Here’s a quick tip that I use all the time.
You’re saving (or opening) a file. Up pops the trusty system dialog box. And you’re nowhere near the folder you need.
Type the Johnny.Decimal ID of that folder in the ‘Search’ box there. Make sure ‘This Mac’ is selected next to ‘Search’.
And there you go. Instant navigation to any folder, wherever it happens to be.
≡
A few years ago I set up play.johnnydecimal.com
as a ‘playground’ site. I intended to post less well-formed ideas there.
Well, I never did! Or not much. But it’s still hanging around. Until today: I’m taking it down.
I hate breaking links, so the domain will always redirect to this post. And if there was something on that site that you did want to read:
- You probably shouldn’t, but
- it’s all at github.com/johnnydecimal/johnnydecimal-2020-play.
Let me know if you can’t find what you’re looking for.
≡
Some things are not better sorted by number.
For some things, the alphabet is the best way. ‘People and organisations’ fit in to this category.
Let’s say I want to store information related to friends. I keep a list of books we’ve loaned each other. I save a friend’s passport details when we go on a trip together. I write a list of gifts I want to buy them.
So we have a category 12 People
. Would this make sense?
10-19 Life admin
12 People
12.01 Susan Schuzensutz
12.02 Barry Barfelschwacker
12.03 Fred Flopagolopolous
...
12.63 Joe Lunchbox
Quickly, find Kate Krapolodou in the list. Hmm. Not optimal.
Instead, organise these people alphabetically.
You can still give them a number: just append it to their name. We still just start at .01
and go up by sequence:
10-19 Life admin
12 People
Barfelschwacker, Barry [12.02]
Flopagolopolous, Fred [12.03]
Lunchbox, Joe [12.63]
Schuzensutz, Susan [12.01]
And now when Krapolodou, Kate
is somewhere in the middle of that list, she’s easy to find.
You might never use these numbers to refer to your friends. (And if you do, perhaps don’t tell them.)
But they’re there if you ever need them.
The same principle applies to organisations. Your gas company, the electricity company: if your system organises them in a category together, you may find this sort-by-alphabet technique to be more natural.
≡
Until now, I have used the word ‘project’ as a term to mean the thing that you’re organising and/or the result of doing the organising.
For example, the Workbook’s cover sheet reads:
A guide to setting up a single-project system and working the Decimal way
This is imprecise and confusing. What if you’re not organising a project? This results in me having to qualify it, for example:
Yours might not feel like ‘a project’ in the typical sense.
Precision
In defining this system, I believe that precision and clarity matters.
I want to help you to be more organised. If you’re confused about what I mean, that’s just going to get in the way.
And if we all use different terms when we discuss things on the forum, we’re going to be talking across each other.
New definitions
With a lot of community consultation and intense whiteboarding here at JDHQ, we’ve come up with the following definitions of terms.
The site and Workbook will be updated to reflect these new terms. (This will improve clarity, but nothing fundamental has changed.)
I’ll add a new page to the main site with the definitions minus the background contained in this post.
The Johnny.Decimal System
Is a collection of methods, tools, and behaviours as documented at johnnydecimal.com.
Defined terms:
The Johnny.Decimal system
The system
(for short)
Your Johnny.Decimal system
Is your implementation of this system, customised to suit whatever it is that you’re organising.
Defined terms:
Your Johnny.Decimal system
Your system
(for short)
We considered the repeated use of the term system here but it’s just too natural a word to ignore.
It’s a very ‘active’ word: a system is a machine, an organism. It has components. It evolves.
And your system is just an implementation of the system. They’re the same system.
Your system is shown ‘breaking out’ of the bottom of the Johnny.Decimal system to indicate that it’s customisable.
You don’t have to follow my ‘rules’ to the letter (although I think you should).
Components
Johnny.Decimal systems are made up of components.
Defined terms:
Components
or system components
The list of components is not restricted, but the following are all common components:
- The index (see below).
- File system.
- Notes (either an app or on paper).
- Tasks, to-dos, and reminders.
- Email.
