Johnny.Decimal (no AI)

JD CLI updated: now creates filesystem folders

Johnny — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 07:35:50 GMT

The JD CLI has been updated.

It's migrated from using environment variables to the new configuration file.

Now if you try to jd 11.11 to a folder, and that folder doesn't exist, and your JDex is readable by the CLI – i.e. Markdown files on disk, i.e. Obsidian - then it'll create the folder for you.

The MCP server has been updated to understand this tool and the configuration file. Just ask it to help me install the jd cli.

Here's a short video walkthrough.

If you installed the CLI before today

Pull:
```
git -C ~/.jd/cli pull
```

In your .zshrc or .bashrc, find these lines. You might only have the first.

source ~/.jd/cli/jd-nav/jd-nav.sh
source ~/.jd/cli/jd-prompt/jd-prompt.zsh

Replace them both with this line.
```
source ~/.jd/cli/jd.sh
```
Start a new shell.

SBS meeting schedule: Tue 15/Sep moved +3h

Johnny — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 22:25:07 GMT

We've moved next week's Small Business Zoom session forward 3 hours.

This is the slot we designed to suit Decimals in the Americas, but at 15:00 the scheduled time doesn't suit those on the west coast who are still at work.

This session only has been moved to:

18:00 Mon 14/Sep – Los Angeles (UTC-7)
21:00 Mon 14/Sep – New York (UTC-4)
01:00 Tue 15/Sep – UTC
10:00 Tue 15/Sep – Tokyo (UTC+9)
11:00 Tue 15/Sep – Canberra (UTC+10)
13:00 Tue 15/Sep – Wellington (UTC+12)
View a timezone chart

Your calendar should update

If you're subscribed to the events calendar (Business members only) this slot should have updated in your calendar.

If it hasn't:

Refresh the subscription.
Confirm you're subscribed to the calendar and that you didn't import a point-in-time copy instead.

Feedback welcome

We try to pick times that suit the most people. Let us know if this doesn't suit, and what does. We'll keep experimenting.

'Project' section of 'Task & Project Management' course re-recorded

Johnny — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 06:35:47 GMT

Our Task & Project Management course is, perhaps unsurprisingly, split into two sections: tasks, and project management. (Perhaps to our marketing detriment, I have a tendency to name things literally.)

We just re-recorded the entire project management section. If you watched the previous version, you should watch these new videos. Start from feedback from the future.

Updated based on real-world use

Everything we produce is a result of real-world experience. I can't teach you how do to a thing if it's not something I do myself.

The previous projects section was the best that I knew at the time. But since releasing it late last year, I continued to refine the method. The re-recorded episodes reflect 6 months of further work, and are exactly how we run our own business.

It's a great update. I'm really happy with it.

Also see: Work packages

See the previous blog post, '50-59 Portfolio of creative outputs' becomes 'W0000-9999 Work packages'.

'50-59 Portfolio of creative outputs' becomes 'W0000-9999 Work packages'

Johnny — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 06:35:43 GMT

With the release of the Small Business System last year we introduced a new pattern. Area 50-59 Portfolio of creative outputs was an expanded area with numbers ranging from 50000 through 59999.

The extended numbering is required because you're expected to have more than 100 'creative outputs', so the usual restrictions don't work. This numbering was always a bit weird, not least because 50-59 as a parent folder name didn't accurately describe its contents.

Expanding the concept

This concept was originally for 'creative outputs', as its name says. For our type of business that's blog posts and video course lessons. For a restaurant it might be the photo shoot for their latest Instagram campaign.

But the more we used it, the more we realised that it was a useful pattern for all work. If you have a broad Johnny.Decimal ID like 21.34 Small Business System, it gets crowded if you try to do work in there.

One solution would be to promote that thing to its own category: 61 Small Business System, say. You could do that, but now we've pulled this specific product out of the list of products into its own place. And we still have the limit of 100 things to consider.

This 'place to do work' turned out to be a really nice alternative. With this pattern, you leave the core thing where it is: 21.34 Small Business System never changes. Each piece of work you do gets a new number in this 'work world', and we link it back to 21.34.

