19/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
While I was away last week, Lucy recorded herself creating her index. (We’re still recording that section of the workshop.)
One of the items she added was a doctor’s referral letter. My natural instinct would have been to create a very granular ID, something like:
12.20 Referral for scan for achy knee problem
1
…or maybe broaden it to the subject rather than the specific action:
12.20 Achy knee problem
This is just how I’ve always done it. But Lucy did this instead:
12.20 Doctors and tests
That’s much less granular than I would have done, and I really like it.
Because I don’t need a super-specific ID for that scan. In the grand scheme of my life, does every little thing that I do need its own ID? No. I’d be drowning in them.
Lucy’s answer fits better with an idea that we came up with while recording the workshop: IDs are like the manila folders that we show on the home page. When you sit down to do ‘some work’, imagine yourself opening that folder. Ideally, everything you need is in it, and not much more.
And imagine that they cost about a dollar. So you wouldn’t create them willy-nilly, but nor should creating one be something you consider too deeply.
Put the date in the scan’s filename
The crucial extra step here, which Lucy did, is to name the scan so that it includes the date at the front:
2024-05-19 Referral for achy knee scan.pdf
2
This way, folder 12.20
can contain an almost limitless amount of this sort of information without ever feeling cluttered.
If I’m lucky, this one folder will serve me for the rest of my life.
Officially endorsed
I really like this approach. I’ll be doing it myself when I rebuild my own systems.
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18/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
Peter asks on Discord, what apps do you use to organise yourself and your website and your business life?
I’m in-between tools at the moment; part of the ‘organisational bankruptcy’. But I’ll give a run-down of what I’ve used in the past, and where I’m leaning for the future.
Notes apps
I’ve always preferred the really simple style of note-taking app that I think was popularised/invented by the legendary Notational Velocity, which was forked to the also-legendary nvALT. The former dates back to 2009.
They have a list of notes, and a search box. Typing in the search box instantly — and instantly is really important — filters the list of notes that you see to only include those that match the search.
That’s it. That’s the feature. Anything else is a bonus: any sort of folders, tags, whatever. You don’t need anything else. You just need text search.
I'm not kidding – this is the whole app
This works amazingly well with Johnny.Decimal because your numbers provide a really powerful built-in filtering feature. Want to search for melbourne
but only inside your category 16 Travel
? Well then search for 16. melbourne
.
ResophNotes
There was a clone for Windows: ResophNotes. Slightly different layout, exactly the same features. Which is to say, no features.
Alas as of last month (April ’24), the website is offline. It had a good run.
RIP nvALT
Nothing good lasts forever, and nvALT is also no longer maintained. It’s tough being a notes app.
Bear
Enter Bear. By now I guess a decade old,1 it’s one of the most respected Mac notes apps.
It has a ton of features but what I love about it is that most of them stay out of the way until you need them. This is important because…
I seek simplicity
This is my job now, and people look to me for recommendations. So part of my new thinking is that I want to be using the simplest apps that anyone can use.
If you’re reading this you’ve probably heard of Obsidian. I don’t use it. Because the first time I opened it I thought, whoa, this is complex, and I closed it immediately.
There is no way that your average person is going to use Obsidian. I’d be bad at my job if I suggested that they do so.
And I believe that my system will be better, more focused, more deeply considered, if I’m not leaning on some obscure Obsidian plug-in to get something done. No. You can do everything you need to do with nvALT. And if you want to write yourself a plug-in, go nuts. I’m not going to discourage you.
Currently, Bear is in that sweet-spot. It has an amazing sync service and native, beautiful apps for every Apple platform. It’s very reasonably priced. It’s well supported and has a secure future. It doesn’t lock you in: you can export all of your stuff whenever you want.2
You should probably use Bear.
To-do apps
For a long time I used OmniFocus. And really heavily: I replicated my Johnny.Decimal structure entirely in the app, every ID having its own project.
This works really well. But I don’t do it any more.
I’m not sure why. I think I just got sick of having so many ‘to-dos’ that were never getting done. It was making me feel bad.
I think my job was really hectic at the time. So I’d come home and have all of these tasks and maybe I just rejected it.
