'System expansion' rewrite

Continuing the all-site re-write, we've re-written and expanded category 13 System expansion.

The original multiple systems concept remains; that page is now much simplified.

Two new pages have been added.

Expand an area

When you need a bit lot more room in the middle, you can expand an area. Use this when the usually-useful Johnny.Decimal constraints get in your way.

Extend the end

And if you just need a bit more room at the end, extend the end. Use this when you just have the odd ID here and there that needs a bit more space.

All the information is on those pages so I'll just let you head over there and read them.

Feedback always welcome. Head to the forum, Discord, or drop me an email.

Video series: Managing your JDex with Bear

Here's something I've been wanting to do for ages: a video series showing how I use the Mac/iOS app Bear, which I love, to manage my JDex.

This series will also serve as the introductory videos for the Quick Start: 'Life admin' pack. In each video I'll use an ID from the pack to demonstrate Bear's features.

Here's the first. Subscribe to the channel for the rest; they'll come at about one a week.

Old vs. new IDs

I got myself a snazzy new keyboard this week. They were on sale and my previous, the Microsoft Ergo Sculpt, feels like it's starting to fail.

It comes with a manual which I'd like to save, and while I'm at it I thought I'd download the manual for Lucy's keyboard as well.

There's a place for that

Life admin already has a place! I even remember discussing it with Lucy.

10-19Life admin

14 My online life

14.15My accessories

And so I make a new note in my JDex and that's it, job done.

How I did this previously

I'm really enjoying this shift to a less-granular ID. Designing 'life admin' in to a single area forced us to do it, and I'm thankful for it.

In my previous system this would have been:

10-19Personal, daily life

14 Technology

14.64Keychron keyboard manuals & receipt

(It just happens that my previous 14 was also technology.)

That is a much more specific ID, but more importantly it would have required me to create it first. This tiny, tiny friction is enough to stop you doing a thing.

Whereas this morning, when I thought to save these manuals, there was no friction. Great idea, I thought. I already know where they go.

Why is the receipt in Bear?

In recording a little YouTube series for Bear (keep an eye on the channel), I wondered to myself why I don't use its feature whereby it lets you attach pretty much anything to a note.

This is probably useful, I thought. So I put my keyboard's receipt in there. I wondered whether it was Spotlight-searchable, which it is; the file is just in a folder buried in your iCloud drive.

In this particular case I think I'll move it back to my main file system folder. Because there's no situation I can envisage where I'll be on the move and need this file on my iPhone.

Contrast with, say, tickets to an art gallery. I think there's a case to be made there that having those available in the Bear note 15.34 The arts is going to be way easier when you get to the gallery.

Both locations are available from my iPhone: they're just files in iCloud. But finding a file in Bear is a nicer experience than doing it in the Files app. (Because what isn't?)

RSS whoops

Just a quick note to say that I'm aware of the dodgy 13.__ items in the feed.

Thanks to Decimal Gemma for letting me know. Just thought I'd put this in your feed so you know that I know. :-)

(As usual, it was me fat-fingering a git command.)

Increase contrast

A couple of weeks ago I had a Zoom chat with Decimal Jade,¹ and noticed that her screen looked really really cool. What's that?, I asked her.

It was macOS' increase contrast accessibility mode, and it's changed my life.

Here's how a modern mail window looks.

And here's how it looks with increased contrast. (And Berkeley Mono set as the display font.)

This difference is startling to my eyes and it's changing how I use my computer.

I use windows -- lowercase -- heavily, as in I have lots of overlapping windows open. As well as making each individual app easier to use, it makes my entire desktop more cohesive.

Here's the before. (Full size light, dark.)

And after. (Full size light, dark.)

To my eyes we've gone from a kinda-pleasing-I-guess? smush of windows to a version where everything pops. Windows have an identity now. You might not find it as visually pleasing, but functionally it's night and day.

And, after running it for a few weeks, I do find it more aesthetically pleasing. What made us so afraid of a border around an icon? (A: Jony Ive.)

