The front door and the elephant

When I migrated everyone from our various 3rd-party platforms to JDHQ in August, I ended up with this ginormous spreadsheet: who came from where, with what access, to what product, based on which previous purchase on which platform. It's hideous, but it worked.

I thought that spreasheet's work was done, but it's never that simple. Two months later I still get emails from people who missed the invitation email and can't sign in to their old accounts (which no longer exist). That's okay: customer support is part of the job, that I enjoy. I get to email people and make them happy.

So I've still been using this spreadsheet, weekly. Here's the problem: it was called 2025-08-07 Working out who is Life vs. Annual by extracting Clerk data and munging it with Shopify.xlsx (for real), and I'd been accessing it via Excel's 'recently opened' list. Which worked great. Until it didn't.

Because last week I opened a bunch of other sheets, causing it to be pushed off the bottom of the list. So when I went to open it -- predictably enough, in some sort of a rush -- wait … agh … where the hell is it?

An identifiable stress

I think this entire endeavour, my life's work, is to remove from the world a type of stress that I've come to immediately recognise. It's this one: I know it exists and I'm stressed because I don't immediately know where it is.

So I just want to note that stress here. I see you, tiny stress. I poke you in the eye.

The front door

So here's the first thing I'm going to start doing: stop relying on that 'recent' list. It's a crutch. Handy, for sure, and I'm not going to stop using it entirely. But if you find yourself using it over and over, ask yourself, do you actually know where that file is?

When your recents is obliterated due to some sort of crash or bug, is that An Event? It shouldn't be.

Back to basics

The fundamental nature of Johnny.Decimal is this property where you start at the top, and you have at most 10 things to choose from, then you have at most 10 again, and now you're looking at your IDs.

With this constraint, my system would work without numbers. Numbers are secondary: they help the system along. But its heart beats to the rhythm of constraint.

Use the system as it was designed. And I'm talking to me here. What should I have done in this moment of tiny stress? Just start at the top. I only have 5 areas. Which one? The one that contains customers. Now 5 categories. Repeat. Now I only have 8 IDs in there! This one is 33.14 Customer data mashing and munging.

Three easy decisions. So chill out, and follow the bouncing ball.

The elephant

Of course the true crime is that filename. Every time I opened it I knew it was bad. So, improve it. Stick the ID in there: this is exactly what it's for.

When the filename is 33.14 Customer data from store migration.xlsx, I can use that recent list all I like. Because every time I open the file I'm reinforcing where it is.

This is exactly what be a better human time is for. Tidy up. Poke stress in the eye.

100% human. 0% AI. Always.