The managing email [12.01] page has a screenshot of Outlook under the heading I can fix your email.
While I’ve changed my mind about your email — I think email is just broken and probably beyond fixing, especially at work — a few people have asked exactly how I get Outlook looking like that.
I have good news and bad news.
Good news: I’ve documented it here, in a video.
Bad news: this is all going away, thanks to the ‘new Outlook’. Microsoft are simplifying all of their products for reasons, and my first look at this new Outlook tells me that it basically doesn’t have any features.
They’ve turned Outlook in to Hotmail, because they assume their customers are idiots.
So, with that said, here’s the video.
Discuss this on the forum.
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I’ve been training a GPT at OpenAI, home of ChatGPT. It’s amazing. The structured nature of Johnny.Decimal lends itself to this very well.
You can try it out here.
https://chat.openai.com/g/g-j7o133XOW-johnny-decimal-architect
Notes
- Requires a GPT Plus subscription.
- Will disappear at some point: I’m going to turn this in to some sort of a product, honestly.
- But y’all are family so help me test now and I’ll sort you out later. ❤️️
Suggested prompts. Works great with ‘generate me an area to…’
- Generate an area to manage my small business
- Generate an area to manage my knitting hobby, and provide a bash prompt that will create the folders in my file system
Example
Prompt: create a simple area for my knitting hobby, and give me a bash script to create folders
Output:
50-59 Knitting Projects
51 Pattern Library
51.01 Cardigans
51.02 Afghans
51.03 Mittens
52 Yarn Stock
52.01 Alpaca
52.02 Merino
52.03 Bamboo
53 Accessories & Tools
53.01 Circular Needles
53.02 Crochet Hooks
53.03 Gauges & Counters
The bash script:
#!/bin/bash
# Directory for knitting projects
baseDir="Knitting_Projects"
# Creating base and subdirectories
mkdir -p "$baseDir/51_Pattern_Library" "$baseDir/52_Yarn_Stock" "$baseDir/53_Accessories_Tools"
# Creating subdirectories for each category
mkdir -p "$baseDir/51_Pattern_Library/51.01_Cardigans" "$baseDir/51_Pattern_Library/51.02_Afghans" "$baseDir/51_Pattern_Library/51.03_Mittens"
mkdir -p "$baseDir/52_Yarn_Stock/52.01_Alpaca" "$baseDir/52_Yarn_Stock/52.02_Merino" "$baseDir/52_Yarn_Stock/52.03_Bamboo"
mkdir -p "$baseDir/53_Accessories_Tools/53.01_Circular_Needles" "$baseDir/53_Accessories_Tools/53.02_Crochet_Hooks" "$baseDir/53_Accessories_Tools/53.03_Gauges_Counters"
echo "Folders for Knitting Projects have been successfully created."
The bash script needs work: as of this post, it insists on replacing spaces with underscores.
Roadmap
This is great for inspiration, but I see the end goal as an app/executable that you point at your file system — the messy one that you have today — and it:
- Detects the names of your existing files and folders, ignoring all the cruft that isn’t actually your stuff.
- Generates a new Johnny.Decimal structure for you using the GPT.
- Validates the structure, i.e. confirms the numbers are all consistent.
- Confirms that you like it, trying again if not.
- Creates those folders in your file system.
Although honestly I’ve given this about half an hour’s thought at this point.
Thoughts?
Discuss this on the forum.
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In the process of sending out some stickers, Lucy just had to create a new category in D85 Johnny.Decimal business.
It naturally fits in to our 30-39 Marketing area, but then we need a new category. And in this situation, we don’t really know what the future of that category will be.
Because it’s not just going to be stickers. That’s a really narrow category, which is usually a red flag.
I can’t know what else might go in there, because it doesn’t exist yet. And I don’t want to sit and think about that, because I have better things to do.
So I’m stuck: a mental block. The worst.
But, I realised: renaming a category has no cost!
The category name doesn’t appear in any files. You can just … change it. Expand it. Whenever you want, later.
It doesn’t matter. There are no consequences.
So that’s interesting and might influence how you create things.
Discuss this on the forum.
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A conversation with a reader made me realise that this site had been written for the wrong audience.