Introducing 'work packages'

At this point I realised I'd brought the established concept of work packages into Johnny.Decimal. And that's a good sign: well-established patterns are probably correct. Let's not invent something new for the sake of it.

So that's what the 'creative pattern' has grown into: each of these jobs is now a work package, and they're no longer limited to creative-like things. They're useful for any work.

For example, you might need to conduct a large audit as part of a compliance exercise. That audit could be a work package, linked to the SBS ID 11.13 Compliance.

Fixing the numbers

A design principle of Johnny.Decimal is that you must always be able to give a stranger – a new starter at your business, say – a number, and they must be able to find it easily. So the parent folder name needs to accurately explain what's in it.

The existing area pattern A0-A9 doesn't work here. Work packages are so different, we've given them a completely new scheme. They start at W0000 and continue to W9999.¹ So we call the folder that contains them W0000-9999 Work packages. This sorts them below all of your regularly-numbered Johnny.Decimal areas.

They must link to an ID

Crucially, work packages may not exist in isolation. They must belong to an ID. We indicate this in the title like: W0011~11.13 Compliance audit. Here, we've linked W0011 to ID 11.13.

This link-to-parent-ID-in-title is required. You can and should cross-reference these entries using links in your JDex, but trust me: you'll forget to do that. If you always link every work package to its parent using this simple notation, you can never lose anything.

This is how our Small Business example now looks.

How do I migrate from `50-59`?

If you've been using area 50-59, I recommend switching to this new scheme. Start the numbers where you left off: if your last creative job was 50106, your first work package is W0107.

You could renumber your old entries. We didn't: the nature of these things is that, once done, they're rarely referenced again.

We've also retitled `40-49`

While we're at it, we've tweaked the title of the Small Business System's area 40-49. What was your Library of creative inputs, previously mirrored by the now-defunct Portfolio of creative outputs, has been renamed to 40-49 Creative assets. Same thing, simpler name.

See more at the updated Task & Project Management

We just re-recorded the entire second half of the course. You'll find a full explanation of this concept starting at this episode. See the blog post that follows this one for more information.

Just like every other part of the system, you should leave the first 10 for standard zero-like IDs. Start your own WPs at W0011. ↩

Small Business System – '50-59 Portfolio of creative outputs' becomes 'W0000-9999 Work packages'

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 06:23:04 GMT

This is the changelog entry for this update. See blog post 0240 for full details.

Life Admin System – '.02' says to use it sparingly

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Standard zero description

The .02 standard zero now tells you to prefer storing a task close to the thing it relates to.

Its description now ends with 'Use sparingly: prefer storing tasks close to the thing they relate to'.

The standard zeros page and every .02 ID say this. The IDs themselves have not changed.

Small Business System – '.02' says to use it sparingly

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Standard zero description

The .02 standard zero now tells you to prefer storing a task close to the thing it relates to.

Its description now ends with 'Use sparingly: prefer storing tasks close to the thing they relate to'.

The standard zeros page and every .02 ID say this. The IDs themselves have not changed.

Site and product updates

Johnny — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:44:52 GMT

Originally sent to the mailing list on Wednesday 2026-08-19.

Hey all. It's been a while; we've been busy. Rather than overload this update, I'll send a couple of short(er than usual) updates over the next few days.

Site changes

I've been tweaking the site homepage again.

The previous home and product pages had that 'sales page' thing going on. Large text, not a lot of it, kinda shouty. It was a new approach – for most of the site's ten-year life it's had a predominantly-text homepage: 2015, 2018, 2020, 2024, 2026. I'm glad I tried 'the shouty thing', once. Because now I know that I hate it and don't have to do it again.

Design is hard. I have no design training. I opted out of every art class at school in favour of science. I like to think that I have taste – I know nice when I see it. But knowing it and making it are two different things.

Thankfully, inspiration hit me in the form of Are.na's wonderful new homepage. Charles wrote about it here. I'm a big fan of their ethos and of his writing – I quote his Personal Business piece often.

Seeing their page it hit me, instantly: that this shouty page that I'd designed just wasn't me; wasn't us, Johnny and Lucy, this 'personal business'. The old page was my attempt at being a Big Company – something I don't want to be!

