my setup.

The downside is that if you want to configure them to do anything special, you're dealing with a device that is usually underpowered, whose software is not macOS or Windows. It's some specialised Synology or QNAP thing.

So if you want to run, say, Syncthing -- we'll get to all of this later -- then you're depending on that software having a Synology version. Not everything does, and when it does, it's often a cut-down variant. This can be limiting.

For these reasons, I moved away from a NAS when I bought the new mini.

DAS

DAS stands for 'direct-attached storage'. It's storage that is directly attached to a computer. It's basically an external hard drive. And you can just use an external hard drive from your office supplies store.

But if this is your central data store, you probably want something a bit more advanced. Hard drives get hot, so something with a fan is nice. And you can get units that take multiple disks, which can provide redundancy in case one of the drives fails.

(It depends how you set these disks up, and this is as technical as I'll get here. Look up RAID levels if you want to know more.)

So I have a LaCie 2big 16TB DAS that is plugged directly in to the Mac mini via USB-C.

The LaCie doesn't do anything by itself. It requires a server. But now that server is a fully-featured computer, and I can install whatever I want on it.

So where's all the data?

Let's recap. Johnny has a 500GB MacBook Air. Lucy has a 1TB MacBook Pro. And there's an always-on Mac mini whose internal storage is insignificant because it has 16TB of HDD plugged in the back. I'll call the mini 'the server' from now on.

Technically, we could store all of our files on the server and access them over the network. But this would be slow, especially over wifi. Ideally, you want the things you're using all day to be on the machine you're using.

This is where synchronisation software comes in. Dropbox is the one you know: you install it, point it to a folder, and it synchronises all of those files. If you want them on another computer, you just install it there and wait for them to copy over. As a bonus, now they're also in the cloud, and you can log in to a website and access them from anywhere.

This is a great technology but it comes with limits. What if me and Lucy both edit the same file at the same time? This causes a 'conflict', and there's not much you can do about that. Dropbox can't merge our Excel sheets, it's just too hard. So that's just something to be aware of.¹

Syncthing

The secret sauce is an amazing piece of free software: Syncthing.²

It's like Dropbox, but completely configurable. You get to say what synchronises from which computer to which other computers. And you get granular control down to the folder or file level.

You also get to control what happens to the file on this computer after a new version is received from that computer. This is really handy. On the server, I've got it configured to keep versions of each file, which it deletes as they get old. It'll keep … well, let's just quote Syncthing:

The following intervals are used: for the first hour a version is kept every 30 seconds, for the first day a version is kept every hour, for the first 30 days a version is kept every day, until the maximum age a version is kept every week.

So as Lucy is working on the small business system, every time she saves the document, it's synchronised to both my laptop, and the server. The server is then applying the 'retention policy' as described above. This is one form of backup: if Lucy accidentally deletes all the text in the document, we can just grab a previous version from Syncthing. Super handy.

Our Syncthing configuration

In a nutshell: the server has everything, and we each have most stuff, minus the massive folder of workshop video files. There's a bit more to it, but that's all you really need to know.

Start picturing 'blobs' of data

What's important is what this means for our data. When you're planning something like this, you need to have this picture in your mind of:

1. What your data is, and
2. Where your data is.

Johnny.Decimal makes this easy for me to think about. Each blob of data -- the minimum unit of 'my data' that I think about -- is a Johnny.Decimal system. I have:

1. D85 Johnny.Decimal (the business)
2. D01 johnnydecimal.com (the website)
3. P76 Johnny's personal life
4. L77 Learn with Lucy (the Excel course)
5. Z99 Archive some old long-term archives, including some data that isn't mine

I know that all of this data is on the server. That's really important when it comes to backups, later. It's so important, it's a non-negotiable: all data must always be on the server. Then I know that if both laptops fall in the ocean, nothing is actually lost.

I also know that Syncthing is synchronising the important stuff that we use every day to both laptops. And those laptops synchronise to each other.

This is important because if one of the laptops falls in the ocean, it'd be nice to be able to access our important daily stuff quickly. We can do that from the other laptop. And when we get a replacement machine, the two laptops can talk directly to each other. The server, physically far away, is a last resort.

So that's the day-to-day synchronisation of data. Syncthing is indispensable. It's complex, but worth getting to know. If you need any help, ask.

