On the forum, user cobblepot raises the question of how much a Johnny.Decimal ID should contain, and whether it should contain subfolders, and if so how many.
My thinking on this has changed significantly over the years. The site needs a proper refresh, which will take time. It’s next on my list.
Until then, this short video hopefully clarifies my thinking, and answers some of cobblepot’s questions directly.
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We’ve been spending the last few weeks developing a standard ‘life admin’ pack. The idea is that it’ll handle 95% of what 95% of people need to run their daily lives.
It’s been an interesting process. We did it by the book, starting by ‘discovering’ all of the things that people tell us they need to organise on the forum, email, workshop comments, and looking back at our own lives.
Then to design a structure we cracked open MindNode and we spent a few days just talking it all over. Looking at every decision, questioning it, refining it, moving things around.
And then I moved my entire personal life in to it, which caused us to refine it even further. So I’m proof that this works.
Who’s it for?
At JDHQ we’ve been calling this the ‘JD quick-start’ pack. We’ve designed it for everyone: the idea is that you don’t need deep background — any background, really — in Johnny.Decimal to jump in and use it.
And you shouldn’t have to spend a week ‘getting organised’ to, well, be organised. Everyone needs this stuff.
We’ve spent a hundred hours figuring it out so that you don’t have to.
One area, five categories
I knew I wanted this to be a single area.
The more I do this the more I’m convinced that broader — much broader — categories and IDs are the way to go. And that my advice from a decade ago to ‘not create subfolders’ is no longer relevant: see below for the secret to subfolders.
(I think it was good advice at the time. But the landscape has changed; the amount of stuff we all store has grown. That changes how you should think about storing it.)
And we’ve compressed everything in to just five categories.
Dates solve so many problems
You can compress an amazing amount in to a single ID when the first thing you see inside that ID is a list of dates, formatted yyyy-mm-dd
so that they sort nicely.1
For instance, we’ve designed a single ID:
10-19Life admin
15 Travel, events, & entertainment ✈️
15.41All short trips
We realised that a ‘short trip’ — one that you don’t really need to plan, you just book and go — doesn’t need its own ID. We all make these trips all the time.
So a single ID is enough, as long as its subfolders look like this:
10-19Life admin
15 Travel, events, & entertainment ✈️
15.41All short trips
2024-02-04 Melbourne
2024-04-18 Sydney
2024-05-28 Brisbane
2024-07-13 Adelaide
And in each of those, for a short trip you might just have a flight confirmation and a hotel booking. Simple.
An idea I’ve toyed with over the years, and one that I usually avoid because of its unpredictability.
But in this highly-designed system, it’s really useful: subheaders.
10-19Life admin
13 Money earned, saved, owed, & spent 💰
13.10■ Earned 🤑
13.11Payslips, invoices, & remittance
13.12Expenses & claims
13.13Government services
13.14Gifts, prizes, inheritance, & windfalls
13.15Selling my stuff
13.20■ Saved 📈
13.21Budgets & planning
13.22Bank accounts
13.23Investments & assets
13.24Pension
We picked the ‘black square’ symbol because it looks nice in macOS’ Finder.
This works really well in breaking up a long list of IDs.
The emoji really help 😛
We’ve sprinkled emoji throughout, and they’re really useful. They give your brain something else to anchor on to.
(When we release the pack there’ll be a version without emoji if you’re the sort of person who takes yourself really seriously.)
The pack
The pack will contain this folder structure as a download, and links to shared folders on all of the usual cloud platforms.
It will contain an index, either as downloadable text files that you can import in to your notes app of choice, or as a shared Apple Notes link.
And there’ll be a version that you can import in to Bear, which uses its unique nested-tag feature to build a really nice sidebar.
It’ll include a PDF manual which details every ID, explains the sorts of things that should (and shouldn’t) go there, and points out any obvious exceptions.
Eventually — not in the first release — we’re going to have a short series of videos which explain the structure and our thinking in more detail.
Money
Its full list price will be US$20. It’ll go on sale for US$10 as it won’t be 100% finished. Obviously if you get it early you’ll get all updates.
If you’re reading this, you can get on pre-sale now for just US$8. it’s launched: see 14.04 for the current deal.
Sneak peek
This looks really great in your file system. Honestly, I love it.
Feedback?
I’d love to know what you think of this. Is this the thing you want more of? If not this, what?
