Back from holiday; minimising the office; Decimal.Business update
Hey all. I thought I'd mentioned this here but evidently not: I just got back from a 3-week holiday. My whole family visited from the UK. Mam, dad, sister, brother-in-law, and two nieces.
Ages ranged from 9 to 78. We visited Sydney, Canberra, and the Gold Coast. It was amazing, but you know that old cliché that I need a holiday to recover from my holiday? Well yeah, that's definitely true.
I threw away half the office
I got back, took the few personal items out of my bag, and put them on my desk. Pencil case with a few pencils and charging cables. Notebook. Glasses case. Battery pack. Wallet.1
Not much. I travel light. But still, I saw them there and was immediately filled with a tiny dread: that of putting them away in a messy drawer.
So what option was there other than to pull everything out of every drawer and throw half of it away? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The time felt right. End of the year: might as well start 2025 with a clean slate. I took a bunch of photos but it'd take too long to embed them here. Here's an iCloud shared library of the 'before' if you're interested. That's each drawer's contents laid out on my desk.
If you don't throw it away...
Lucy started to do the same, and while neither of us are hoarders -- those photos don't show that much stuff -- we had a startling realisation.
Which is that if you don't throw this thing away, somebody else has to. Maybe not for a while. Depends when you die. But, eventually.
So those 16 cards I was 'saving' in a little box along with my still-current bank cards. Why? My old UK drivers licence. PADI diver cards from 2003. Expired Qantas frequent flyer cards. To what end?
It's not like I considered them mementos. I didn't get them out and spread them lovingly on the table. They were just there, waiting to be thrown away. So I did, along with anything else that I don't actively use.
Tending towards minimalism
On a scale of minimalist (1) to hoarder (10) I'd put us at a 4. In counting what I put back in the drawers -- not counting, say, individual pencils -- I have 112 items.2@Skjolnir over on the Discord has 700 items in his life, total.
But I'm comfortable that everything in those drawers has a use. I questioned every item: do I actively use it? Would I pay to put it in storage?
The result feels amazing. My (physical) desktop now contains a laptop, a trackpad, a keyboard, and a mouse. Every drawer is neat and only contains what's necessary. As disposable items age out, I won't replace them. And I've got an entire drawer empty.
I definitely recommend this. There is an undeniable mental clarity that comes from having less stuff around you. Less stuff means less decisions.
Decimal.Business
And so, back to work with a clear mind. We're both 100% focused on the upcoming Decimal.Business system. Christmas means nothing to either of us so, other than allowing ourselves a watching of Die Hard with a Vengeance and a bottle of something bubbly on the 25th, we'll be working hard to get it out as soon as possible.3
For those of you who've pre-purchased, you have our deepest gratitude. We'll have it with you as soon as humanly possible.
Footnotes
In daily life, I don't carry a separate wallet. Apple Wallet (the software) handles my bank cards, and Apple Wallet (the magnetic one that sticks to the back of your phone) holds my drivers licence4 and a couple of business cards. But when travelling I take a couple of extra cards -- health insurance, medicare, credit card -- so these go in my tiny Bellroy wallet which typically stays in my bag. ↩
We feel like we've seen the first two movies recently enough. ↩
Which I hate having to carry around -- I don't drive, on a typical day -- but I've been burned one too many times by not having ID on me. As soon as the ACT introduces digital licences, I'll stop carrying the magnetic wallet. ↩
Theres gotta be a better way of naming Amex (and other credit card statements) than this surely? I always struggle to remember the dates, but this just feels overwhelming, I usually just go with the statement date for naming credit card statements. Amex Ending 12345 - 2024 10 10 to 2024 11 09 - Statement 2024 11 09 - Due 2024 12 05
There are many situations where I recommend starting a filename (or folder) with the date. It works really well for almost any time-based document. Amex statements fall squarely in to that bucket.
Which date?
For the record, this is the ISO 8601 date standard. Once you get in to date formatting1 you'll see that around, so it's good to know what it is.
That standard defines a bunch of formats, but the one we're interested in is the simple yyyy-mm-dd, i.e. 2024-11-21. It's the only sensible format for your computer dates as it sorts chronologically. Use whatever other weird crap you want in your personal life.