I don’t actually enjoy being task-list driven. I usually have a sense of what needs to be done. Maybe I’ll plan a thing out on paper.
Due
One app that I can’t live without is Due.
It has one killer feature: it nags you, forever, until you tell it to stop. Over and over. This makes it basically impossible to forget to do a thing.
I use it sparingly, for what I call P1
tasks in this post.
Apple Reminders
We’re a HomePod house. The kitchen has a stereo pair of the big ones, and the office and bedroom have a mini each.
This makes shouting ‘hey Siri, remind me to do a thing’ really convenient. Mostly for this reason — I think the app is garbage — I use Reminders.
Also see above re: simplest tools. But this is not a recommendation at this point. I need to consider this and get back to you.
Fantastical
I almost forgot Fantastical! I use this to interact with my reminders more than I do Reminders. Great app, indispensable, worth every penny of the subscription. It’s how I use my calendar, 100%. Never open Apple’s Calendar ever.
This is all up in the air
That’ll do for now, because 10% of my daily thinking currently goes towards this problem. I’ll have properly thought out recommendations and strategies for each of these classes of app later this year.
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17/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
I’ve spent the day diving in to the Swift programming language that runs all modern Apple apps.
So far it’s really similar to JavaScript which is great. Computer languages are a lot like spoken languages: if you already speak Italian, Spanish isn’t far away. But Hungarian or Finnish are totally different.
Fortunately JavaScript and Swift feel like Mediterranean cousins.
I’m using Hacking with macOS: SwiftUI Edition by Paul Hudson and really enjoying it.
I’m looking forward to the bit where we start to build a UI; so far we’re just in text-function mode. One step at a time.
I haven’t given this deep thought…
This might be a rash decision. To write an app. But watching Lucy create her index in Apple Notes the other day really made me realise how much I could do if I had my own thing.
I think this deserves its own thing. And yes, this means yet another app. In the crowded PKM market.
But actually I’m not trying to compete with the Obsidians or the Notions. I made a decision a while ago to focus my efforts on the tools that anyone can use. Not just the PKM nerds. Obsidian isn’t that.
I want my app to sit in this space; where someone who has no idea what ‘PKM’ is, but has a bunch of files on their desktop, could start to use it and have it be immediately useful, familiar, comforting.
That probably means design over features. Simple to start.
But let’s see what SwiftUI can do first, and then think about app design.
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16/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
Chatting to a friend yesterday made me realise that I really want to write software to help you manage your Johnny.Decimal system.
It’ll be Mac initially, and iPad/iPhone maybe later. It can’t be web — not enough system integration — and I’m sorry if you use Linux or Windows but I’m just one guy and Apple is what I know.
I can already code to a meh standard. I know JavaScript. So I don’t need to learn the fundamentals of programming.
I listen to ATP, so I have a good high level understanding of the state of Mac development. I’d like to learn whatever’s as default and future-proof as possible. So I guess that means Swift UI? (I know this might come with some trade-offs.)
So! What I’m looking for is a list of the best resources. Including but not limited to:
- YouTube channels.
- Courses, paid included.
- Blogs or other personal sites that will tell me what to do.
- Podcasts? Though I don’t see audio as the ideal medium here.
Who’s the Wes Bos of Swift? Who will mainline me information as fast as I can absorb it?
What’s my fastest path to getting a minimally functional Mac app working?
Throw me suggestions via email or on the forum post associated with this entry, or on Mastodon.
Thanks! 🙏
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15/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
Today’s a day off. I had lunch with a friend and a lovely walk back in to the city through my old neighbourhood.
See you all tomorrow. Heading back to Lucy and the chickens.
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14/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
I’m heading to Melbourne to see an old friend. Just a short trip, so a tiny bag, enabling me to fulfil a life’s dream: I’m going to cycle to the airport.
Marie saw me off.
A strange dream, you might think. It’s just a small thing, but I love the idea of being able to do something so big — fly to Melbourne — without having to get in the car.
Also I don’t own a car, so it’ll save me at least $50 on Uber rides.