As an ex-IT-project-manager myself, I’d always assumed that I should write for people at work. You have to write for someone, and that’s what I picked.
Wrong! I think most of you are at home. Or you’re starting at home, and taking this to work later.
So I’m in the process of re-writing these pages with that in mind. I want the system to be more relatable to more people.
Nothing about the system changes: it’s just how I present it, and the examples that I use.
Until it’s finished, accept my apologies if feels a bit disjointed.
Progress
Done ✅
To-do 🚧
- Everything else: I’ll update the pages in order from 11.04 onwards.
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The Hemispheric Views podcast that I was on the other week had a fun Duel of the Defaults episode last week.
Do you use the default stuff that comes with the computer, or something else?
I definitely feel like mine has tended more to the default over the last five years. Here it is.
- Mail Client: Mail.app.
- Mail Server: Migadu. Love Migadu, 💯
- Notes: Bear, sorry @canion.
- To-Do: Scrap of paper and pencil; Reminders for longer-term, remind-me-on-a-day.
- Though I never use Reminders.app: stuff gets in there via Siri or Fantastical, and Fantastical tells me it’s due.
- iPhone Photo Shooting: Camera, from the Home Screen button.
- I wish I could turn off the swipe, I only do it by accident and I realise when my phone sets on fire in my pocket.
- Photo Management: Photos.
- It’s just a decade of chaos in there worth 200GB of my iCloud storage. Mostly photos of whiteboards.
- Calendar: Fantastical/iCloud.
- Cloud file storage: iCloud, and the Synology under the desk.
- RSS: NetNewsWire sync’d with iCloud.
- Contacts: Contacts.
- Which I brought to the first iPhone from my Nokia, and have never deleted a single one, and they’re all immaculately tagged with the label and the international number format, and I have 1,690 — the vast, vast majority of which I have no idea who they are any more; but if I’ve ever met you, you’re in there.
- Browser: Safari, even for development; I switched to its dev tools last year, they’re terrific.
- Chat: iMessage/Discord.
- Bookmarks: Safari, although I don’t really keep bookmarks.
- The trick is to set your history to never expire (Safari > Settings > General > Remove history items: Manually), and then every site you’ve ever visited will autocomplete, so why bother with bookmarks?
- Read It Later:
null, don’t use; is that -1 points, @canion?
- Word Processing: Pages, or VSCode because I need Vim keybindings.
- Spreadsheets: Excel.
- Presentations: iA Presenter. Lush OMG.
- Worth downloading for the video that plays when it launches; the only video in all of history that I ask to play again the next time.
- Shopping Lists: A Field Notes notebook and a Mitsubishi 9850 pencil.
- Meal Planning: I keep recipes in Mela.app which is amazing.
- Budgeting & Personal Finance:
null unless you count my bank’s iPhone app?
- News: after doom-scrolling Covid for the entirety of 2020 I stopped reading all news as of 2021. I haven’t been to a news site since then. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done for my mental health.
- Of course, I get news. I see Lucy’s screen; she tells me things; people send me links; we put the radio on. This isn’t a religious thing … I just don’t browse it, myself.
- Music: Apple Music.
- Typing this listening to Texas’ 1989 (?!!?!) - album ‘Southside’ because it was suggested.
- Podcasts: Overcast.
- Passwords: 1Password.
There’s now 98 99 of these that Robb Knight has collected here.
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I’ve been experimenting with Notion as a way to keep your index. I love it so far.
If you’re interested there’s a Discord thread here, I’d love feedback. The templates are linked there along with a couple of overview videos.
All very sketchy at this point. Use at your own risk blah blah.
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Daan on the forum asked a common question about ‘the freelancer system’.
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.
The freelancer problem - YouTube
All feedback and comments welcome. This isn’t a solved problem yet. The forum post is the place to go. Thanks.
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A great post from Anna Havron at Analog Office about her use of Johnny.Decimal.
Particularly important is the recognition that this thing takes time. Of course it does: it’s work that you weren’t doing before. But…
Pay now, or pay later.
—Anna
Nailed it.
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I use Mela — Recipe Manager on my iPad. It’s a great app, I recommend it.
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.
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