The problem with this date is that it's a real pain to type out by hand. And first you have to remember the date! Bo-ring. Fortunately computers are good at a) knowing the date and b) generating text.
Introducing Raycast
You're gonna need an app. There are many that do this. The venerable TextExpander might have been the first, but we're going to use a reasonably new app: Raycast.
Raycast is a beast. It does so much. But don't let that put you off -- we can start to use it for the stuff we need, and over time you can explore the rest of its features.
It's free. There's a pro plan, but you don't need it. It's currently Mac only, but they're working on a Windows version.
So, install it. You can test it's working by pressing Option-Space. A little window should appear in the middle of your screen.
I won't go over any other Raycast features just now. The manual is here.
Snippets
We're going to create a 'snippet'. How this works is that you type some sort of shortcut, and Raycast converts it to something else.
It's just like the feature on your iPhone that detects if you typed teh and corrects it to the. Or the one that corrects █uck to duck. You know.
There's a trick here, and it's in naming your snippets. You want to guarantee that whatever you type will never ever occur in normal daily typing. Because if your snippet trigger was al, every time you type that out Raycast will replace it for you.
So now instead of Johnny.Decimal you'll get Johnny.Decim2024-11-21. Not ideal.
I recommend ;;
I think this came from Merlin Mann waaaay back in the 43 folders days (2005!).2 If you start each of your snippets with two semicolons, you guarantee that you'll never trigger them by accident.
If you touch-type3 they're under your right pinkie. So you mash ;; and then the name of your snippet and boom Raycast steps in and replaces it with something else.
Let's drop a little video here in case you're wondering what I'm on about.
Raycast: Create Snippet
Cool eh! Let's set it up.
Activate Raycast with ⌥ Space. Type create snippet to find that command. Press return.
The Name helps you identify it in the future.4 Call it YYYY-MM-DD or whatever else you like.
The Snippet is what will appear when this is activated. Paste this in: {date format="yyyy-MM-dd"}. This is a little bit of code that Raycast understands. Include the curly brackets.
Scroll the window to reveal Keyword. This is what you type to activate this snippet. I'd recommend ;;date for this one.
Press ⌘ return to save it.
Try it out!
Problem: it's today's date
As Jade is renaming lots of old files, this isn't perfect. But honestly I find even having the skeleton of a date format that I can then edit is more useful than starting from nothing.
Tip: use option-arrows to move around
Another small computer power-user tip: hold option (alt on Windows) and use the left/right arrows. This jumps your cursor a word at a time, and it stops at the breaks between the numbers in the date.
This will speed up your editing.
Why stop there?
In Jade's specific case, where she wants yyyy-mm-mm Amex 12345, there's nothing stopping you creating another custom snippet for that whole piece of text.
Repeat the process but now the Snippet should read {date format="yyyy-MM-dd"} Amex 12345. Maybe give that one the keyword ;;ax1? Whatever makes sense to you.
We can do so much more with Raycast, but that's a good start. Let us know how that works for you, Jade!
I've sent a bunch of emails & updates the last 18 hours, so rather than writing another, I'll just paste the latest Quarterly here.
Hi everyone. This episode of The Quarterly is a touch early, for a couple of reasons.
Let's get the exciting news out of the way first: we just opened up the new Johnny.Decimal Small Business System for pre-launch.
In a nutshell, it's the 'life admin' pack, but for small business. But so much more: where life admin is a static pack -- apart from the odd update here and there -- the business system will be a living thing.
This has been something that I've wanted to do for a decade. Literally: I found the first note that I made, 25.15 Business in a box, dated 9th December 2014. It will be so much more than just the Johnny.Decimal structure and JDex: it'll be your operations manuals, your community, and whatever else you need it to be.
Me and Lucy are planning on working on this full-time for the next couple of years. I've built a mini-site for it with all the details. Check it out at https://business.johnnydecimal.com.
You've no idea how much we appreciate those of you who put your trust in us by giving us money before a thing even exists. It really helps our small business, and puts a bit of a rocket up us to get it finished, and make it as good as it can be.
So, as always, thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your support.
It's interesting, looking back on the last 18 months since I quit my job. You think, this small business idea: it's so obvious, why didn't we do it at the start?
I really believe that these things need to be allowed the time to evolve. And I'm so glad we did 'life admin' first, because that taught us so much.