Backups

Backups? Didn't we just talk about backups? All these copies of your data all over the place on three machines?

We did not. Synchronisation is not a backup.

Read that again. In bold. Synchronisation is NOT a backup.

Because synchronisation -- wait for it -- synchronises everything: including you messing up some file and not realising it. Including you deleting some folder and not realising it. So you MUST also have backups.

Nobody said this was simple. Alright, backups. When you think of backups, think of the event that causes you to be glad that you had it. They get progressively worse. Let's simplify and say you're always at home, and not about to be globe-trotting like we are.

1: Your laptop falls in the bath

Bath, ocean. Laptop wet, laptop no good. In this scenario, you're in your house, you have a new laptop, and you need to get working quickly. You want a local backup that you can restore from.³

(In my situation, I'd try the re-synchronising first; but let's say you don't have that option.)

Your operating system has software built-in: Time Machine for Mac, Windows Backup for the other one, and you Linux nerds can figure it out yourself.

You should probably just use this. Personally I also use Arq but we don't need to go there. Different software, same result.

2: Your backup didn't work

It is not your day. You got your backup drive, tried to restore to the new, dry laptop -- and it failed.

Disk error. Can't read. Backup error code FKU390093-B. Cosmic rays. Whatever: backups also fail.

Lucky you have a second backup on a different disk. This is why I use Arq: it makes it really easy to connect to another machine and to create a backup there. So I have one backup on this little external SSD, one on the server, and another on an old Synology. Multiple backups on multiple storage devices.

But we're not finished.

3: The house is destroyed by a cyclone

So now everything's gone. Laptops, servers, hard drives, the lot. Really really unlikely, but it happens.

This is what the cloud is for. Ironic, as it just wiped us out. Ha ha. I pay for a cloud backup service that I never hope to use. Literally, if I go my entire life and never ever have to restore from the service that costs me about a hundred bucks a year, I'd be happy.

But the day you do, you'll be glad for it. So: use Backblaze. Just do. Now, go and sign up now.

3-2-1 backup strategy

This is the industry-standard way to do things:

• Three copies of your data.
• On two different media.
• One copy off-site, i.e. cloud.

Backblaze, and NAS vs. DAS

We talked about NAS vs. DAS above for a reason. Backblaze is amazing: unlimited storage for ~$100/year. With a catch: it only includes DAS.

Backblaze will not back up your Synology for $100/year. It's a miracle that they will back up your LaCie 16TB for that. So this is definitely a factor when deciding what to buy.

Oh yeah, that Synology

Because I already had a Synology -- an old DS118 single-drive unit -- I'm using it purely as a backup target. Both laptops and the server back up to it, using Arq.

This is probably overkill. If I didn't already have this, I wouldn't buy one for this role.

Review

Let's review with a little diagram. I have no computer drawing skillz so here's one I did on paper.

Now, yours won't look anything like this. Don't just copy me. But make sure that you have this mental model of your data. What blobs are there? Where are they? Which copies are complete vs. partial? Local vs. cloud? Synchronisation vs. backup?

And if you need any help, ask on the forum.

Tailscale

There's a secret sauce here which I'll mention briefly.

The server was in the cupboard in the kitchen, but since deciding to go on the move, it needed a new home. So it's now at my mate Alex's house in Melbourne. Thalex!

Ordinarily this would have broken all sorts of stuff and required complicated network reconfiguration. But I have Tailscale permanently turned on, on every device, so I had to do: exactly nothing.

I turned the server off, gave it to Alex, he took it and the LaCie and the Synology home with him, he turned them on, and everything just works like it did. Albeit a touch slower, as they're now about 700kms away. Only about 40ms of network latency though, which is impressive.

I couldn't recommend it more. Again, too much detail for this post, but let me know if you need help.

Blog questions challenge 2025

Hyde, who had seen a post from Adam, who had been reading Kev's blog, who had seen a post from Brandon, who had been tagged by Jedda, who had been tagged by Ava, who came up with a blog post challenge … wait, where was I?

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I've never really seen myself as a blogger, if I'm honest. Which might explain why I'm so bad at it! I'm hardly what you'd call prolific. Johnny.Decimal as an idea is now 15 years old and here we are at post #100.