It's gone; blessed relief. In its place is a page that I hope helps you find the place you're looking for. I hope it's useful to the newcomers, who don't know what this thing is, and the long-timers, who know just what they're looking for.

I particularly like the new user flow. The page subtly changes when you go from signed out, to signed in with a free account, to signed in with access to products. Same place, same feel, slightly different story.

I'm proud of it. It feels like me. Let me know what you think.

Product name updates

We've updated the names of our products. So if you look in your new account page you might see unfamiliar words. Nothing has actually changed other than a name.

What was 'Life Admin System' (and then, very briefly, …(pack only)) is now a Personal membership.

What was 'Johnny.Decimal University' (then, briefly, 'The Life Admin System') is now a Pro membership. This better reflects what we're doing with it – there's a fledgling API you can use, and most of the AI tools (see below) will require a Pro account. I want to keep adding useful stuff – if you're Pro, you'll get it all.

And what was 'Small Business System' is now a Business membership. It includes everything in Pro.

What hasn't changed is that 'membership' doesn't mean 'subscription'. Pay once, access and updates forever. Nor have any of the prices changed.

Lifetime is back

For a while we sold a Lifetime membership option. Then I couldn't figure out where it should sit, so I removed it.

Enough people ask how they can support us, so I've put it back. You'll find it there on your account page. As with all of our products, it'll discount anything you've already paid.

For this extra money you get … not much, honestly! You get our eternal gratitude and love. You get everything we make in the future, but I can't promise what that'll be, if anything.

Our Lifetime members make a huge difference. When I say love, I mean it. Thank you all.

AI content coming

The next update will be about exciting stuff I'm doing with AI. I think it's really cool – but I know some of you aren't into it. There's a new button on the homepage. If you don't want to hear about AI, turn it on. I'll do my best to filter it out of the site (still some work to do, bear with me).

Do that in the next ~36 hours and I should be able to filter you out of AI-specific email. I haven't coded that up yet so no promises but I don't see why not. I should also be able to create an AI-free version of the RSS feed. I'll drop a post in the feed when I've done that.

Until next time,
j.

AI-free features now available

Johnny — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:39:21 GMT

For those of you not into AI, there are a handful of new features. There's a setting on your new homepage that, when checked, will hide most AI content on the site.

I'm not promising that you'll never see the letters 'AI'. But posts and pages that are predominantly about AI will be hidden. These posts are also hidden from your search results.

AI-free RSS feed

That setting doesn't carry across to the public RSS feed, so if you want the AI-free feed, resubscribe to https://johnnydecimal.com/rss-no-ai.xml.

'Organising our small business' is now 'Working with Johnny.Decimal'

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 07:26:37 GMT

Preferring fewer, broader playlists (it's easier to manage), we renamed JDU's 'Organising our Small Business' to 'Working with Johnny.Decimal'. This aligns it with YouTube.

The JDU playlist will contain videos that YouTube doesn't – for example, today's 'How I keep my JDex entries and notes'. The JDU-only episodes will typically be less polished – this playlist will be a place I can throw up quick ideas, responses to your questions, that sort of thing.

Obsidian links break. Mine don't. (video)

Johnny — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 01:18:37 GMT

This video continues a theme:

If anybody needs step-by-step instructions for this, let me know.

Indicating levels of Johnny.Decimal complexity

Johnny — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 23:35:15 GMT

The previous post discussed an advanced notation whose primary intent is to enable 'parsing' of your Johnny.Decimal system using automated tools.

While the nature of the content was obviously advanced, I should have made it more obvious that this is an advanced concept and is very much optional. Most of you don't need to care, and don't need to feel like this is something you should be doing, or that you're missing out.

I regret the error.

I've been thinking about this for a while. I passionately believe that the Johnny.Decimal system can help everyone to be more organised; that you really do not need any special 'computer skills' to use it to help you reduce the stress of modern life.

Some of the best email I get is from 'normal people' (i.e. not nerds like me) either thanking me for the system, or asking me a question about it. I love answering these emails – no question is too simple, and they inform what we create. Email me any time.

Some stuff is advanced

But then some stuff is advanced. That's the beauty of a system based around numbers and text: you can drive it as hard as you like. So here's a way to indicate when this is the case. I'm going to try to start using it on the blog, YouTube, and anywhere else. It's pretty simple.

Complexity: 1/3

Johnny.Decimal level: ▓░░

The default. I won't be writing this everywhere: unless I say otherwise, assume this.

Complexity: 2/3

Johnny.Decimal level: ▓▓░

'Intermediate' level stuff that you might like to use.

Complexity: 3/3

Johnny.Decimal level: ▓▓▓

Definitely 'advanced' level stuff that you should only use if you know you need it.

RFC W0192: Use of +, ~, @; clarifying extend-the-end

Johnny — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 06:12:45 GMT

This post is a request for comments. I am actively seeking your feedback. This feedback will influence the development of Johnny.Decimal. Feedback closes at the end of 2026-07-30. Details are at the end.

I put this post together quickly as a result of this time constraint. (Its decisions are holding up the recording of additional Task & Project Management (T&PM) episodes.) So it's a bit rough around the edges: I'll write up something more formal when feedback is in.

One of my goals has always been for the Johnny.Decimal system to be semi-formal. By which I mean that there are clear – almost mathematical – rules that define it.

This has many benefits. Clarity, obviously. Consistency. It also enables the creation of software tools to support the system: you can't write a script to validate your system if you don't have a list of rules against which to validate.

These rules need to survive the real world. Let's be honest: they need to survive Obsidian. Obsidian is just a nice way to view Markdown files, so really what we're saying is that these rules need to survive arbitrary text files on disk. We need to imagine those text files as a database, even though they're not one.

Defining an ID

One such rule seems simple enough: an ID – which I'll refer to generically as an 'entry' in your system – is defined as AC.ID Title,¹ e.g. 11.11 I am ID eleven-eleven.²

From here, we already know that we need 2 more definitions:

The definition of category 11, which we store as 11.00 Title of category 11.
The definition of area 10-19, which we store as 10.00 Title of area 10-19.³

Folder structure

You might optionally choose to store these text files in a nested folder structure.⁴

10-19 Area ten through nineteen/
   └── 11 Category eleven/
      └── 11.11 I am ID eleven-eleven.md

In which case, ID 11.11 must be a child of folder 11, which must in turn be a child of 10-19.

But if you want to leave all your files flat in a folder, that's a style choice. It breaks no rules.

So far, nothing new. Just setting the scene.

What about additional notes?

If you've used your system for any amount of time you know that notes can get full. It can be nice to create a new file so the main file doesn't get unmanageable.

Let's start using a real example, Life Admin's 11.11 Birth certificate & proof of name (which I'll shorten for convenience).

We just said that 11.11 Birth certificate defines the ID. So I can't just create another note called 11.11 Notes from applying for copy of UK birth certificate, because now I have 2 notes with ID 11.11. Which one defines the ID, and which is just a note? There's no way to tell.

Proposal 1: `~` is used to indicate a freeform sub-note

Any file containing notes, that is not the definition of the ID, and is not an EtE note (see below), must be named:

AC.ID~ Arbitrary title of sub-note

AC.ID Title must exist, in order to define the ID.

Freeform sub-notes MAY NOT contain Johnny.Decimal system metadata.⁵ All metadata is inherited from the parent ID. (You may do as you please with your own metadata/frontmatter.)

You may think of a sub-note as functionally identical to text inside a heading of the main note.

Valid: notes inside the ID note

# 11.11 Birth certificate

## Notes from applying for UK copy

I called the service centre and spoke to Dave and he said…

Equivalent: sub-note extracted to its own file

# 11.11 Birth certificate

// is now an empty note

# 11.11~ Notes from applying for UK copy

I called the service centre and spoke to Dave and he said…

Proposal 2: `+` means 'extend-the-end'; defining 'extend-the-end'

The system has had the concept of extend-the-end (EtE) for a few years. It's useful, but I've never been totally comfortable with its definition until now.