We sit here and try to work out what people want. It’s much simpler if you just tell us! :-)
Drop me an email and let me know.
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On the forum, Kelso asks:
How do I change my MindNode into a folder structure onto my computer?
Great question, best answered with a video.
Excel sheet
You can download the sheet from the video here.
Fill the column
=IF(C5<>"", C5, D4)
Create a file path, ‘escaping’ spaces with a backslash
=IF(G7="", "", SUBSTITUTE(CONCAT(D7, "/", F7, "/", G7), " ", "\ "))
Create the mkdir -p command
=IF(H7="", "", CONCAT("mkdir -p ", H7))
Create the echo command to create text files
=IF(G7="", "", CONCAT("echo # ", G7, " > ", SUBSTITUTE(G7, " ", "\ "), ".txt"))
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This was written as a reply to a forum post but it got long and felt useful enough to cross-post here.
Maybe you can invent a complementary system for tasks as well?
– osau
I spent most of yesterday thinking about this. I’ll type out some thoughts here as it might help them crystallise in my mind.
We start with the classes of to-do [22.00.0034]. Read that if you haven’t.
In my mind I’m still using this P1
–P4
idea. How do we feel about that, generally? It makes an internal monologue really quick! But if you didn’t once run helpdesks for a living it might not be so obvious.
P4: not really a thing to-do (yet)
So P4s are easy. They’re not actually things ‘to-do’, or if they are, you haven’t decided that you really want to do them yet. You might, in the future. For now they’re ideas, thoughts, lists, hopes, dreams, notes, something you just don’t want to lose.
@LucyDecimal system was ~90% P4s. She loves a list. Here’s a selection of mine from my re-grouping exercise yesterday:
- Re-think your iOS device home screens. Align with macOS desktop widgets?
- Tidy up your Airtable bases. Rename them, consolidate icon colours, and archive some old stuff.
- Gift idea: buy [someone] [thing].
- Make a trout & bean salad in summer.
The key with P4s is that there is absolutely no consequence whatsoever if they don’t get done. If they all burned in a fire you’d be sad, but nothing bad would happen.
I am therefore convinced that P4s MUST NOT live in your task system. They’re a bullet point in a note.
P1s: critically time sensitive
I’ll jump straight to P1s because they’re also easy. These are things that absolutely must happen and usually before a certain time.
That time is usually quite soon – pick Jemima up from saxophone practice – or regularly – pay the rent.
I only have one P1 and it is to check the account we use to pay our rent and bills, which is not our primary account, to make sure that there’s enough in it. We keep it at or near that amount as it doesn’t earn interest etc. So each month, on the last day of the month, Due goes off and tells me to do this.
So I think P1s MUST live in their own little world. You have so few. If you have five that’s probably too many. Unless you have six kids and they all love learning brass instruments and none of them can catch the bus. But you get the idea. Use sparingly.
Because when I see Due, I never ignore Due.1 Past me has sent me a message: this one is really important. Drop everything else.
P2s & P3s: the difficult part in the middle
Here’s where it gets harder.
First, one class of to-do that we can safely handle.
Project tasks
A project task is a task in service of getting a project done. Step 89 of 121 things. It’s not some isolated thing like pick Jemima up.
As a broad rule, I think these tasks can be lumped together. When you sit down to get Project Shoehorn
done, you look at your list of tasks and you work through it. Perhaps some of those tasks need to be pushed out to the future and so we need to handle them differently, but a lot of them do not.
Don’t clutter your P2/P3 task system with project tasks. They can probably be bullet points in a note.
Criteria for P2/P3
So the criteria for something to be a P2/P3 is that if you do not do it, there is a consequence.
That consequence might not be grave. It might just be that you feel worse about yourself. But, in your estimation, it exists.
So the question then is, what gets to interrupt you? I say only a P2 is allowed to do that: to put a notification somewhere in your life.
Because it is these notifications that are the curse. As soon as they exceed some very low threshold, they cease to be useful. Worse: they’re harmful because there is something you really should do in there, but it’s drowned in a sea of other stuff.
My stuff from yesterday
Yesterday — I wish I’d taken a screenshot, damn — I checked off 6 or 7 items that had been sitting as past-due to-dos in my system.2 Not one of them had a genuine reason to be there.