- Calendar.
- Bookmarks and other saved links.
The index
The index is a specific component of your system; it serves to link all other components together in to a cohesive whole.
Defined terms:
Your stuff
Your stuff is the real-world thing that you’re organising with Johnny.Decimal.
I can’t specify the thing you’re organising — because you can organise anything you want.
It’s your home life, or your job, or a work project, or a community group, or your university study, or anything else.
Defined terms:
Collection of systems
You may need more than one system to manage everything in your life.
We refer to this as your collection of systems.
Defined terms:
Collection of Johnny.Decimal systems
Collection of systems
(for short)
Domain
Domains group together systems which have one or more shared components.
For example, when you go to work, everything might be on the company’s systems: your index, your file system, your email; everything.
‘Work’ is its own domain in this situation.
But if you use your personal phone’s notes app to keep notes related to the system at work, that app just became a shared component.
‘Work’ is no longer its own domain; it has merged with your ‘home’ domain.
Extended naming
This is relevant when we consider the extended naming of your systems.
A system which is the only system in a domain can be uniquely identified by the standard AC.ID
notation:
11.01
can only refer to an item in one system.
When a domain contains two or more systems, this is no longer the case:
11.01
could refer to an item in two or more systems.
When a domain contains two or more systems, each system SHOULD1 use the extended SYS.AC.ID
notation.
A note on the word ‘project’
I’ve said it elsewhere, but it bears repeating.
I consider ‘a project’ to be a very large thing. In the Workbook we use the analogy of painting the kitchen.
People colloquially call painting the kitchen ‘a project’.
It is crucial to understand that painting the kitchen can be handled within a single Johnny.Decimal ID.
It is not what we used to call a project; what we now call a system. You don’t need ten areas and a hundred categories and ten thousand IDs to paint the kitchen.
So let’s remodel the kitchen. Does that need its own system (née project) yet? No. It could still fit in a bunch of IDs; at most, it’s its own category.
Let’s rebuild the house. Full system? Nope! Definitely a category; potentially an area.
So what does it take to ‘fill’ an entire system? I say you need to build a farm.
One area builds you the house. Another might deal with
connecting your plot to the local infrastructure: a category each for roads,
electricity, and water. One more for setting up a working farm, and we’re
done with room to spare.
Think big
I tell you this to encourage you to think big.
Design broad categories. Design very broad areas.
Your entire life can easily fit in a single Johnny.Decimal system.
Discuss this on the forum.
Internal ID: D85.61.11
.
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As we record the Johnny.Decimal Workshop, I’m thinking about how to price it. I wanted to record my thoughts somewhere that I could link to them later.
Pricing things is hard.
I’m not a salesman. It’s the part of my new job that I enjoy the least.
When we released the Workbook I had no idea what it was worth. How could I? What baseline could I possibly have? It’s a PDF that we’d written.
It’s simultaneously worth nothing (it’s a digital good with zero marginal cost) and everything (it’s how we pay our rent).
So it’s an equation. Basic maths. Price × sales. Higher price, fewer sales, and vice versa. Where’s the sweet spot?
Doing it wrong
I treasure my audience. Lucy and I call you ‘the Johnny.Decimal family’. We really do.
So when I price a thing high, my best supporters buy it immediately, and then if I lower the price … that feels bad.
This happened, obviously. There’s nothing I can do about it now, other than learn the lesson.
#1: Turn it up, not down.
Unfortunately, discounts work
I hate the bullshit where someone says that some thing is ‘worth’ some amount and if you get this one thing and this other thing then really the ‘value’ is $499 but unbelievably you get it for $4.99!
I refuse to play that particular game, but people do love a deal. It’s just human nature.
#2: Price it higher, but always have a deal.
This feels a bit sleazy, but I need to get over it. Make the base price higher, but nobody actually pays it: there’s always an offer.
And it aligns with #1: you can easily turn it up by adjusting the coupon discount.
Lower price × higher volume = lower stress
When the Workbook was $37, some days I’d wake up to zero sales. (~80% of my sales occur while I’m asleep here in Australia.)