Which is funny, because I love writing. But I'm also really conscious of people's attention. I dislike how my own is constantly being bartered for, and so I feel that unless I have something useful to say, I'm not going to spew words out to fill the void. There is no void. There's the opposite of a void.

Also I was on Twitter since 2009 -- when you sent it an SMS to post -- and so I think I've got that tell everyone what you're doing all the time thing out of my system. I've realised that nobody cares what I do. Thank god.

So I feel like my blog is more of a communication channel and less of a blog in the traditional sense.

What platform do you use?

This website was hand-coded by me in Astro. Astro is amazing. My hand-coding is not, so much. But I'm getting better!

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I have a few posts still lingering on a Wordpress site but they're old (2008/9) and embarrassing so I won't link them. And I mean literally, a few posts. Perhaps five.

How do you write your posts?

Usually directly in to Visual Studio Code, in Markdown, with vim keybindings. This whole site is one git repository.

Occasionally I'll draft something in my beloved Bear, but usually not.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

When I have something to say. See above. But not at any particular time of day.

Walking is the ultimate life-hack for writers. I don't know if I've ever had an original thought while sitting on my arse looking at a screen. But go for a walk round the block and let it tumble around up there. That's where the good stuff is.

Do you publish immediately, or later?

Usually pretty quickly. If I do the draft-then-come-back-later thing I tend to find that the moment feels like it's passed.

I'm definitely one of those people who can't really 'see' a post until I literally see it, on the published site. Not on my dev site, where it looks identical. It needs to be the live version. Then you read it and go ooh that's not what I meant and make a few quick edits.

What's your favourite post?

I don't have a favourite.

Any future plans?

I feel that my comms are bit disjointed. I even published a comms plan to try to solve the problem. But I'm not happy with it.

So I'd still like to streamline official Johnny.Decimal communications, somehow. But I don't know what that looks like yet.

Goodbye, sweet ladies

Aah, this is hard. We loved them so much.

Wendy

Their leader from the start, she was benevolent and fair. She never ruled by force: she never had to. The other two just understood that she was in charge.

AKA Flapsy-Toot or Flapsy on account of her enthusiastic flap -- cut short by a mysterious wing injury -- and her keen toot.

Wendy was the only one brave enough to honour us with "a sittin'". Usually later in the day, us sipping on a glass of wine in the back garden, she'd come and jump on your leg. She fell asleep on Lucy a bunch of times.

I don't think I've ever been as content as I have with Wendy on my leg. She was a beautiful animal; truly a unique character. I'll miss her more than I can say.

Marie

Little Marie, bottom of the pecking order but the most adventurous of the lot. A smart bird, she learned to recognise when we were calling her (hey, Coolie! in a whisper), usually because we'd found some sort of bug and wanted to make sure she got it.

AKA Coolie, Coolie-pie, Cool-bean, based on the feathers on her legs, which made it look like she was wearing culottes.

She'd often go to bed early, to get a bit of time to herself. But then when the other two went in, she'd come back out and Lucy would get the fork to do some digging with her. Marie loved finding grubs in the ground with her mamma.

A gorgeous, gentle bird. She would have gone anywhere and done anything for you.

Belinda

Every flock has a bully, and Belinda was it. But we loved her, because they're your chickens, and what do you do?

AKA The Bruiser.

If Belinda had been a human she'd have been the matron of a girls' school. We always wanted to get her a pair of half-moon glasses.

But she was always the first to come and sit next to us of an evening. We'd set up the outdoor chairs in our 'business class' configuration, and she'd be straight out. She'd sit on the ground and pancake out … it looked really relaxing. With us sitting above them, they knew they were safe.

Toot-toot-toot

AKA collectively the tooters.

Goodbye, sweet ladies. We loved you so much. You gave us such happiness. We will miss your little faces and your inquisitive toots. The garden is so empty without you.

Toot-toot-toot. One two three.

What chickens taught me

Looking after these girls taught me that all I need to be truly happy is Lucy, a quiet back yard, and a handful of chickens.

I don't need things. I don't need money above the basics for a simple life. This realisation has been profound.

≡

There's this idea in meditation practice that this might be the last time you do something. It might be the last time you see your kid. It might be the last time you have dinner with your partner, or visit your best friend. You just never know.

This is a useful reminder to pay attention. Don't sit there in the garden with your chickens and scroll your phone. Be with your chickens. Absorb the moment. Because, eventually, it'll be the last.