Some of them were things that I should periodically do: update the forum software. If I leave that too long, it becomes harder or breaks. There is a consequence to my forum not working.
Some of them were things that I wanted to remember while I was out on a walk, and I just asked Siri to remind me this afternoon to… and that action was still there days later.
Back to notifications
Let’s pretend notifications didn’t exist. What would we do?
- We’d write down the things we had to-do.
- We’d try to group these to-dos in to sensible buckets of similar stuff.
- Maybe on different pages of a notebook?
- We’d remember, on some sort of cycle, to look at each of the pages.
- We might either:
- Just do all the stuff from one page on one day, or
- Pull important things from different pages to a new page, and focus on that stuff.
Now substitute:
- ‘sensible buckets of similar stuff’ for ‘your Johnny.Decimal categories’, and
- ‘pages of a notebook’ for ‘folders in your to-do system’, and
- ‘remember, on some sort of cycle’ for ‘scheduling time in your calendar’,
and we have the beginnings of a system.
Should anything get to interrupt you?
What I’m struggling with here is, is there actually a difference between P2 & P3? My first thought was that P2s should be allowed to interrupt you. But the more I think on it, the more I doubt this approach.
Here’s a P2 that I have: check my credit card before the 15th of the month and, if there’s anything to pay, pay it.
I consider that a P2 because if I don’t pay, that affects my credit rating, which is a long-term thing that I can’t easily undo. Compared to a P3 which is to check that some company processed a refund as promised and I got the $50 back. If I don’t do that and they forget, I stand to lose $50. But I consider that a lower consequence than a bad credit rating.
But back to interruptions. If I’m organised, and things are in neat buckets, and I trust myself to look at them regularly, why would any of them need to interrupt me?
Do categories of stuff at the same time
I need to pay my credit card at some point before the 15th. Not on the 15th. So do it every month on the 10th. And while I’m there, check all the other financial related stuff.
It’s all boring, you might as well just get in a zone and do it all at once.
Now, the problem comes when you decided you’d do this on Friday at 14:00, like I did last week, then this time rolls round and you were doing something else, and you didn’t actually do it.
But I wonder: could I make life simpler, calmer, more reliable, if instead of considering that as 5 things ‘to-do’ — credit card, rent, etc. — could it just be 1 thing, which is monthly financial processing.
Don’t just do things randomly
Because here’s another consideration. (Sorry, I know this is long. I don’t mind if you’ve given up.)
I had a task: print your iCloud account recovery kit. I wrote that on a piece of paper on my desk.
Yesterday, I found that piece of paper. But, damned if I wasn’t sure I’d done that thing. But did I? I didn’t crumple the paper up, it’s still here in the list. Ugh. So I get out the locked box and check and, yeah, I did it. What a waste of mental energy that was.
So don’t just do things as they occur to you. No! Write them down, or check whether you already have them written down.
Put them in their categories with their friends. You know they can wait: there was no urgency whatsoever to me printing that thing.
And get to them in the cycle.
So are P2s just higher in the (same) list than P3s?
I wonder then if P2/P3 isn’t just one list — as in, one list per category — that needs to be looked at on a cycle.
And if the P2s aren’t just higher on that list than the P3s. You do them first, because they’re more important.
Check the rent account. Then if you’ve still got time/energy, you get to the lower stuff. Did you get that $50 refund?
When I was thinking about this yesterday, I couldn’t think of a situation where a P2 should be allowed to interrupt you.
Work in progress
There’s more to think about here, but I’d appreciate any thoughts.
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In re-doing the D85 structure I realised that the hardest part is, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the creation of your areas and categories.
This is the bit where you form the shape of your system: you decide how to categorise your life or project or whatever.
So here’s an example. On a recent episode of Cortex, CGP Grey talks about his very granular use of to-dos. (The bit is near the end.)
I found this interesting enough to want to save it. So: where?
This sort of nebulous piece of data is one of the hardest. I realised the key is to ask yourself the question:
Why am I saving it? What is its purpose?
In this case, the answer is that this might influence the Johnny.Decimal system in some way in the future. It might change my thinking; change how I recommend people do things.
This led me to the realisation that D85
needs an area for this: for the thinking about Johnny.Decimal as an idea.
That’s a long area title, and thanks to Lucy I now appreciate the value of an interesting title. So I ended up with:
30-39 The institute 🧬
(Yes, I’ve started to use emoji in my titles. Something else I got from Lucy building her system. It’s surprisingly useful in anchoring concepts in your brain.)
