Personal and work systems: how do they interact?

This is a common question that I just received by email. The author has a personal and a work system – let's say they're Life Admin and Small Business, but that isn't important – and wants to know how the two should interact.

The key question is whether these systems should be merged and/or interact in some way, or if they should remain divided. For example should you move Life Admin's 10-19 under your business system and re-number it? Should these systems share a JDex?

(An assumption is that they're on the same computer, like they are for me. I don't have a separate work machine; if you do, this is simpler.)

I split my systems

I have P76 Johnny's personal life and D25 Johnny.Decimal. To each, it is like the other does not exist.

They're different parts of my life and I find the separation helpful. Also, for example, I share the business with Lucy, but not my personal stuff. As soon as you merge them, you lose the ability to do that sort of thing.

I keep my personal JDex in Bear and work in Obsidian. Again, because Obsidian is shared and Bear can't do that. This works for me: when I'm 'at work', I'm at work. It's rare that I find myself wishing I could, say, link a note from my work system over to my personal system.

And when this does happen, I just use the full SYS.AC.ID identifier to tell myself this is what I mean. It just happened this morning: in a note in Obsidian I wanted to refer to a personal thing so I just typed out 'blah blah P76.15.54 blah blah' and that's all I need.

No renaming necessary

Our emailer had asked whether it was necessary to rename any of the systems' subfolders to indicate the system that they belong to.

No. I have two top-level folders which mirror the system names, then the folder structure underneath is as-downloaded from JDHQ. No renaming of folders.

I do name files

I find it useful to name files with SYS.AC.ID at the start. This takes no extra time and now I can quickly see to which system they belong.