Ask yourself: why am I saving this thing?

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?