We've had our last moment with these girls. We're crushed with grief. But I enjoyed every moment. I'll never forget them.

On chicken care

I write this hoping that it'll be absorbed in to the internet and help future chicken owners.

You're probably thinking, why did he get rid of these chickens he loved so much? It's because they couldn't have moved with us, and we couldn't have given them to anyone else, and this is because of their breed, and its problems.

(Obviously I have learned all of this since getting the girls. My god, the stuff I've learned about chickens...)

ISA Brown

Chickens bred for laying are ISA Browns. So they're a very common back-yard chook, because for the first year or so you get an egg a day. Amazing, right?

The problem is this aggressive laying schedule, a result of selective breeding, wrecks their little bodies. Commercially, they lay for a season and that's it. But when you get one as a pet, it's a problem.

When they reach about 1.5 years old, they start laying lash eggs (image warning).

Untreated, this will kill them. They get an infected reproductive tract and either die from the infection or associated tumours. I can only imagine it's a painful, slow death.

The treatment is hormones: an IUD, the same they give to dogs. And most vets won't give this to a chicken. We're forever indebted to the magnificent, kind staff at the Unusual Pet Vets in Fyshwick, without whom we couldn't have done any of this.

The hormone is effective, and permanently stops them laying. But you can tell that it messes with their moods. They become very subdued; they sleep a lot.

And it costs about $1,000/year/chicken. It's a commitment.

So if you are considering keeping chickens, please don't get ISA Browns. They're beautiful birds, but they're doomed to this life of disease. The eggs aren't worth it. Just buy free-range eggs from the store.

Other breeds of chicken -- in which I have no expertise -- do lay eggs. But you're not going to get one a day.

My consolation

Many back-yard chooks die either in terror, eaten by a fox/dog/snake, or painfully, with an unnoticed disease.

We kept ours safe for over three years. Nothing bad ever happened to them. I'm sure they lived a near-perfect chicken existence. Lucy kept their place immaculately clean. They got treats and love. They were free to roam our whole back yard, every day. What a life.

And when they went, they went together, peacefully.

🐓

JDHQ is on the move

Big news: we're moving. Away from Canberra. Away from anywhere! We're going to try being location-independent for a while.

We don't love it here any more. And when you don't love where you live, it's time to go. This is especially important when your house is also your office.

Because how we feel in this home affects the work that we produce. Our work is the most important thing to us. We both gave up our careers to do this.

The Small Business System (SBS)¹ feels like the thing that will make us long-term sustainable. So it has to be the best that it can possibly be. For that to be the case, something needed to change.

≡

We've both lived and worked all over the world. Now, in our late 40s, we're not quite ready to say goodbye to that lifestyle. Because we do, soon, want to settle down. But not in this inner-city rental; this could never have been our forever place.

We need our own place, in the country. Undisturbed by neighbours. Full of chickens.

So, decision made just a week ago, we've already taken decisive action. Notice has been given. Many items have been sold or disposed. There's more to go: we don't plan on keeping much.

Where are we going? First stop is Lucy's parents' place, where we'll briefly re-group and plan the next move. It might be Japan, the USA, Germany … or anywhere else. It might depend on a cheap flight! We really don't know.

≡

To be clear, the production of the SBS is our absolute priority. Some of you have trusted us with a lot of your money. We appreciate that, and after a rough week -- see below -- we're now in total-focus mode.

Since starting development of the SBS we've been talking about visiting some of the businesses we're hoping to help. You can't truly know what people's problems are until you see them with your own eyes. So this will give us an opportunity to come and see some of you.

If this interests you, fill in this form.

≡

⚠️😔🐓 Sadness warning. Skip if you love chickens.

This decision came with a terrible cost. Our beloved chickens couldn't have come with us. They couldn't really have come anywhere: they were all on medication to keep them alive, and without a chicken vet close by their implants would have worn off and they would have died painful deaths. Most vets won't see a chicken.

And so we had to say goodbye. We took them to the vet and they went, peacefully, together. Obviously we're crushed beyond words. It's the hardest thing we've ever done.

I want to honour them with their own page. So: goodbye, sweet ladies.

TGIF

Announcing a new Johnny.Decimal initiative: Thank God I Filed it! (on Friday).¹

Okay, this one's a little tongue-in-cheek. But I think there's something to be had here.