There aren’t many cities you could do this, and there certainly aren’t many capital cities. But Canberra’s a funny little place. A lot of people don’t even realise it’s the capital — they assume that’s Sydney.
At the top of our street you hit Anzac Parade. That’s the Australian War Memorial at the left/north, then you look down the parade and over Old Parliament House to Parliament House at the right/south.
A tiny panorama doesn’t really do it justice. It’s better on street view.
At the bottom of the parade you do a left, turn in past ASIO (our FBI), and you hit Lake Burley Griffin.
Over the lake there is the Parliamentary Triangle. It’s a delightful part of the world; whenever we’re there we can’t quite believe that it’s where we live. It’s like a scene from the original Star Trek, one of those episodes where they land on some utopian world and everyone is young and beautiful and they’re all exercising with a big smile and they’re rolling hoops and wearing lilac leotards and then later you realise actually it’s really sinister because actually everyone’s a lizard and they eat the old people but on the surface it’s an idyllic paradise.
That’s what it feels like when you cycle round Lake Burley Griffin.
Over the way there you’ve got the National Gallery of Australia, the High Court of Australia, Questacon (the science museum), and the National Library of Australia. We work in the library sometimes, it’s lovely and the Wi-Fi is epic.
So then you ride along the lake for a bit…
…and you get to the airport. By now my hands and toes are a touch cold — it’s about 7°C — but not too bad.
The bike gets parked.
And I’m in one of the loveliest airports you’ve ever been in.
The flight was on time (actually we’re running early), I’m in 5A on a lovely QantasLink A220 which feels like it’s been recently renovated. Seating is 2+3 so there’s loads of room.
Whenever we fly Qantas we wonder what Americans would think of Australian domestic flights. No offence, America, but I’ve done a cross-country economy flight on one of your main carriers. We do it better.
Oh and this is cool! I’ll publish this from the plane, which has Wi-Fi. Better hurry up, we’re coming in to land.
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13/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
Yesterday I repeated something that I first said at the start of the year: some of my own systems are disorganised.
So here I am, this guy with a site and a blog, and my stuff’s a mess. Seems odd. Why should you trust anything I say?
I didn’t take my own advice
The simplest explanation is that, in this instance, I didn’t take my own advice.
I quit my job a year ago and that’s when this system, D85 Johnny.Decimal business
, started.
I didn’t really know what I was doing; there was no plan for the business. I just quit one day! So I knocked something together out of necessity, as I went. The system just evolved.
And, to be clear, it’s not a bad system. It works. We’re here, working, and we can find things. I just know that it can be a lot better.
I hadn’t written my own advice
It would have been hard to follow the step-by-step procedures that I outline in the workbook because I hadn’t written it yet!
So that’s not a bad excuse.
Also, working it out is instructive
I don’t pretend to have a perfect solution to all of this. My thoughts are evolving; the Johnny.Decimal system evolves; and the very nature of the work that we do evolves.
I’m just listening to Cal Newport’s latest podcast. He’s giving a rundown of the state of productivity advice since the ’90s.
There’s the ‘sage advice and optimism’ era of Stephen Covey, then the ‘productivity pr0n’ era, defined by David Allen’s Getting Things Done® and Merlin Mann’s site 43 Folders.
Then in the late 2000s we got sick of working so much and we move in to the era of ‘lifestyle design’, defined by Tim Ferris’ The 4-hour Workweek.
And that’s where I’m up to. The point is, this stuff shifts. Whether it needs to or not, who knows. Is it all a fad? To some extent. Is it generational? Probably a bit of that.
So I’m trying to think about the type of system that I want Johnny.Decimal to be. I don’t actually see myself as a ‘PKM’ nerd. I’d like to help normal people — who have no idea what that acronym means and don’t care — to be more organised.
Because we have no option these days. In the late 2000s you could plausibly get by without using a computer all day. Then they invented the iPhone and everything changed.
So now you have to use a computer, for essentially everything, whether you want to or not. I’d like to find a way to navigate that fact without burdening the world with yet more procedures; without it having to be your hobby.
Most people don’t have a deep passion for knowledge management. They just want to know where they saved that receipt when the thing breaks.
Anyway. A work in progress.