That’s terrifying.
So when I dropped it to $19, the overall earnings didn’t necessarily go up, but the chance of any given day being disastrous certainly went down.
#3: I prefer volume over price.
This sits nicely with me. I’d prefer to be more affordable, and this means I get to help more people.
(The alternative is to go high-end. The price of entry for some of my competitors starts at multiple-hundreds of dollars. Good on them, but that’s not for me.)
Sales are spiky
What are you people doing out there?
If my best day last week was 100%, my worst was 19%. The sales graph is super spiky and as far as I can tell there’s no pattern.
│▓
│▓
S│▓ ▓
a│▓ ▓
l│▓ ▓ ▓
e│▓ ▓ ▓
s│▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓
│▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓
│▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓
└────────────
ThFrSaSuMoTu
(Indulge me my passion for pointless ASCII graphs.)
So you’ll have a great week — the first week of January was a record-breaker — and you’ll think, mad!, we’ve cracked it.
And then the next week will be crap.
It’s been long enough now that I’ve learned to ignore it.
#4: View sales month-by-month not day-by-day.
#5: Don’t respond to yesterday. It was random.
An experiment
This header was going to read ‘this isn’t science’ and then I realised, no — it’s the very definition of science: I don’t know the answer, and I’m testing hypotheses with experiments.
And so if you see prices change, or you wonder why he did that, the answer is … experiment. It’s just some guy with no expertise trying to figure it out.
It’s not nefarious, and it’s certainly not personal.
Discuss this on the forum.
≡
Buttondown1 is a great email service. It’s ‘one guy’, Justin, though I think he has a small support team now. But it’s not the corporate behemoth that is, say, Mailchimp.2
A happy user, I was about to hit a subscriber number threshold and I thought I could save a tiny amount of money.
I also thought it’d be simpler if I managed my email list myself.
Massive LOL
As we say in Australia, ‘yeah nah’.
I started managing the list manually in Airtable. To send mail I have a clunky shell script which calls Amazon’s Simple Email Service. Running this script is terrifying: I’m always sure I’m going to send something out twice, or to the wrong group of addresses.
To get on or off the list you fill in my web form and that goes to Netlify Forms: a fine service, but it turns out it costs money over a certain fairly low number of submissions and that the difference is more than I’d just have given Justin for the higher-subscriber-level plan! 🤦
And then I still have to take that submission and manually add it to Airtable, making sure I don’t add duplicates,3 that I properly remove unsubscriptions, and so on.
I soon came to a stark realisation: I am an idiot.
2024 is the Year of Simplification
As per my previous posts, I’m starting over. This includes everything: and therefore includes the systems by which I manage my email lists.
It’s too early to say for sure but I’m pretty certain that ‘simplify where possible’ will be a theme for the year.
To that end, I am returning to the warm embrace of Buttondown. I never should have left. I’m sorry, Justin.
Will be adding a bunch of addresses
If you’ve signed up to the list since the start of December, I’ll be adding your address to Buttondown some time in the next day or so.
I’ve turned off the ‘welcome to the list’ notifications, so you shouldn’t actually notice. But if you do, and you ask, I’ll point you here for an explanation.
Update on JD’ing JD
Nothing much has happened since the last post. January in Australia is like August in Italy: everyone is on holiday.
Lucy’s family have been here and so we haven’t really started work properly yet. They pop in again tomorrow for the last time, so Wednesday might be the day we switch our brains back on.
Discuss this on the forum.
≡
In the previous post I said that I was going to ‘list all the things’ to consider.
So I went for a walk this morning1 and realised that doing so would be jumping ahead to Workbook section 20-29 Discovery
.
I’m not ready for that yet.
Because there is so much in my life, I would hardly know where to start discovering.
So let’s step back.
Where do I even look?
Johnny.Decimal was conceived as a way to organise your files. But as technology progresses, we need to think more broadly.
If you want to organise your digital life, you need to look at systems, data, and knowledge.
Systems
So of course your file system is one system. But here’s a bunch of others I can think of, in no particular order:
- Email.
- Any sort of physical note.
- Any other physical artefact.
- Digital notes. I bet you have more than one app?
- Databases, e.g. Airtable.
- Social media. Forum, Discord, Mastodon. At work this might be Teams or Slack. Instagram or TikTok if that’s your thing.
- To-do/reminders.
- Calendar.
- Bookmarks and other management of online history. All of your open browser tabs that you don’t dare close.
- Music, photos, TV, movies (typically managed by another application).
- All of your different file systems: your local drives; cloud drives; external drives.
- Backups.
- Apps that store data in their own sandbox: very common now on Apple’s platforms. This includes the per-app folders in your iCloud Drive.
- Any other app that has its own data store.
- e.g. my beloved Bear, which manages your notes in an internal database: they’re not
.txt
files in a file-system folder.2
- Bookmark-like data in other applications, e.g. Maps.
- Contacts.
- Private messages and group chats, probably across multiple apps.
- Passwords and other security keys, e.g. SSH.
- Code repositories, as they’re often distributed (e.g. GitHub) and might not live in your base
~/Documents
folder.
- I have mine at
~/dev
so that it doesn’t synchronise up to iCloud.3
That’s what I came up with just by looking at the open applications on my Mac right now. There will be more.4
If you don’t mind me saying so: holy shit! Life got complex.
Data and knowledge
These are similar, and possibly even the same thing: I need to give this more consideration.
But for now we can say that your systems serve to contain data and knowledge.
Here I define data as a large thing that takes work to [re]create. A photograph is data. A PDF is data. An Excel spreadsheet is data.
Knowledge is something that originated in your brain5 that you could — assuming you haven’t forgotten it — recall and write down. It’s smaller than data. It’s someone’s birthday; a recipe; places you’d like to go for dinner; a memory to take the bins out on Thursday.
I don’t know what to do with this yet, or whether the data/knowledge split is required or useful.
This is why I can’t just tell you what to do
If I wanted to, I could probably prescriptively, definitively tell you how to manage your file system.
It should be clear that I can’t do this for ‘all of the systems and data and knowledge’ in your life. It’s just too much. It changes too often.
New systems are introduced all the time. We each use different systems for different reasons.
Instead, I need to give you the tools and techniques to be able to integrate these systems into your life as needed.
My scope
Okay, this is what we came here for. Can I define my scope yet?6
I think so. Here’s what I plan to discover and organise.
All of the systems and data and knowledge in my life.
🤯
I better get on with it! See you next time.
≡
It’s the 3rd January. I decided to reset my life yesterday.
I’m exhausted already and I haven’t even started. Just the thought of it is exhausting. So let’s recognise that — I see you, fear — and move on.
Don’t just pretend that this feeling doesn’t exist. Don’t pretend that what you’re about to do isn’t going to be difficult.
Following the rough theme of the Workbook, I’m going to define my scope first. To help me do that, I’m going to brain-dump everything that I can think of. Here, now.
(Even if I wasn’t writing this post, I often write notes to myself in this voice; as in, I type out a note as if I were talking to myself. It’s me, talking to me. I find this helps as it’s less boring, and allows me to recall things more easily.)
What prompted this?
I was chatting to one of my best friends and he reminded me about a video we made about ~15 years ago. I think I have a copy of it somewhere; I recall seeing it recently. As in, some time this decade. But I couldn’t lay my hands on it now.
That’s annoying.
I’m not sentimental, but this video is precious. It would be silly to lose it.
So let’s fix it by reorganising my entire life.
Think about your goals
This got me thinking. If you’re reading this, you want to be better organised.
Why?
Your reason might influence how you do this: how long you take, the methods you use, how well you do it, who else you involve. We’re all different: I can give you tools, but I can’t tell you what to want.
So, just think about that. Write it down. Why do you want to be organised? What do you want to achieve? What do you care about? What do you not care about?
My goals
I want to be organised because:
- It frustrates me when I know that a thing exists and I don’t know where it is.
- This frustration can quickly derail my mental state. It’s an excuse to give up.
