This is the problem where the stuff you produce simply doesn’t fit in to a 10 × 10 system. You have more than ten clients, and/or each has more than ten projects or jobs.
In an effort to nut this one out, Lucy and I did the first Johnny.Decimal Q&A video on YouTube. Rather than embed it here, which is currently a bit broken (I have some site back-end work to do), here’s the link.
Once I’d saved a dozen or so recipes — more than fit on a single screen — I realised that I couldn’t find things. It’s the old computer science problem: naming things is hard.
Take one of the favourites, chicken shawarma. That’s how I saved it, but in my mind I think of it as ‘Lebanese chicken’. And so I can never find it.
A trivial problem indeed, but I think it serves as a nice example. Because exactly the same problem occurs whenever we save anything, anywhere. Did we call it ‘chicken’ or ‘shawarma’ or ‘lebanese’ or something else? All are equally valid, and we decide arbitrarily when we do the saving.
The solution, of course, is categorisation. As soon as I realised that I was becoming frustrated because I couldn’t find a recipe, I looked for a categorisation feature in Mela and found it.
And so now I don’t search for recipes. I browse categories.
The more I think about the index (I’m finishing off the workbook and it’s the next chapter) the more I come to think that its existence is an absolute necessity.
It hit me watching The Office last week. David Brent is introducing a new work experience girl. This is 2001: everyone still has a massive CRT monitor on their desk.
“Everyone’s got email”, he tells her. “Have you used email before?” 1
In 2001 the PC was still fairly novel. We certainly didn’t all have one at home. We had them at work, but they were slow and clunky. Hard drive space was severely constrained. We weren’t creating that much data — we couldn’t if we tried — so there just wasn’t that much to keep track of.
Just over 20 years later and the world couldn’t be more different. All of us use computers all day. The amount of data that we are generating has exploded, and we haven’t changed our behaviour at all.
None of us have been given any training, and the way we store and retrieve data hasn’t changed. We still just make stuff, wonder where to save it, and drop it in some hastily-named folder somewhere expecting to be able to find it later.
Sitting writing this in the garden, I look to the garage for an analogy. It’s full of labelled boxes of stuff.2 Imagine if nothing was labelled. It’d be chaos. But the analogy breaks down, because at least the garage is finite. At least there are only so many boxes I can put in any given box, or how deep my box nesting can go.
These constraints on sanity do not exist on your file system.
A more appropriate analogy is a large library. Imagine your national library without a catalogue. That’s no longer a library: it’s just a building full of books.
The action is on you
And so if you run a project or a department and you don’t use an index, what exactly are you expecting to happen? Are you hoping that people will just magically know where everything is?
I think we’re all deluded. I’m not blaming you; this has crept up on us all. It doesn’t feel like 20 years since I first saw The Office. But here we are. You know there’s a problem now. Go and do something about it.
Imagine on your first day instead of being given the company org chart, being given access to the index.
Imagine being able to know what exists, and where it is.
“It’s like we’ve never done this before”, I joked to Lucy. Of course we have done this before: as recently as 2018 in the Gold Coast, and Melbourne in 2006. Melbourne is the state capital of Victoria!
The point of having done it before is that you learned something from the experience. You spent a tremendous amount of money costing security, transport, and athlete villages. So then the next time you do it, you can use what you learned.
But we can’t do that, can we? Because we’re disorganised. I wonder if the organisers of Victoria 2026 even approached the Gold Coast team. Was there any point?
If you’d asked anyone for the files related to the Games five years ago, could they have given them to you?
Would what you were given have been any use at all? Or would it have been a disorganised medley of folders littered with files called Copy of copy of Transport budget for Gold Coast (001).xlsx?
Disorganisation is costing us billions of dollars a year. Most of it is hidden; this was the rare case where we see it laid bare.
Naming areas and categories can be difficult. I find areas are the hardest: by definition, you’re trying to convey a lot of information in a few words.
I seem to strive for single- or double-word area names. But why? Be descriptive: it’s a computer. Words are free.
(If you’re at work Microsoft will ruin this for you. You’ll run in to filename length restrictions sooner rather than later.)
‘Spatial’ names
Lucy and I had an idea over dinner the other week: name your areas like places. Keeping something creative? Call it The studio. Where does all of your paperwork live? The office, of course. You might keep your research in The library.
Computers are boring: making them interesting in any tiny way helps your brain.
Input vs. output
In the creative bubble that is our studio, we use Johnny.Decimal to track the creation of artefacts for LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
This is a pattern that I’ll document when I’m happy with it — it’s a tricky one that I don’t think we’ve nailed yet — but one thing I’ve found helps is differentiating between ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’.
‘Inputs’ are things you need in order to create a thing. In the creative world this might be your logo and brand colours.
‘Outputs’ are the things you create: the video that is eventually seen by the world.