Modern apps have embraced this squishy-edge mentality, to their detriment. Here's Slack on my iPad. Honestly I look at that and I've no idea what I'm meant to do. I hate it.

There are whole threads of information hidden behind 8-point blue text. It's ridiculously un-discoverable.

Try it

Give this a go for a couple of days. It's a single toggle in your system's Settings → Accessibility → Display → Increase contrast.

I don't think I'll ever go back.

YouTube: Focus and productivity series

For those of you not subscribed¹ to the channel, we put up the first in a new series of videos yesterday.

'Focus and productivity' will be about how I use my system to stay focused myself. The first round of videos will explain how I'm using Timery's widgets, Live Activities, Apple's Focus modes, with Shortcuts tying everything together, to stay focused.

If that sounds complex it's because it is, a bit. But once set up, it works. Basically I tell myself, via a timer which is displayed as a widget, what it is that I want to be doing.

Am I writing this blog post? Creating the video series? Spending time on my forum or Discord?

Or am I not at work? Should I be with the chickens Lucy? Should I be offline entirely?

The problem

There was a day when I was working, and I went to the kitchen to get a glass of water, and an hour later I swear I was at the shops or something and I thought, wait ... what am I doing here?

Many of us know the problem of distraction; of trying to stay focused on this thing. Your computer makes it positively easy to do something else. So this is me trying to build a habit; trying to be better at doing this thing until I decide it's time to stop.

The 'solution'

Heavy air-quotes there. So far this is really helping, but there's a ways to go.

I'm using Apple's Live Activities, which are basically widgets everywhere -- including on your lock screen -- along with Timery, to always display a running timer on all of my devices.

That timer tells me what I should be doing. Basically that's it. So now when I wander off to the shop, as I pick up my phone on the way out the door I see that widget and think, wait a minute.

At my desk, I've got a spare iPhone suspended on a microphone boom arm above my monitor.² It's pretty cool! So I've got this floating display, as well as a widget on my Desktop, always reminding me: do this.

Exploring this topic

I'll show this setup in detail, and the rest of this series will address the topic of focus and productivity more broadly. We're aiming to put out a video a week.

I hope you like them and, as always, let us know what you think and what else you'd like to see.

The video

Slack × Life admin: an experiment

There's been some great discussion in the life admin support thread on the forum.

In thinking about the next Quick Start pack, which will be 'Small business'¹, I'm interested in the idea of providing really specific support at the ID level.

I want to start this experiment with the life admin pack.

The goal

An example will help. Let's say we end up with
13 Finance > 13.11 Quarterly accounting.

The pack will give you a place to put that: but what if it was also your operations manual, so that you not only knew where to store your accounts, but how to do them.

Why does every small business have to figure this out for themselves? Surely we can be more efficient than that.

I can't create a small business operations manual by myself. But together, we can.

One channel per ID

The idea is that we'll use Slack, and each ID in the pack will have its own channel.

Then you can ask for help in that channel and get really specific advice. Perhaps someone is an accountant; or maybe they live in your state and understand your question about tax law. Or maybe they just did it themselves last month and have experience to share.

I'll extract this knowledge and make it a permanent part of the system.

Why Slack?

I'm wary of adding another comms channel to this system. It's something else to manage.

But my existing options aren't suitable. I want this to be the sort of place you can jump in and 'chat', so that rules out the forum. Discord could possibly work -- but I get the feeling that small business owners would rather not spend their day on a platform built for gamers.

So I'm going to try Slack. Like the title says: this is an experiment. Feedback is welcome.

Free now; not always

To seed this, invitations are currently open. When we create the small business pack later this year this will become a perk that is only available to those who buy it.

Because, to reinforce the point: this is place to get targeted advice on a specific Quick Start issue. So if you're not using the pack, it's not going to be useful.

Life admin

This all applies to the life admin pack, so let's try it out. Here's how it works.

1. You need advice about a specific ID in the pack. Say 13.21 Budgets & planning.
2. If that channel doesn't already exist, create it. All members have permission to do this.
3. Post your question.
4. Happiness.

Get access

Here's the link. See you there.