- I’ve applied this system to various jobs and home projects and I’ve felt the relief that it brings. But my own ‘personal life’ has barely had any attention, and the worse it’s got the less I’ve cared.
- This has become a vicious cycle.
- So now I’m in a position where I’m Johnny.Decimal and my own personal stuff is a mess. This is silly.
- Doing this will teach me more about the system.
- So I should pay attention to the process, and meticulously document my findings. 👋
- I need to know what to do next. More on this below. This one’s really important.
I don’t care about:
- Being a digital hoarder. I don’t have to keep everything I’ve ever done.
- I have a feeling for what’s important and what isn’t. I’m going to listen to this voice and let it guide me.
- Being perfect. I know that I can be a perfectionist and that this stops me from doing things. So I will recognise that and not allow it to derail me.
- I like the aphorism ‘don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.’1
Decision
I just made a decision:
- In this round of organisation, I either organise it, or I delete it.
- There will be no more folders called
archive of stuff from 2014 from USB drive
.
- I can leave these less-important potentially more-difficult decisions until the end: but they must be made.
What do I do next?
I run my own business now: Johnny.Decimal. So figuring out what to do next is a) daunting and b) life-alteringly important.
Late 2023 was ‘easy’ from this perspective: finish the Workbook; make sure it’s selling enough to pay the rent; make sure people are happy with it and that there are no major issues. ✅
January 2024 is a blank canvas. I have a decade’s worth of ideas, and the time to pursue them. But I have to choose, and be focused.
So my new organisational system needs to enable this. Note that I don’t have any idea how it’s going to do this yet: I’m just stating my intent.
All the things
Okay, so what are all the things? This is just going to be a bullet list of stuff to consider.
In the Workbook I exhort you to go for walks and to give this the consideration it deserves. So here I will commit to myself: for the next 24 hours I will try to think about little else but this.
My job for the next 24h
Until at least 2024-01-04 15:002, and until I think that this list is finished:
- I will not check my social media.
- I will check my mail once, tomorrow morning.3
- I will go for walks or a bike ride.
- I will not listen to podcasts while I do this.
- I’ll just think about this, as much as I can.
The list will be in a new post
I might as well post this one as-is. See you tomorrow.
≡
It’s 2024 and I am declaring ‘organisational bankruptcy’. Here’s the plan.
Hard reset
I’m going to reset my entire life:
- All of my files, including my personal stuff and all Johnny.Decimal related projects.
- This includes my archived stuff, all of the ‘hard drives in the tin in the garage’, anything that I’ve kept from an old computer. Some of this goes back to 2012.
- My ‘to-do’ system, which currently is a bunch of stuff in a bunch of places: at least 3 different applications, as well as paper scattered all over my desk.
- My email, and how I manage it day-to-day.
- Everything else.
- I’ll discover it as I go: I haven’t started, other than to type out this blog post.
In public, less structured
I’m going to do this all ‘live’: here on the blog, on Mastodon, YouTube, and possibly via podcast.
I’ll document as I go, rather than spending too much time thinking through how to present it ‘neatly’. So my organisation process will be presented more as a stream-of-consciousness vs. Lucy’s more structured approach (see below).
I’m going to record how much time I spend on each of these things so you know how long this sort of thing takes.
If in doubt, I’ll over-share. You can always choose to ignore it. Feedback is welcome.
Meanwhile, Lucy is doing the same
Lucy is also organising her life, but she’s following the Workbook as if she wasn’t one of its co-authors.
While she did edit the Workbook, she has very little practical experience with Johnny.Decimal.
We’ll be using Lucy’s efforts to record the Johnny.Decimal Workshop. Our hope is that she can be the stand-in for you: we hope that her experience will mirror yours; her questions answer yours.
This will be a video course to accompany the Workbook. As with the Workbook, we’ll think hard about how to present this: it’ll be neat, concise, well recorded, and structured to help you succeed.
This will be released as a paid course as soon as it’s finished, some time in Q1 2024.
Discuss this on the forum.
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