For example: the business pack won't be a static set of folders and files. Turns out that updating a bunch of folders and files is a complex nightmare!
So this pack will be generated by a little helper app. That way you can choose your options on-the-fly. Want emoji? Tick a box. Want Bear-style JDex files or Obsidian-style? Choose that option.
For the nerds here, I'm learning Rust to do this properly. I dipped my toe in the waters of Electron and hoo boy did I not enjoy that. (Although for speed I may do a quick version using Deno, as I already know JS/TS.)
So this is step 1 towards a Johnny.Decimal app to help you manage your system. Rust + Tauri, completely cross-platform.
And this is why the business pack is taking longer: it'll just be a much bigger thing. It'll be worth it.
Reason #2 for an early newsletter: on 1st December I'll be in Sydney with my entire family, who are flying over from the UK for 3 weeks. Six of them, ranging from 9- to 78-years-old.
I'm meeting them in Sydney and we're spending a week there. Then we get the train to Canberra, where I'm really looking forward to showing my mam the beautiful gardens. Then as a peace offering to the 9- and 16-year-olds, for whom Canberra will be bo-ring, we're heading to the Gold Coast for a week.
It's been over a year since I've seen them. I can't wait.
I'll still be online, but probably just for an hour or so in the morning to keep on top of stuff.
Small apology for not really keeping up with the YouTube channel: there just isn't time. A typical video takes about 2 days of my time and then about the same for Lucy. Planning, shooting, editing, uploading. We just have to make priority calls and for now, the small business system is it.
Okay, wish me luck ferrying 6 British people around Australia! It's going to be one of those holidays where I need a holiday at the end.
Love from Canberra,
x johnny, lucy, & the chickens
In figuring out what the Decimal.Business membership should look like, one of the 'obvious' features was the private community. After all, everyone does it.
But it never sat right with me. It just feels wrong. It's not what Johnny.Decimal is; fundamentally not who I am. A week later and now I think it's really dumb. I made a bad decision, so I'm correcting it.
When you can't connect two people, you don't have 'community'
Earlier today I was chatting to someone over in private-business-world. And I wanted to connect them to someone in not-private-business world, because I thought they had a thing in common and they'd like to chat.
But when one of those people is behind a closed door, you can't do that. Discord even lets you know, by discouraging you from @mentioning someone who doesn't have access to the channel you're in. I thought this was a bug, until I realised what was going on.
At that instant I knew it had to end.
The intent
There was some logic in the original intent: which is that if you're not in business, you probably don't care about those conversations.
But this can be achieved in myriad other ways. Simplest of which is to mute those channels. So if that's you, here's how you do it.
Discord
Right-click the DECIMAL.BUSINESS folder in the left pane.
Select Mute Category > Until I turn it back on.
Forum
Select a category from the left pane.
At the top right of the right pane, click the bell.
Select Muted.
Business is still business
The other intent was to keep business stuff separate, so that it's easier to refer back to later. The channels don't need to be private to achieve this objective.
If it's not business, I'll steer it away
This is less relevant in Discord, where the chat nature of the platform really does see conversations just flowing by. I think worrying too much about which channel they're in is probably futile.
On the forum, which is more persistent, this is more important. Fortunately it's trivial to move an existing thread to another category, so if something starts in business but shouldn't really live there long-term, I'll just move it out.
Feeling robbed?
If 'the private community' was the primary reason you signed up, please accept my apologies and hit me up for a refund.
Since 'how I feel about AI', I've been using ChatGPT a whole bunch. I'm on the paid plan at US$20/month.
A few quick observations. I might say more in a later post.
I've (mostly) stopped searching the web
Unless I know exactly what I want and just need a link to it, my default search is now ChatGPT. (Which needs a better name please. The Claude people got that right. I'm gonna call it Chris.)
I'd guess 80% of what was search, is now not. This is where what I'm looking for isn't a particular page, it's an answer to a question or having something explained.
What I want in these situations is some prose that explains, like a person would if they were talking to me, the knowledge that I was seeking. This is exactly what you get from Chris.
Note: I know GPTs 'hallucinate' and tell you stuff that isn't true. I find that exceedingly rare and if you're using it as an excuse not to like these things you're doing yourself a disservice.