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12/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
At the start of the year I declared ‘organisational bankruptcy’.1 I haven’t had time to do anything about it since then (recording the workshop is a full-time job), but I started today.
My scope statement is up.
In scope
- Anything to do with the running of Johnny.Decimal as a business.
- Specifically I’m going to bring
30-39 Coruscade
over from my personal system. That’s the company that the business operates under.
Out of scope
- Anything that is 100% website related. I have a separate system for that,
D01 johnnydecimal.com
.
- You’re looking at that system: it’s what gives structure to the site.
- But if we create non-text content that then gets published on the site — a video, say — that’s not in
D01
. That’s part of D85
.
And here’s the first bunch of Post-its. These have come from the things I’ve done over the last week, which I’ve been writing down.
Next up I’ll go through our file system and get everything represented there on the wall.
Note that I’m doing 20-29 Discovery
(ref. workbook/workshop) by myself, but when it comes to 30-39 Build your areas & categories
I’ll do that with Lucy as this is a system that we both use.
Of course if she also discovers some stuff and sticks it on the wall, that’s cool.
It’ll all be documented
Here at the very least, and I expect we’ll do some videos for the YouTube channel.
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11/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
Saturday feels like the day I talk about stuff that I do round the house, so here are a couple of really easy recipes.
They both come from my mam. I’ve been cooking them both for about 30 years; or, she has, and I used to hang around and help.
I love cooking. It keeps you busy: gives your hands something to do but allows your brain to wander a bit. It’s great thinking time.
Anyway, neither of these will tax your skills (or wallet) too much.
Vegetable soup
It’s getting cold, and that means soup. This is so easy anyone can make it.
Ingredients
- 50g knob of butter.1
- One large leek.
- One large head of broccoli.
- Two large carrots.
- Three large potatoes.
- Black pepper.
- Powdered vegetable stock.
Instructions
- In a really big pan (mine might be 5 litres?), heat the butter.
- Chop the leek in to 1cm rounds and fry until soft. Don’t brown.
- Chop the carrot, broccoli including stalk, and peeled potatoes in to chunks. It doesn’t really matter how big. Add to pan.
- Add 2 litres of boiling water.
- Add a really good amount of freshly ground black pepper. I do about 1tbsp of peppercorns but I like it spicy.
- Add 3tsp of the vegetable stock, or adjust to taste (it’s mostly salt).
- Boil gently for at least an hour.
Eat with fresh bread slathered in really good butter.
The rest will keep in the fridge for a few days, or it freezes really well.
Corned beef and potato pie
This has been a favourite as long as I can remember. When I was in my early 20s I had cool jobs where I’d fly all over the world. Mam used to make a pie to take with me. It’d be in my luggage, wrapped in silver foil.
So I’d land in Nigeria, check in, and eat a slice of pie.
One of the first web pages I ever made was this recipe. It would have been at http://york.ac.uk/~jen101/pie.html
or similar. 1995! Lost like tears in rain, alas.
Ingredients
- 2 frozen puff pastry sheets. If you can find the stuff made with butter vs. vegetable oil, obviously it’s better.
- One 340g tin of corned beef. (The ‘lite’ variety works great.)
- One medium onion.
- Three potatoes.
- Black pepper.
- An egg.
Instructions
- In an 8” shallow pie dish, blind bake the pastry base at 180C for about 15 minutes.2
- Boil the peeled, chopped potato. Drain.
- Chop the onion: half quite fine, half a little larger.
- Add the chopped onion, corned beef, and a good helping of black pepper to the pan with the boiled potatoes. Mash roughly.
- Add the beefy-potato-mush to the pie. Top with the other pastry sheet.
- Bake at 180C for about half an hour. I find turning the top oven element on at the beginning puffs the pastry a little better; then I switch back to regular fan oven.
- Near the end, beat the egg and brush over the top.
It’ll be thermonuclear so let it cool a touch before eating. Best with mushy peas and gravy.
I think I prefer this cold the next day. But I’ve always been a cold-savoury person. I like the way that everything congeals. I could eat a kilo of this for lunch the day after (with a bit of hot English mustard).
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