Filing is boring

I'm constantly aware that I run this website for a thing which most people find really boring. Let's not fool ourselves: even if you're in to this sort of thing, filing things isn't 'fun'.

The result is that we don't do it. We know we should. We might even have a really neat place to file things. (You're welcome.) And still we don't!

So TGIF is a little prompt. Here's the challenge:

This Friday, make an effort to file at least one thing. Make it the thing that caused you the most problems this week.

Invest an hour

Let's say you set aside an hour to do this. This is why we picked Friday: it's a perfect 3pm-on-a-Friday sort of job. You're almost finished, your brain is fried, so why don't you do something menial that helps future you?

In an hour, aim to file four (4) things. Just four. No stress.

If you do this every week for a year, in a year you've filed 200 things. And I bet you don't routinely use 200 things! We're talking your logo, your pricing chart, your list of suppliers.

So in a year, you might not have much left to do. That'd be nice.

Share your success

Let us know on the forum if this helps!

21c/Q2 – new habits for a new quarter-century

Happy new year quarter century.¹ This doesn't happen often. I'm going to use it to re-shape some of my behaviours. As I was born in 1976, this roughly coincides with Q3 of my life. Let's shake it up a little.

Would you like to join me? Habits are better formed with friends.

Vision statement

Behaviours are driven by goals, so let's define what I'm hoping to achieve. This is the immutable part. And then we'll talk about how I'm going to do it, which might evolve over time. There's more than one way to skin a cat.

1: Check stuff less often

As in, check my mail less often. The price of that stock I own. That tech website I browse when I'm bored. Reddit. Or something related to what I'm doing: I'm reading a book and the character is on Bleeker St, NYC, and I think I wonder where that is and 35 minutes later I'm on YouTube via maps and a pizza shop and a recipe and … you know how this goes.

This is a habit that wasn't possible at the start of 21c/Q1 and is now endemic. In 2000 I had a computer in the house but its default state was powered off: when I wanted to do a thing, I turned it on and loaded that thing.² The internet, such as it was, was dial-up; the connection took a full minute to establish. You didn't just check stuff.

Now, the device I'm writing this on has instant access to all of the information that humanity has ever generated. Let me try it now. I'm going to time how long it takes me to find some interesting fact about that pizza shop.

15 seconds. John's of Bleeker St is open today 11:30 through 22:00. So we've conditioned ourselves to think that 15 seconds is the distraction: and then, what's the harm? Of course this isn't how it works.

The solution, I believe, is to completely break this habit. It has to be: otherwise Q3 rolls around and I'm a 75-year-old dude glued to his phone? That sounds pathetic. I intend to be a 75-year-old dude glued to Schubert on vinyl.

So am I becoming a meme and quitting the internet? No: my job is on the internet. You can't quit the internet. But you can spend a lot less time there. And you can make sure that the time you spend is deliberate, and that it is serving you well. That's the vision.

2: Live more deliberately

I've alluded to this already in my stalled YouTube series Focus and Productivity.³ I want to move through life more deliberately: to do one thing at a time, and to be aware of what it is.

The first corporate training course I ever took was on 'time management'. I was on a graduate program at Rank Xerox in 1996. The advice was so inane as to be absurd: if you're waiting for a large job to print, said the instructor. Don't just sit and look at your computer screen. Do something else! This is called multi-tasking.

Sounded like a great idea. Something an instructor told you to do. 29 (!) years later, I'm not so sure.

Again, technology is the enabler. In 1996 there was a hard limit on the number of things I could have done while I waited for my print job. Now the list of things is functionally infinite. Great, so I'm more productive! Well, no. Because an infinite subset of the infinite possibilities isn't productive work. It's Reddit.

I think that we need to learn to do less in order to do more. Not a new idea: in Deep Work, Cal Newport sets out four rules.⁴ The second: embrace boredom. Give your brain time to think, to drift, to wander in to idle spaces.

This ties in with Johnny.Decimal. I want to work by engaging with my system. Something like this:

1. Choose what to do. Identify the appropriate Johnny.Decimal ID.
2. Open that ID in my JDex and my task management system. Check in with myself. What's to do? What did I do previously? Is there a context to load? A thing to not forget?
3. Do the thing. And only the thing. If there is a pause, just pause.
4. Finish the thing. Close it down, mentally. Put it away.