When we kept everything on paper, it was someone’s job to organise it. This was an occupation: you were trained. You became an expert.
Now we employ Gen Z’s who didn’t grow up with the concept of ‘a file’1 yet we expect them to navigate the byzantine hierarchy of the company’s SharePoint.
You work at a keyboard all day, so we make you sit through a module so you know to bend your knees when you lift a box.
But when it comes to information management: you’re on your own.
When we kept everything on paper, you had to be organised. There was no other option.
If you weren’t organised, the information was lost. Not lost as in ‘it’ll take me a while to find it’: lost as in ‘gone forever’.
Now you can be disorganised, but at what cost? The cost is the time it takes you to find a thing; it is the risk that the thing that you find is a duplicate or an old version. It is the constant frustration that comes from knowing that something exists, but having no idea where it is.
We all feel this every day and we have come to believe that it is normal.
The link back to the site from items in the RSS feed has been incorrect.
I’ve fixed it now, but the thing that makes each entry unique is its URL: so now your RSS reader will probably see a bunch of ‘new’ articles, which are duplicates of the old articles. You can ignore them.
Sorry! Like I’ve said, I’m hand-coding this site. Like I might not have said, I’m not actually a web developer by trade…
How many conversations with old colleagues — one of them just called me — start, “hey do you remember where?..”
In this case he asked “do I remember where that server analysis that I did was stored?” And I said, yeah, it’s on our customer’s network. Thirty-two-dot-something, I think.
Then I realised that I still have my old index in Bear, so I opened up the phone and within thirty seconds there it was.
Isn’t it ironic that I thought quitting my job would give me more time to work on the site, and instead I’ve done essentially nothing.
There’s a good reason: money. The site earns none. I need some. :-)
So that’s what I’ve been doing: planning how to make money. The plan is that it’ll come from the corporate world. There is a plan, it’ll just take a while to enact.
The site will always be free, and my dream is that I have income that allows me to spend a lot more time on it.
Until then, forgive the lack of updates. I need to kick-start the ‘job’ part of ‘this is my job now’. Adding new pages here unfortunately does not do that.
In the mean time there are little threads that pop up on the forum that I try to stay on top of, so if you’re hungry for more content, or have a burning question, that’s where you should be.
And of course — I won’t keep banging this drum, I swear — if you want to sponsor me, every bit helps.
I didn’t love the job, and a late-Sunday-night conversation with my partner Lucy turned in to me resigning the next morning. Hardly spur of the moment — this has been coming for some time — but not what either of us had ‘planned’.
The turn of events saw me free by Tuesday afternoon. Laptops and badges handed in. Quite surreal.
And so here I am: Johnny.Decimal. My job. (I need to think of something to write in the ‘occupation’ box; suggestions welcome.)
But whenever I’ve seen anyone in this role their focus tends to be on the organisation’s databases. That SFIA description talks about your ‘knowledge management database’ but the word ‘file’ doesn’t appear once.
Is it that the file system is just so unglamorous? It is, right, I know it is. (It’s one of my fears in trying to make this my job: organising your files is, well … boring.)
But that’s no excuse to neglect it. Your internal knowledge databases may be amazing but that’s only part of the picture.1
Why is this okay?
The cost of being disorganised at home is negligible: you might be frustrated that you can’t find your insurance documentation, but it’s not costing literally hundreds of dollars an hour.
This is the problem that I intend to solve.
Footnotes
Are they? I’ve yet to see this either, but that’s a separate issue. ↩
I thought I’d use this first post to explain the numbering scheme.
As you might expect, each post has an ID. This post’s ID is 22.00.0001.
Blog posts are breaking the rules. I wanted to give them some sort of identifier but in the context of the broader site they don’t fit in the overall structure.
Imagine if every post had a Johnny.Decimal ID: 22.01, 22.02, and so on. My navigation tree would soon get out of control. And I’d run out of numbers quite quickly.
This is a nice example of why I save the 00 numbers. In this case I’m using 22.00, which is the ‘meta’ ID for the blog category, as an ID to represent all blog posts.
Each post then gets its own supplementary ID, starting from 0001. (I’m assuming I’ll never write more than 10,000 posts.)1
Accessing the posts
The main site has a couple of IDs dedicated to viewing lists of posts.
There’s 22.01 which shows the full content of the latest posts, and 22.02 which is an index of all posts but only their titles.
If I add ‘tags’ to future posts, I might use 22.03 and upwards to show pages that list blog posts with a specific tag.
I’m just having a bit of fun with this
None of this was really necessary. :-)
Footnotes
Let’s say I write a post a day. 365 days/year means I could easily hit 1,000 in a couple of years, but at the same rate I’d need to do that until the year 2050 to get close to 10,000. Unlikely. ↩