As soon as this idea came to me, a bunch of other stuff dropped in to place.
Where do I store my sample Johnny.Decimal systems, the stuff I use as examples and screenshots? In the institute.
Items related to solving the edge-cases like the academic problem or the freelancer problem? The institute.
Academic papers that I find? Institute. It’s perfect.
And I’m not sure if it would have occurred to me if I hadn’t asked: why am I saving it? what is its purpose?
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We finally found the time to get stuck in to the re-organising of system D85
that we use to manage the Johnny.Decimal business.1
As I’ve documented previously, our own system grew as a result of me quitting my job last year. When you’re figuring out what to do, just getting the job done and trying to earn an income is more important than being perfectly organised.
We were organised enough. It’s not like it was chaos over here.
But it did get to the point where we felt it was getting in the way. I didn’t have a good place to keep ideas. Important ideas: stuff that affects what we do next.
The old system – not *terrible*
So, we’re starting again.
Step 1: follow my own advice
Easy enough: follow the workbook. First up, 10-19 Define your system's scope
.
In
So in scope there we have:
- All business related activity.
- Coruscade finances & admin. This is the legal entity that we trade through, and is currently
30-39
in my personal system.
- Previously, I used it for IT contracting. But as it’s now exclusively Johnny.Decimal, it makes sense to bring it over.
- Creation of content that might end up on the site.
- For example, videos to accompany blog posts.
Out
Out of scope is anything that is only, exclusively, on the web site.
This blog post, for example. I type it directly in to my code editor. It exists in D01
not D85
.1
Goals
We realised while recording the workshop that as well as defining what’s in/out of scope, it’s really good to write down the goals of your system.
What is it you want it to do? How do you want to work? What do you want it to achieve?
These can be intangible. They’re your hopes and dreams for this new thing that you’re building.
Here’s ours.
- 100% shared system.
- That is, between me and Lucy. There can be nothing that only one of us has access to. This will influence tool choice, later.
- Easy inbox/transfer (of, say, URLs).
- So when I want to send Lucy a URL I don’t default to iMessage. There’s a place that I can drop it that she can pick it up.
- Logical like the Life Admin standard area.
- We really like the design of the soon-to-be-made-a-standard
Life Admin
area. See: diagrams on home page, Lucy’s new system in the workshop.
- Full implementation of the standard zeros.
- See
12.03
— we explored this extensively while building Lucy’s new system, and came up with some great new ideas.
- An index that cross-links all the things.
- So things are where they should be, rather than everything being bunched up near 43.11.
- 43.11 is the ID for the workshop. We found overselves over-loading it with stuff, vs. putting that stuff in its proper home, and using our index to link the two.
- DaVinci is special: when you’re making a video, assets need to be in a central assets folder, i.e. you’re not …
- wait a minute. I get what Lucy wants. But let’s check that this really is the right approach.
- DaVinci is the video editing software we use. It needs access to your files so that you can use them in videos. It has its own concept of a ‘media library’ that we need to be conscious of.
- Uses the new, to-be-designed ‘creative template’.
- Lucy wants a ‘logical library of (creative) outputs’.
- Related to creative template.
- Start from scratch: brand-new, all clean.
- This should be as perfect and standard an implementation as it’s possible to be.
- If I wouldn’t recommend it on the site, we’re not doing it.
20-29 Discovery
Someone recently reviewed the workbook:
Overall I find it hard to believe any reader will actually write on sticky notes for a week while building the system. ⭐️⭐️
Well I find it hard to believe that someone thinks you can organise your whole life without writing stuff down for a week. What the hell else would you do?! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also who doesn’t want to put coloured notes on the wall? When I had a job if they’d said hey we’ll pay you to just stick bright paper on the wall I’d have jumped at it.
Anyway. Discovery’s fun, don’t skimp on discovery.
Write. Everything. Down. Even you, Travis.
30-39 Build your areas & categories
So that gets us to yesterday. Time to start building the structure of this thing.
We started by putting all the post-its in a mind map so we could shuffle them round more easily.
Then me and Lucy each put our headphones on and had a go at building it independently.
🤯
I had no idea how hard this was going to be.
I’ve never done this
A weird confession, but hey. I’ll never lie to you.
