PRM vs. PKM; getting a new driver licence

Johnny.Decimal is part of the global 'Personal Knowledge Management' (PKM) movement. But that's not a term I've ever used to describe my system. I think that 'Personal Records Management' is more accurate. Here's why.

Getting a new driver licence

We just officially moved from the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) to New South Wales (NSW). Since Australia is a federation, each state and territory issues its own licences. So we need to get a new one in NSW.

Previous licences?

NSW wants to know. Question 9:

Do you hold, or have you ever held, a licence issued by another State, Territory or Country?

Provide details of any other licences you have held from another State, Territory or Country.

Licences, plural. I got my UK licence in 1994, transferred it to the state of Victoria in 2004, and to the ACT in 2020. Spoiler: I do not have those details.

Minimalism × records-keeping

Being who I am, you might think that I keep everything. But actually I've never been that sort of person, I think as a result of my natural unsentimentality. I don't find historical artefacts particularly interesting, so why bother keeping them? We just sold 90% of our stuff.¹

But it turns out that some stuff is really useful. What sort of stuff? Records.

UK licence

In packing to leave Canberra, I threw away an old copy of my UK licence. Credit card sized, so you might think, ah, I'll keep that. But no! Multiply that by 1,000 and now you're carrying around a bunch of junk.

You know what I should have done before I chucked it in the bin? I should have scanned it, and recorded its details. Because while they're not the whole picture back to 1994, they'd be more than I have now.

Implementation details

So what does this look like? Bullet points, mostly. If you analysed my various JDexes over the years, I think you'd find 80% of the content to be bullet points.

11.14+ Driver licence

As I noted the other day, I like the idea of reserving all 'parent' JDex entries for metadata only, and creating a sub-note by extending the end.

This gives us a new JDex entry 11.14+ Driver licence. Let's create that, and get cute with a link back 'up' to the parent entry.² While I'm here I'll fill it out with some headers.

Dates as headers

There are a few patterns that you could use here, but hopefully you're at home shouting use the date! Because of course you should use the date.

You might think the location is more obvious. It's a UK licence then a Victoria licence and so on. And with so few entries, that'd work. But with more entries, future-me is going to forget: did I call it Melbourne? Or Victoria? Or Elwood, the name of the first suburb I lived in? Or just Australia, because when I first moved here I didn't understand that I'd need a new licence per-state, and thought I'd never move anyway.

Not just a header

You should be thinking of this header as a reference that you might use elsewhere. So the headers should match the names of any folders you create, or the names of the files. See figure 22.00.00112C.

I've only used the year for historical entries because it's all I know, and it's enough. For future entries yyyy-mm is sufficient. The bullet points within the header will have the full detail.

Records-keeping

So now to fill this out with my current licence details, before I replace it and throw it away.

As well as recording the details exactly as written on the licence, I've noted at the top that there's also a scan in my file system. Always, always help your future self like this. You think it's so obvious: you assume you'll also check your file system. The reality is that future-us locks on to the first thing it finds and doesn't think to keep looking.

Saving the scan

Let's create some folders in our file system. I'm still experimenting here, but I think it makes sense to exactly copy, down to the + followed by a space, the name of the folder from your JDex title.

A folder whose name starts with a + … odd? Maybe. But who cares? We keep coming back to this concept: leave yourself hints. Future-you is going to see this and immediately understand what it represents.

The dated subfolder within should be obvious. And the scan of my licence is named with today's date.

Security/privacy

You might wonder if I'm locking this note. While Bear can do that: no, I'm not. You'd have to have one of my devices, unlocked, or have access to my iCloud account, to read that note. In which case you knowing when my licence expires is the least of my worries.

That's enough

And that's it. A simple records-keeping exercise. There's no prose here. Nothing to really think about. This shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes.