# TGIF continues to prove valuable

> Our review process – 'Thank God I Filed It' – continues to prove its worth in uncovering duplicate information, and clarifying the purpose of each category.

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]](https://johnnydecimal.com/blog/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.

> Also see [0170](https://johnnydecimal.com/blog/0170), [0199](https://johnnydecimal.com/blog/0199), [0212](https://johnnydecimal.com/blog/0212).

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.[^wc-jdex]

[^wc-jdex]: I just did a word count on our business JDex: more than a quarter of a million words.

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`.[^sbs]

[^sbs]: Categories in this post are from the [Small Business System](https://johnnydecimal.com/sbs).

### '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](https://discord.com/channels/822215537589354566/1274252172707495958/1563319983218630729). [Books are written](https://calnewport.com/a-world-without-email/). 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](https://johnnydecimal.com/university/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.