This applies to life as much as it does to work. Example: yesterday, I had to drop a parcel off and shop for dinner. About to depart, I put in one of my AirPods as I was half way through a video a friend had sent me.⁵ Fortunately Lucy was there, otherwise I'd have cycled 3kms without the parcel, which I'd left on the table: a victim of distraction. (It would not have been the first time that this had happened.)

I don't think the solution to this is technology; it's not yet another to-do app. And I don't want my life driven by a reminder app. I want to drive it myself. The solution is to be more considered in what you do. To engage with life and not let it be the background to some YouTube video.

New Year's resolutions don't work…

Yeah, so they say. But I have a data point.

Exactly four years ago, after doom-scrolling Covid for all of 2020, I decided -- mostly in the moment, if memory serves -- to stop reading the news. And I did. Since then I haven't once visited the home page of a traditional news organisation, or watched any significant portion of a TV news broadcast. (I still keep up with 'tech news' because I'm a nerd and it's not really news.)

It wasn't the resolution that helped, it was having a date to anchor it to. By the end of January if you still haven't done the thing, well you're not going to start doing it in February. And four years later here we are. It worked for me. Science.

Let's leave the how for tomorrow

Would you like to join me? Let's do this together.

Your goals should be similar to mine but if they're not exactly the same that's okay. And you might not want to go as hard as I plan on doing. But I'm Johnny.Decimal: this is content. So that's also okay.

I think if we do this together, we can keep each other honest. I've created dedicated threads on Discord and the forum. Throw your hat in the ring!

And if you don't keep it up, that's okay. There's a good chance that I'll fail. This feels like it's going to be difficult.

But let's give it a crack. Think how nice it'll be in 2035: someone says, hey, you are like a really chill person, and you can say, yeah, I haven't been distracted by the internet since the start of this quarter-century.

Back from holiday; minimising the office; Decimal.Business update

Hey all. I thought I'd mentioned this here but evidently not: I just got back from a 3-week holiday. My whole family visited from the UK. Mam, dad, sister, brother-in-law, and two nieces.

Ages ranged from 9 to 78. We visited Sydney, Canberra, and the Gold Coast. It was amazing, but you know that old cliché that I need a holiday to recover from my holiday? Well yeah, that's definitely true.

I threw away half the office

I got back, took the few personal items out of my bag, and put them on my desk. Pencil case with a few pencils and charging cables. Notebook. Glasses case. Battery pack. Wallet.¹

Not much. I travel light. But still, I saw them there and was immediately filled with a tiny dread: that of putting them away in a messy drawer.

So what option was there other than to pull everything out of every drawer and throw half of it away? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The time felt right. End of the year: might as well start 2025 with a clean slate. I took a bunch of photos but it'd take too long to embed them here. Here's an iCloud shared library of the 'before' if you're interested. That's each drawer's contents laid out on my desk.

If you don't throw it away...

Lucy started to do the same, and while neither of us are hoarders -- those photos don't show that much stuff -- we had a startling realisation.

Which is that if you don't throw this thing away, somebody else has to. Maybe not for a while. Depends when you die. But, eventually.

So those 16 cards I was 'saving' in a little box along with my still-current bank cards. Why? My old UK drivers licence. PADI diver cards from 2003. Expired Qantas frequent flyer cards. To what end?

It's not like I considered them mementos. I didn't get them out and spread them lovingly on the table. They were just there, waiting to be thrown away. So I did, along with anything else that I don't actively use.

Tending towards minimalism

On a scale of minimalist (1) to hoarder (10) I'd put us at a 4. In counting what I put back in the drawers -- not counting, say, individual pencils -- I have 112 items.² @Skjolnir over on the Discord has 700 items in his life, total.

But I'm comfortable that everything in those drawers has a use. I questioned every item: do I actively use it? Would I pay to put it in storage?

The result feels amazing. My (physical) desktop now contains a laptop, a trackpad, a keyboard, and a mouse. Every drawer is neat and only contains what's necessary. As disposable items age out, I won't replace them. And I've got an entire drawer empty.

I definitely recommend this. There is an undeniable mental clarity that comes from having less stuff around you. Less stuff means less decisions.

