Areas and categories

What is an area?

Areas are the filing cabinets we just talked about. Think of them as 'areas of your life' or 'areas of expertise'. That's how broad they should be. If they're too narrow, you'll use them up. Leave room for expansion.

Areas group categories

Area 10-19 groups all of the categories from 10 through 19.1 Everything also has a title, so this becomes 10-19 Life admin.

Similarly, area 20-29 Home business groups the categories 20 to 29. And area 30-39 Tennis club groups the categories 30 to 39.

What is a category?

Categories are the drawers we just talked about. They're collections of similar stuff: travel documents; marketing material for your small business; facilities maintenance for the tennis club.

And they're the most important Johnny.Decimal concept.

Categories group IDs

A category is as organised as you need to be. When you get there, you see a bunch of ID folders. But they all relate to the same thing. And they're ordered in the sequence that you created them.

A category is where you work

Any type of 'work' you do can become a category. When you sit down at your computer you have a task in mind ā€“ researching a holiday, writing a flyer for your business, employing a new groundskeeper.

The goal of Johnny.Decimal is to get you to the place where you do this work, quickly, with no stress.

Prefer fewer, broader categories

If you have granular categories called investments, budget, and savings, you've created ambiguity. This slows you down because there's more decisions to make. Compress them in to one ā€“ money ā€“ and the ambiguity disappears.

Categorising is worth the effort

Categorising our stuff requires some effort. But it is necessary because it helps us find things again.

And it can feel harder when things could go either way. For example, do I go with Insurance > Car and Insurance > House or
Car > Insurance and House > Insurance?

In reality, you just decide. It's not like you're ever paralysed with indecision: that's the entire point of the structure of Johnny.Decimal.

Making areas and categories

There's two main approaches to sorting the stuff in your life when designing a Johnny.Decimal system.

  • Top-down: sort everything into areas first, then divide those into categories.
  • Bottom-up: sort everything into categories, then group those categories in to areas.

I talk more about this in the Workshop.

Footnotes

  1. Area 00-09 does exist; I'll discuss it later in the advanced topics. ā†©