TGIF continues to prove valuable
Our review process – 'Thank God I Filed It' – continues to prove its worth in uncovering duplicate information, clarifying the purpose of our categories, and refreshing our memory.
Categories are the heart of your system. If you can deeply understand, with absolute clarity, exactly what each of your categories is and isn't for, you'll find your information more easily, with less stress.
TGIF recap
As a recap, we first had the idea of regularly reviewing our system in early 2025 [0097]. Basically, you spend a bit of your okay I'm done with work and I just need to waste an hour before I pack up for the week time on Friday by going through your system, category-by-category, according to a schedule, and just giving it a bit of love.
Because knowledge doesn't look after itself. It atrophies. There's so much of it, you're creating and modifying it all day: you can't possibly hold it all in your mind.1
You might think that you could outsource this work to your AI. And you could – but I'd argue that now you understand less about your business than you did before. You need to do the work for it to help your brain.
TGIF helps you to clarify purpose
Our business is a bit funny in that we use Johnny.Decimal to manage it, while at the same time being Johnny.Decimal, producing the system itself. It's very 'meta', which leads to some interesting decisions about how we manage our own data.
Lucy's TGIF revealed a discrepancy which led to us making a decision: category 24 Processes & procedures is for our internal processes & procedures. One of those is my 24.18 Email-sending checklist.2
'How I think about managing email' isn't here
I spend a lot of time thinking about how we – all, society – should manage email. This is something I've given hundreds of hours of thought to. It keeps coming up. Books are written. I don't think it'll ever be solved, because technology and our use of it continuously evolves.
So how I think about email is something that I consider to be part of our 21 Products & services. My thoughts on it, and the associated output, are one of the reasons you might follow me, and sign up. One of the next videos in the member's feed – likely a short series of them – will cover this topic.
I manage this at 21.53 Email, your opinions of and advice thereon.
What's important is the review
These details about my business won't be relevant to yours. What's important is the point that reviewing them – questioning them, giving them a poke, testing them this way and that way – this is what's going to give you a clearer mental model of your business.
It's unglamorous work. But I think it's really important.
Footnotes
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I just did a word count on our business JDex: more than a quarter of a million words. ↩
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Categories in this post are from the Small Business System. ↩