I’ve built easily a dozen systems over the years. But they’ve all grown organically: I started a job, I just got going, I fixed it up as I went.
When we recorded the workshop, I told Lucy what to do, but she did the work.
This is the first time that I’ve taken ~100 items and tried to group them like this.
So, if you do yours and you find it difficult, that’s okay. And this is why we say to take a week: give it a go, have a rest. Come back and see what you did. Try it another way. Go for a walk, do it again.
Like I always say, this thing will be with you for a while. A week is a tiny fraction of its lifespan.
The ‘creative agency’ problem
We knew that we needed to use the not-yet-documented ‘creative’ pattern.
This is for the sort of creative — individual, team, agency — who has inputs like artwork, logos, colour palettes — and then does some work, and as a result ends up with outputs like videos and social media posts.
So before working on the rest of our system — the business admin side of things — we thought we’d nut this one out, because that’ll clear out a bunch of stuff and we’ll know what we’re left with.
We started that yesterday with a whiteboard-in-the-garden session. This entry is running a little long, so I’ll save the details for the next post.
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I’ve started learning to write Swift, Apple’s modern programming language. I’m going to write an app to help you manage your Johnny.Decimal index.
I think I have some pretty cool ideas. 😎
When you do this sort of thing, you have to choose a language and a platform. This choice is all trade-off. There isn’t one best-choice-for-everyone.
JavaScript
If there was going to be a common language, it’d be JavaScript. And I already know it! So why am I not using it?
With JavaScript, your desktop option is to build an Electron app. Slack is written in Electron. Discord is Electron. Electron is really popular.
I hate most Electron apps. They’re janky, they just don’t feel right. They use gigs of your RAM. They take ages to load. You end up with hundreds of dependencies and you’ve no idea what most of them do.
I know this because I’ve built web stuff. It’s cool to hate on JavaScript but I love it! It’s the only language I know.
But I won’t be using it to build a desktop-class app.
Native integration
I want to build something that can fully integrate with the thing that I use. I want it to be able to talk to my file system, my reminders, my calendar.
It has to feel right. It has to fit in. When you launch it it should feel familiar.
iCloud
The other massive benefit to developing in Apple World is iCloud.
You know what the very last thing I want to build is? Like the last thing on Earth?
It’s a database of users. Oh boy do I not want your data.
As soon as I have it, I have to worry about encryption. There’s no way I’m keeping your stuff if it’s not end-to-end encrypted. And that’s really really difficult to do…
…unless you use the data stores provided, for free, without any additional login, by iCloud. Yes please.
iPhone and iPad compatibility
It doesn’t come for free but it’s pretty cheap from an effort perspective. Swift mostly just handles it. That’s nice.
I’ve tried Microsoft development
It was one of the first things I did when I quit my job last year: I spent a few months hacking about trying to develop a thing for MS Teams.
I have never been unhappier in front of a computer. Never again.
So, there it is. Sorry, FJ! You’re going to have to get a Mac, my friend.
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31/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
I just did a word count on the posts from 22.00.0032 through to yesterday. Removing the header text that appears immediately above, it’s sixteen thousand, three hundred and thirty seven words.
I certainly wouldn’t have written that much without the challenge. But I’m glad it’s over! I’ve had Due nagging me from 07:00
every day and some days I have wanted to throw it out of a window.
That said, I’m going to try to keep some sort of cadence. Writing is good. Being forced to write is good.
16,456. 🫡
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30/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
Lucy and I spent the night in Goulburn, NSW.
Short review: seems like a lovely town. Neat as a pin. A ‘high street’ many towns would kill for. You should visit.
But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I’m here to talk about Chinese restaurants.
These regional towns invariably have at least one. And they’ve become a highlight of our trip. We actively seek out the ‘regional Chinese’.
Because they’re a blast from the past. The menus are identical: chow mein, prawns in translucent goop, special fried rice.
The decor is invariably a shade of pink.
The wine is … well, technically it’s wine.
The Lotus, Goulburn; we didn't go to this one
There’s even an ABC show, Chopsticks or Fork?, celebrating this great Australian institution.
Perhaps our favourite to date is the Jade Garden, Smithton, TAS. I mean have a look at it.
We have this photograph printed and framed on the wall.
We went there two nights in a row because there is literally nothing else to do in Smithton. Do not go to Smithton.
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