Decimal.Business

And so, back to work with a clear mind. We're both 100% focused on the upcoming Decimal.Business system. Christmas means nothing to either of us so, other than allowing ourselves a watching of Die Hard with a Vengeance and a bottle of something bubbly on the 25th, we'll be working hard to get it out as soon as possible.³

For those of you who've pre-purchased, you have our deepest gratitude. We'll have it with you as soon as humanly possible.

Don't type the date by hand

On Discord, Jade asked:

Theres gotta be a better way of naming Amex (and other credit card statements) than this surely? I always struggle to remember the dates, but this just feels overwhelming, I usually just go with the statement date for naming credit card statements. Amex Ending 12345 - 2024 10 10 to 2024 11 09 - Statement 2024 11 09 - Due 2024 12 05

There are many situations where I recommend starting a filename (or folder) with the date. It works really well for almost any time-based document. Amex statements fall squarely in to that bucket.

Which date?

For the record, this is the ISO 8601 date standard. Once you get in to date formatting¹ you'll see that around, so it's good to know what it is.

That standard defines a bunch of formats, but the one we're interested in is the simple yyyy-mm-dd, i.e. 2024-11-21. It's the only sensible format for your computer dates as it sorts chronologically. Use whatever other weird crap you want in your personal life.

The problem with this date is that it's a real pain to type out by hand. And first you have to remember the date! Bo-ring. Fortunately computers are good at a) knowing the date and b) generating text.

Introducing Raycast

You're gonna need an app. There are many that do this. The venerable TextExpander might have been the first, but we're going to use a reasonably new app: Raycast.

Raycast is a beast. It does so much. But don't let that put you off -- we can start to use it for the stuff we need, and over time you can explore the rest of its features.

It's free. There's a pro plan, but you don't need it. It's currently Mac only, but they're working on a Windows version.

So, install it. You can test it's working by pressing Option-Space. A little window should appear in the middle of your screen.

I won't go over any other Raycast features just now. The manual is here.

Snippets

We're going to create a 'snippet'. How this works is that you type some sort of shortcut, and Raycast converts it to something else.

It's just like the feature on your iPhone that detects if you typed teh and corrects it to the. Or the one that corrects █uck to duck. You know.

There's a trick here, and it's in naming your snippets. You want to guarantee that whatever you type will never ever occur in normal daily typing. Because if your snippet trigger was al, every time you type that out Raycast will replace it for you.

So now instead of Johnny.Decimal you'll get Johnny.Decim2024-11-21. Not ideal.

I recommend ;;

I think this came from Merlin Mann waaaay back in the 43 folders days (2005!).² If you start each of your snippets with two semicolons, you guarantee that you'll never trigger them by accident.

If you touch-type³ they're under your right pinkie. So you mash ;; and then the name of your snippet and boom Raycast steps in and replaces it with something else.

Let's drop a little video here in case you're wondering what I'm on about.

Raycast: Create Snippet

Cool eh! Let's set it up.

1. Activate Raycast with ⌥ Space. Type create snippet to find that command. Press return.
2. The Name helps you identify it in the future.⁴ Call it YYYY-MM-DD or whatever else you like.
3. The Snippet is what will appear when this is activated. Paste this in: {date format="yyyy-MM-dd"}. This is a little bit of code that Raycast understands. Include the curly brackets.
4. Scroll the window to reveal Keyword. This is what you type to activate this snippet. I'd recommend ;;date for this one.
5. Press ⌘ return to save it.
6. Try it out!

Problem: it's today's date

As Jade is renaming lots of old files, this isn't perfect. But honestly I find even having the skeleton of a date format that I can then edit is more useful than starting from nothing.

Tip: use option-arrows to move around

Another small computer power-user tip: hold option (alt on Windows) and use the left/right arrows. This jumps your cursor a word at a time, and it stops at the breaks between the numbers in the date.

This will speed up your editing.

Why stop there?

In Jade's specific case, where she wants yyyy-mm-mm Amex 12345, there's nothing stopping you creating another custom snippet for that whole piece of text.

Repeat the process but now the Snippet should read {date format="yyyy-MM-dd"} Amex 12345. Maybe give that one the keyword ;;ax1? Whatever makes sense to you.

We can do so much more with Raycast, but that's a good start. Let us know how that works for you, Jade!