6.0.0

The website has a new version. We re-wrote everything.

Version six. Where six is more of a hunch than any sort of science. (I'll do a brief history of the site in another post.)

Why?

The old content was a few years old, and it was showing its age. This system evolves: with me, with time, and as you -- my community -- discover new stuff.

That sounds schmaltzy but it's true. Especially in the past year, since I've had more time to spend on this thing, the forum and Discord have taken off. Your ideas all make their way back in to the system. Thanks.

Then we wrote a workbook, recorded a workshop, and created the first Quick Start pack -- in that order -- and they all subtly changed how I think about this thing.

So everything needed to be brought in to alignment, which is what we've done. We've drawn all the examples from the 'life admin' pack, so it's a cohesive story.

Lucy wrote much of it

I write a lot of words. Then Lucy -- a professional editor in a previous life -- tells me to delete most of them. This hurts, but she's right.

This time round, she wrote much of the new content.

Like I said last time, I consider the 10-19 Concepts section of this site to be the canonical Johnny.Decimal user guide. I love how focused this version is.

We agonised over every paragraph. 'Kill the widow' is Lucy's favourite game: if there's one word on its own line, you need to find another to delete to bring it up.¹

(Blog posts are where I'm let loose to ramble. Don't blame her for any of this.)

The index is now your JDex

This is big. I've been looking for inspiration for a while, and obsidian_starcaller called it.

JDex is brilliant. It recalls Rolodex, starts with 'JD', works as a noun and a verb, and basically doesn't exist as a term online. It's genius.

Berkeley Mono all the way

In line with this feeling like a manual, we replaced the old body serif font -- IBM Plex Serif -- with Berkeley Mono. It's now the only font we use.

I adore it. Lucy's idea. Why didn't I think of it?

We draw constant inspiration from the Berkeley site. When we wonder how to make something look more like a 1970s NASA manual, we go there and stare for a while.

Berkeley is really reasonably priced. Fonts can cost a lot more than this. We love Neil and his work: please support him if you can.

Dark mode is first-class

The site's dark mode is really sweet now. There's no toggle on the site: it honours your system setting.

With v6, all (new) images have proper dark mode versions. If the source app has a native dark mode, that's where the image comes from. If it doesn't, I've applied a colour filter and brought the luminosity down.

I don't use dark mode myself so feedback on this 'hack' is welcome. I know the contrast suffers; there's not much I can do about this. I'll fix up the old images, all of which are in blog posts, over time.

Layout tweaks

The 'Location' box above the main content was cute, but it didn't work very hard. That's been replaced with a new box that shows a table of contents for the page. Nice.

Behind the scenes

You know when you go to the dentist and they give you a full scrape and you come out and your teeth feel sharper?

That's what I did to all of the back-end code. So it's now much nicer to work with. This will allow me to make more changes more quickly in the future.

Should I read it all?

I think you should. It won't take long, and it'll bring you up to speed.

And when I find a typo?...

There's got to be one, right? It'll kill us but hey, we'd rather know about it.

First accepted typo gets a Johnny.Decimal sticker.² :-)

Thank you

Thanks for being here. Without you, there's no point. As always, we're here to help. Let us know what you need.

-- johnny & lucy, aka 'jucy'

Bear Pro subscription prize draw

Since we launched the Quick Start: 'Life admin' pack I've been running a prize draw for 1 year of Bear Pro, worth US$30.

The kind folks at Bear gave me 5 App Store codes. Another reason why it's my favourite notes app. :-)

Here's how I did it. I won't show full working as it might leak customer data.

1. Export all orders from Shopify.
2. Extract orders for the workshop and paste them in to Excel 5x.
3. Extract orders for the workbook/quick start bundle and paste them in 2x.
4. Extract orders for the quick start pack and paste them in 1x.
5. Add a column, =RAND(). This gives me a random number between 0 and 1.
6. Copy/paste values on this column otherwise it changes on every edit or file open.
7. Sort the column descending.
8. Pick the top 5.

I just emailed those 5 people. They might not need the code, in which case I'll mail the next people on the list until they're all gone.