Another benefit -- and, as someone with a visually distinct website I realise the hypocrisy here -- is that every result looks the same. So not only have I eliminated the gamble that is clicking a link from a search engine, I've eliminated the mental overhead of visually parsing the page that opens.
Every page that Chris serves looks the same: black text on a white background. Simple numbered or bullet lists. And no images! God help me if I see another pointless Unsplash image above the fold.
So the moment the words appear, they're in my brain. This alone is transformational. (I should probably try enabling 'reader mode' on every site I visit. I know that's a thing you can do.)
On to my brilliant idea
I'm writing the first operations manual for Decimal.Business. It's the process by which you receive, store, and finally reconcile receipts for purchases.
Here's an extract. The block is part of a larger process diagram.
The trick is that link there: check your local regulations. How can I make that nice and easy for you, wherever you are?
This week we've been spending a lot of time thinking about some of the patterns inside category 12 Where I trade & how I get around.
'Where I trade…' includes all of the things at those premises, and the management of these things. We've split them in to 'back office' (or 'back of house' if you like) and 'front office'. In considering all of the types of things that you might have there, here's the structure we've got so far.
12.20 ■ Back office equipment & operations ⛔️
12.21 Keep the basics running
12.22 Keep us safe
12.23 Keep it nice for us
12.24 Keep the back office well equipped
12.25 Keep us fed and watered
12.26 Keep us sending & receiving
12.30 ■ Front office equipment & operations 🛎️
12.31 Keep the basics running
12.32 Keep our customers safe
12.33 Keep it nice for our customers
12.34 Keep the front office well equipped
12.35 Keep our customers fed and watered
By now you shouldn't be surprised to see patterns emerging. Patterns help your brain, and patterns are surprisingly useful when you're designing a system because they reveal potential gaps.
And you'll notice that we haven't used boring words. We started with boring words: 'office equipment' and so on. Turns out, making them less boring has a number of benefits.
They're less boring! (adj. not interesting; tedious.)
They're more memorable.
They encompass more when you express them as intent vs. content. We can't possibly know what all of you might put in here; but if we can figure out how each of you go about your day, we can hopefully provide a place for (almost) everything.
Let's put a quick example in each of these things. At JDHQ we're using a hairdressing salon as our working example because it seems to provide a nice spread of services, and conveniently Lucy had a cut & colour earlier this week so she had a good look around and asked a bunch of questions.
12.20 ■ Back office equipment & operations ⛔️
- (This is a header.)
12.21 Keep the basics running
- Electricity supply to the premises.
12.22 Keep us safe
- The office security system.
- This has an operations manual: how do you open up at the start of the day and lock up at the end?
12.23 Keep it nice for us
- Buying a comfy chair for the staff area.
12.24 Keep the back office well equipped
- From staplers to photocopiers.
12.25 Keep us fed and watered
- Getting a fruit box delivered.
12.26 Keep us sending & receiving
- Parcels and post.
12.30 ■ Front office equipment & operations 🛎️
- (This is a header.)
12.31 Keep the basics running
- You might have utility-like services that are front-of-house only. e.g. gas bottles for portable heaters at the front of a cafe.
12.32 Keep our customers safe
- Security guards.
12.33 Keep it nice for our customers
- Cleaning the toilets.
12.34 Keep the front office well equipped
- Hairdryers and straighteners.
12.35 Keep our customers fed and watered
- Buying a Nespresso machine & pods so you can give your customers a coffee while their colour sets.
- This has an operations manual: how do you refill it? How often? Who does it? Where do you keep the pods? What happens when they run out?
Each of these IDs is really broad and, again, this is by design. This system will theoretically include a place for everything: a design goal is that we don't want you to have to create your own IDs. As soon as you create your own thing you're off the standard track; that standard gives us all a common language.
So, within each of these IDs there'll be a well-defined set of subfolders. All the same: as usual, consistency rules. Here they are. (*Noting that this is all a work-in-progress.)
10 Invoices, receipts, & warranties (buying it, or supplies for it)
20 Product manuals & training (how the vendor says to use it)
30 Operations manuals (how we use it)
40 Maintenance, repair, & service (keep it in working order)
50 Vendor & supplier details (who to contact)
60 Sale, cancellation, & disposal (it went away or ended)
The (words in parens) here might or might not make it to the finished product, but they're certainly helping me with the design. See previous email re: telling a story.