The canonical EtE example has always been your kids, in the context of the Life Admin System (LAS). There we have 11.11 Birth certificate. You have a kid, and at 6 months it's a touch young to be managing its own Johnny.Decimal system – one day! – so you do it. How do you store the kid's birth certificate?

The answer is 11.11+ Belinda.⁶ Because she'll also need her jabs, which you'll store at 11.25+ Belinda. Maybe you open her a savings account and you track it at 13.42+ Belinda.

You can think of these extended IDs as sitting on top of your primary system; like a shadow system. You've got your system, and overlaid with these + entries you have Belinda's system. And this is why it's called extend-the-end. You're just giving yourself a little more room.

Now, to find all entries in your system that relate to Belinda, just search for + Belinda.

Formalising how you extend-the-end

So when should you EtE with +, and when should you create a sub-note with ~? The answer is: when you'll have multiple instances of the thing through your system, use +, and always name them identically. Otherwise, use ~ and you are free to name them arbitrarily.

Our examples already demonstrate this. Will any other IDs require a note whose title is, or is even remotely like, Notes from appling for UK copy of birth certificate? Obviously not: use ~.

Will we use + Belinda over and over? We will.

You should be able to list all of your extend-the-ends

Your system must necessarily contain a finite number of EtEs, and you should be able to list them all. This is what makes them useful: you're defining a type of sub-note that you can easily filter on.

At home:

+ Belinda, + Marie, + Wendy for each of the kids.

At work:

+ Work log is a note where we record the fact that we did some work on a thing; typically with a date/timestamp.
- E.g. 21.35 JDHQ has 21.35+ Work log
+ P5 ideas is a note where we record ideas that aren't solid enough to make it into our task system.⁷
- E.g. 21.35 JDHQ has 21.35+ P5 ideas
+ Meeting minutes is a note where we record minutes of meetings that relate to the ID.
- E.g. if we have a meeting specifically about JDHQ we might store the minutes at 21.35+ Meeting minutes.

Standards-in-waiting

Note that these work EtEs are likely to become recommendations of the system, i.e. if you have a need for a work-log-like note, don't call yours + My work-log. Call it + Work log and now we're all talking the same language.

In this way they become a bit template-like. We'll develop this into the Small Business System (SBS) over time.

Be consistent

Don't use + Belinda sometimes and + Bel elsewhere. Pick one.

A counter-example

As a counter-example, the SBS has ID 11.31 Internal policies. Our business has a sub-note 11.31~ Purpose, mission, values: this is the only ID that will require a note with that title, so it doesn't earn a +.

Below it our 11.32 External policies has 11.32~ Code of conduct, 11.32~ Privacy policy for the same reason.

Whereas if we had a meeting about these policies, we would store its minutes at 11.32+ Meeting minutes.

You own everything after the `+`

Parsing software will detect the + and consider it and anything that follows until the end-of-line to be the EtE pattern.

This means you are free to use a space, or to omit one. I have found that it feels natural to use a space when what follows is a sentence/word, and to omit one when what follows is a code. But this is guidance, not a rule.

An example of a code

The EtE concept was born at a job where I was dealing with 13 physical facilities. Each of those facilities had a well established shortcode e.g. E32, K07.

The Johnny.Decimal system as designed contained IDs like 53.07 Hardware delivery and 72.02 Cabling. To handle these things at each location, I extended the end:

53.07+E32 was hardware delivery to E32.
72.02+K07 was cabling at K07.

This worked beautifully. I used the IDs everywhere, across my notes, filesystem, email, and the project schedule. I could filter this schedule for +K07 to reveal all line items related to that facility.

In this case it feels natural to omit the space after the +. But if you prefer to include it, do so.

Keeping notes

Regarding notes, this works in the same way as the ~ sub-note.

Difference between `~` and `+`

To recap:

Both symbols provide a way to expand an ID that already exists.
~ is for arbitrary, unpatterned expansion.
+ is for systematic, patterned expansion.

In your filesystem

If you name your filesystem folders with the +, they sort in a group above any unstructured folders. This will probably be optional. I prefer it.

Proposal 3: `@` links Work Packages to their ID

The updates to T&PM that we're recording include the concept of 'work packages' (WPs) as introduced in this video.

