Work packages

A work package is an optional place to do any piece of creative, administrative, or other work.

In the project management profession, they're an established place to do a standalone project. Or a way to break up larger projects (programs of work) into achievable pieces.

In a Johnny.Decimal system, one of their benefits is the extra room they provide to manage daily work. This helps avoid cluttering the IDs higher up in the JDex and filesystem.

Numbering scheme

Work packages live in an expanded area called W0000-9999 Work packages.¹

A Johnny.Decimal system
├── 10-19 First area
├── 20-29 Second area
├── 30-39 Third area
├── …
└── W0000-9999 Work packages

This area uses non-standard numbering that allows for up to 10,000 jobs (that's one every working day for 40 years). There are no categories here. We jump straight to the unique ID for each work package.

Start at W0011 and increment by 1 each time.²

When moving into this area, we recommend storing old finished projects in W0009~00.09 Archive. Then start fresh at W0011 with new jobs.

Work packages must link to an ID

Crucially, work packages may not exist in isolation. They must belong to an ID. We show this in the title like: W0011~11.13 Compliance audit.

Here, we’ve linked W0011 to its parent ID 11.13 with the tilde symbol. This is required.

W0000-9999 Work packages
├── W0011~11.13 First job description
├── W0012~14.52 Second job description
├── W0013~21.34 Third job description
├── W0014~31.13 Fourth job description
└── …

Recommended subfolders

We recommend using a standard subfolder template in work packages.

This is a simple Decimal trick that builds muscle memory and helps your brain. It doesn't matter if you don't use all the folders every time you do a job. Having a consistent place to work is what counts.

Our filesystem template follows 'the fallback pattern' and mimics the structure of our 40-49 Creative assets area.³

Naming subfolders in blocks of 10 keeps them in sequence, while leaving room in between to sneak in late arrivals (which is what happened with 05 and 95 below).

W0000-9999 Work packages
└─ W0011~11.13 First job description
  ├── 05 Planning/
  ├── 10 Design elements/
  ├── 20 Words/
  ├── 30 Images/
  ├── 40 Audio & music/
  ├── 50 Video & animation/
  ├── 90 Exports for review/
  └── 95 Finals as published/

Examples

Here's some examples of work that we've done in this area:

• Videos we make for our courses or YouTube,
• Major updates to our website,
• Building a mailing list and writing individual email updates,
• Designing a Johnny.Decimal system for the corporate world,
• Back-end improvements for the website,
• Improving the new-customer billing and signup flow,
• Managing customer support issues,
• Designing a website share card and a t-shirt,
• Managing a series of LinkedIn posts,
• Longer blog posts.

There are two lessons in the Task and Project management course that discuss how work packages fit in our project management strategy. And the Small Business System now comes with the work packages area.