So now we have a place, for, say, explaining how to reset the office power breaker:
10-19 Company administration
12 Where I trade & how I get around
12.20 ■ Back office equipment & operations ⛔️
12.21 Keep the basics running
30 Operations manuals
Electricity - how to reset the mains power.txt
And that little text file tells your staff where the breaker is and how to safely turn it back on, etc.
Designing a system that will theoretically be usable by any small business is, obviously, a challenge. I guess that's why nobody's ever done it. So I'd love to know what you think: do you read this and think, 'yeah, I could use that'...
...or do you think something different? Tell us! Now or never... ;-)
In the previous messages [0], I spoke about area 10-19 Office administration. This is the common area that contains the stuff that most of us deal with: company, staff, premises, money, tech, and so on.
But what about your product? The thing that's unique to you, that only you create?
That's going to be 20-29 Your product, and it should be obvious that there's only so much guidance that we can give you here. Because neither me or Lucy are hairdressers or landscapers or forklift rental companies or...
Here's the plan. For product, we're going to guide you with patterns. A lot of Johnny.Decimal is basically patterns and behaviours. If you've been on the forum or Discord for any amount of time you'll have seen people ask a question that stretches the edges of the system, and my answer is always:
Make this thing your own, because
I provide guidance, techniques, patterns, and behaviour: not hard rules.
Absolutism is one of my least favourite human traits. As soon as you start a sentence with the word 'all', you've lost me. (Unless you're a mathematician.) Because we're different: our brains, our lives, our situations, all different.
But we can make life easier -- for ourselves and everyone else -- through common patterns. Here's one: when you have one version of a document, and you want to update it, what do you do? There's a bunch of ways to handle this.
Just update the document in-place. You've got backups*; if you need to recall an older version, you can restore it.
Copy it, leaving the existing version and the seven other older versions where they are, calling the new version Document NEW COPY version (008) Jim's copy.doc.
Copy it, appending the current date to the filename in the format yyyy-mm-dd.
Move this copy to a subfolder called archive.
Ensure that only one version remains in the master folder.
Work on this version.
(*You have backups, right? Small business will make sure that you do -- it'll be one of the core operations manuals, and we'll hold you to account.)
The first method is what we should probably do. But humans seem to like to have a readily-available copy rather than relying on version control and backups. So we need to be pragmatic.
The second will be painfully familiar to many of you. Let's call this the 'I work in a large company' model.
The third is simple, effective, and takes no time. It's just a behaviour: a simple set of rules that, if followed, make life easier and less stressful. So why don't we ever do it?!
Just because we don't know the product patterns for hairdressers and landscapers now doesn't mean that we'll never know them. Because, over time, I hope this community will work together to create them.
I truly believe that community will be what makes this successful. Two people work at JDHQ and we've already established that one of them is no hairdresser. (I do cut my own hair but I'm not sure that counts.)
But once we've got a few hairdressers, our job becomes to discover and codify knowledge. And so by the time the 10th joins, we do have an idea of how that product area should look. And now we've got 10 hairdressers who can all connect and ask each other for help, based on a common language.
Imagine that we've also filled out the company admin area, being specific with examples that relate to hairdressing. So when you're setting up your system, you can choose the hairdressing template and it'll be even more helpful from the start.
(Nerd side-note: I realised that this might be a cool use for that decimal.business domain I bought. What if salon.decimal.business took you straight to the customised version...)
All of which is to say that we're full steam ahead here, and it's progressing very nicely. However: we've realised that we're not going to have this out by our initial end-November deadline. As a reminder, that's when my family lands from the UK. I'll be working minimal hours for 3 weeks.
It's not our style to release something half-baked. I mean, I'd take your money, but Lucy wouldn't be able to sleep at night. ;-) But seriously, while there'll always be more to improve, we want this pack to be a solid v1.0 when it's released. I'll keep you informed.
Tell us what you do! We've got a bunch of example businesses that we're designing for, but it helps us enormously when you mail us. Screenshots of your existing folder structure are pure gold -- it really lets us see inside your business brain. Lucy pores over them and they directly influence what we're building.
