About the Workbook

A text guide to building your own system

If you want to get organised fast, check out the Life Admin System.

But if you know you want more (e.g. if you need to organise a hobby or your job) you're going to want to build your own system.1

The Workbook documents that process. It's how I build systems. In fact, we used it to build the Life Admin and Small Business Systems.

Step-by-step instructions

After answering the question "how do I build my own system?" for a decade, I realised that I needed a foolproof, step-by-step guide. It's as methodical as I could make it.

If you do what it says, in the order it says, you can't fail. As always, there's a world of support available on the forum, Discord, or email.

Although, people don't email me as much now. This is how I measure the Workbook's success. Since publishing it, the number of people emailing me with questions has plummeted.2

So it works. It's helped hundreds of people to be more organised. I guarantee it will help you.

Process overview

We've kept it tight (Lucy was an editor in a former life), but it contains everything that I know. The process should take about a month.

10-19 Define your system's scope:

  • First, we set the goals for your system and draw a boundary around what you want to organise. This keeps you focused.

20-29 Discovery:

  • Then you spend a week writing down everything you do that's related to your scope. This ensures you don't miss anything.

30-39 Create your areas & categories:

  • Next, you sort your discovery notes into different groups. Now you have a structure.

40-49 Build your system:

  • Then you add numbers, create IDs, and move your content in. You now have a working Johnny.Decimal system.

50-59 The index:

  • It's time to create the master record of your IDs, your index. It will transform how you work. You should now feel organised and calm.

Take inspiration from the Life Admin System

We spent hundreds of hours designing the Life Admin System. It's a good system to learn from: see its patterns and take inspiration from them.

Alternatively, you could use it to organise the stuff we all do. And use the Workbook to sort the stuff that makes you unique.

Try the Workshop for the full experience

The Workshop can be accessed with a JDU membership. It's for those who want the deepest, most complete knowledge.

I walk Lucy (our student) through the process over 5+ hours of video. By the end she's built a system that she still uses today.

Footnotes

  1. If you just want to build a new area for a hobby to slot into your Life Admin System, you can still follow the Workbook process. But when you define your system's scope, limit it to the hobby. ↩

  2. It's called the 'Workbook' because it was first published as a PDF download. The web version is the same content. ↩