Deep dive

The previous page gave an overview of the concept of ‘multiple projects’.

It is the issue which causes the most confusion, so I will go in to more detail here. This page is long, so here’s a table of contents to help you get around.

If this is your first time here, just read it end-to-end.

• Definitions
  • Project
  • System
  • Domain
  • System/domain relationship
• Problem statement
  • A warning
• The solution
  • What should we call our projects?
    • Make your project IDs meaningful
    • Order is irrelevant here
    • What if I already have a project code at work?
  • The full Johnny.Decimal ID
    • Do I have to use the full ID everywhere?
  • How many projects should I have?
• Implementation details
  • File system
  • Notes
• An exception

Definitions

I will use three terms and it is important that their meaning is clear. They are project, system, and domain.

Project

A project is any single collection of Johnny.Decimal numbers from 00-09 through 90-99.

System

A Johnny.Decimal system is one or more projects that you manage.

You might have more than one Johnny.Decimal system in your life.

Systems never overlap: all identifiers within a system are guaranteed to be unique.

The multiple projects problem that we are addressing arises when we have more than one project within a system. We will get to this in a moment.

Domain

A domain is a completely isolated part of your life.

You might have two domains: home, and work.

They are each their own domain if they never, ever intersect.

If you use any of the same tools in both places, they are no longer isolated domains.

For example, you might use the same notes application on your phone for both home and work. This makes them one domain from a Johnny.Decimal perspective.

System/domain relationship

It is likely that you manage one system for each of your domains.

I define them as separate terms for easier reading, and there is a particular exception which we address at the end of this page.

Problem statement

If we find ourselves creating more than one project within a system, we have a problem which should be obvious.

Now we have ambiguity. If I refer to 11.01, to which item in which project am I referring?

In this situation we need to expand to a multiple projects system.

A warning

Using multiple projects should be a last resort. They add complexity, which we seek to minimise. They are not an ‘advanced feature’ that you should aspire to use.

For many years I had a single project for my entire home life.

There is a lot of room in a standard Johnny.Decimal project. You have a hundred categories to play with, each with a hundred IDs. That’s ten thousand individual items.

If you plan it well, a one-project system can take you a long way.

I tell you this to save you time: only use multiple projects if you need to.

The solution

It should be clear that we require a further level of identification to differentiate projects.

There are a number of solutions, which I’ll address in the coming pages.

The preferred solution for most cases is to add an identifier above your areas.

What should we call our projects?

As with our existing areas, categories, and IDs, each project should have both a short identifier and a full name.

The screenshots here don’t have names just to keep them simple, but we know that actually category 11 isn’t just 11. It’s something like 11 Book reports.

On the previous page I introduced the project identifier. Review that page now if you haven’t already.

The project identifier format is letter-number-number. This gives us project codes in the following range:

• Start: A00
• End: Z99

We choose a project code, give our project a title, and that becomes the complete identifier:

• A00 My first project
• M49 Some project in the middle
• Z99 My last project

Make your project IDs meaningful

I’ve said that A00 is the ‘first project’ here just to get the point across. You should be more imaginative with your project identifiers as it will help you remember them.

The letter-number-number scheme gives us twenty-six groupings of one hundred. I suggest using the letter to represent a very broad part of your life. (Think about your domains.)¹

Some suggestions

Which you should adapt to the way your own brain works.

• P might be all of your personal projects.
  • But this is kinda boring: if your name is Jill, why not go with J?
• I have chosen D to represent my Johnny.Decimal projects.
• W feels obvious for work, but if you’re going to be at one company for a while perhaps use a letter that represents the company.

Play with the numbers

Here are all of the current projects in my life and the rationale behind their identifiers.

• D01: the Johnny.Decimal website
  • Picked before I’d thought about this properly, hence the boring 01.
  • If I chose this today I might pick D80 because 80 is the port that websites serve traffic on. 🤓
• D85: the Johnny.Decimal business
  • Because 85 kinda looks like BS which kinda sounds like ‘BuSiness’.
  • But this works! I remember it.
• P01: my entire personal life for a decade.
  • For a long time this was my only project.
  • As with D01, this became P01 because I hadn’t thought this through at the time.
• P04: our Learn with Lucy Excel course.
  • A personal project, and in my old scheme (now defunct) this was the fourth project.
  • (It’s really good! You should learn Excel.)
• L43: my previous job.
  • Which I quit to focus on Johnny.Decimal!
  • Because the company name looks a bit like that combination of letters and numbers.
  • Now that I’ve chosen L to be my top-level identifier for ‘work’, I’ll use it again if I need to.

Order is irrelevant here

You should not consider order when choosing project identifiers: that is, X02 need not come after X01. Prefer numbers with meaning over a numerical sequence.

There is a caveat here which we will address on a future page: if you fit one of the patterns that requires more projects, it will likely be simpler to use identifiers in a sequence.

What if I already have a project code at work?

Many of you will be using this scheme at work. In that case, you may already have a well-defined project code.

This might be a job code, the cost code for the project, or some internal code used in another system.

If you already have a code, you should consider using it. Why invent another identifier if you already have one?

Remember, all of this is guidance. Do what works for you. The thing that works is likely to be the thing that introduces the least friction: especially at work where you need other people’s buy-in.

The full Johnny.Decimal ID

Whereas previously our IDs were of the form 11.01, which we refer to in the abstract as AC.ID, they have now expanded and are in the range:

• A00.00.00
• …
• M23.45.67
• …
• Z99.99.99

We refer to this as PRO.AC.ID.

Do I have to use the full ID everywhere?

It depends.

Is your reference unambiguous without it? Then prefer the short version.

See implementation details below for more detail.

How many projects should I have?

It depends on your ‘pattern’, which we get to on the next page. But, as I have said above, you should prefer as few projects as possible.

This is why we are free to choose project identifiers that ‘make sense’ to our brains. We don’t need to start at A01 because we have 2,600 identifiers to choose from.

If you ever come close to ‘using up’ your project identifiers then you’ve probably done it wrong.

Implementation details

So how do I actually do this in real life?

File system

Typically, I just use the project identifier to contain my project.

I have tried and rejected using the project identifier in front of some or all of the subfolders within the project. I found no benefit to this approach.

My email folder structure mirrors this technique.

Where I did find benefit was in using the full PRO.AC.ID identifier in a file name.

This might seem crazy, but it dramatically increases the usefulness of your ‘recently opened files’ list.

This list, currently a garbled mess of document names, suddenly becomes organised according to your Johnny.Decimal system.

And now any file that you need to email has its identifier embedded. I’ve used this to find a five-year-old file in a matter of seconds.

I recommend at least trying this approach to see if it works for you.

Notes

You must use the full PRO.AC.ID identifier in the title of your notes.

The power of your index, which for me is also my notes system, is its ability to instantly and unambiguously find any item.

With multiple projects, we will inevitably track multiple items with the number 11.01. This leads to confusion and slows you down.

When we know what we want, we should be able to find it immediately.

An exception

When you have single-project systems each in their own domain, you should not need to use a multiple project system in that domain.

Note that in this situation it is still the case that you will have overlapping numbers. 11.01 is likely to exist in both systems.

But this isn’t a problem because in either domain, when you refer to 11.01 it is always clear which one you are referring to. Accessing or editing ‘the wrong one’ isn’t possible.