What's important here is a new nomenclature. Each WP has a number like W0000 but MUST also belong to a parent ID, 12.34. You MUST indicate this in the title, which ends up looking like:

W0011@12.34 Name of work package

Previously, we had used ~ as this divider. It works really nicely – it reads like 'work package 11 relates to ID 12.34' – but this is confusing if we also use it as the arbitrary sub-note symbol.

Instead, I propose using @ for this purpose. It also reads well: 'work package 11 at ID 12.34'.

In this context it will ALWAYS be nested between the range of characters defined by the regular expression /^W[0-9]{4}@[0-9]{2}\.[0-9]{2} \S.*$/, so you're still free to use it in your own titles, including EtEs.

How to feedback

Much appreciated. ✌🏼

See AC.ID notation. ↩
You can imagine these as .md files, but I won't write out the file extension. ↩
If we want to name category 10 we need to use frontmatter inside this note. Unless specified, A0 categories are named Management of area $number. ↩
System-management zeros not shown. 11.00 is a child of 11/; 10.00 is a child of 10/. ↩
For example, a YAML block at the top of a Markdown file. ↩
You're also free to duplicate area 10-19 Life admin for Belinda, giving her her own system. The reason many prefer EtE is that this new system of hers is going to be mostly empty. EtE is simpler and requires less management. ↩
A P5 being one priority level below a P4, the lowest priority task. Ref. T&PM episode 'The P1-P4 system'. ↩

WwJD: Spend less time doing boring admin (video)

Johnny — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 06:22:15 GMT

A 'Working with Johnny.Decimal' video.

This video shows how my system helps me calmly complete two simple, infrequent tasks. They're far enough apart that I forget how to do them, and they've previously caused more disruption than necessary. One of the benefits of Johnny.Decimal is that it takes the edge off my computer use, turning it into a neat room where I can work efficiently and spend less time doing boring admin.

WwJD: This is what Johnny.Decimal was designed for (video)

Johnny — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 04:58:04 GMT

A 'Working with Johnny.Decimal' video.

Managing complex tasks is not just possible, it's easy with Johnny.Decimal. Everything has a home, and you keep a simple index that lets you find it again, and everything looks the same no matter what app you're using.

This week at JDHQ – 2026-07-13

Johnny — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 22:53:06 GMT

Originally sent to the mailing list on Monday 2026-07-13.

I've been finding it difficult, after taking a month off circumnavigating Taiwan by rail – counter-clockwise, starting from and returning to Kaohsiung City, great trip, recommended – to get back into the flow of things. Feeling distracted and without focus, I went back to an old friend: Cal Newport's Deep Work.

It holds up to perhaps its third reading, and was exactly what I needed. Because its advice is so simple, really, and so obviously true. In order to do good work – work that you're proud of, work that will be noticed – you have to be deliberate. You have to recognise the many distractions of the world and do something about them.

Cal gives the sort of advice that's easy to implement badly: plan your day; don't browse crap online; disconnect at night. But – as I discovered the last few weeks – none of this works as a half measure. A day half planned wasn't planned. Only browsing some crap still leaves your brain a mess. So I'm going all-in: here's my calendar.

The specific problem that I'm trying to solve is the one where you work all day, get to the end, look back, and think … well I was busy, but what did I actually achieve? When you allow yourself to bounce from task to task all day, it's easy to fall into the trap of busywork. There are only two of us in this little business: there's no time for busywork.

Practically, this schedule stops me from drifting away from a task. Those large chunks of pink are labelled either 'Product' (the making or improving of) or 'Marketing' (like sending this email). Figuring out either of those things is hard, and the natural tendency is to start something, do it for half an hour, and drift away from it. And when I say 'natural tendency', it really is: in Willpower, Baumeister and Tierney explain how our willpower is a finite resource, consumed throughout the day. But there are things you can do to help strengthen it, and this is one of them.

I've done spells of 'hyper-scheduling' in the past. It only works when you get to set your own schedule, which rules out a lot of jobs. But if you can, it's worth a try. I'll report my progress.

'The Work System'

Work has started on 'The Work System', aka a 'coping mechanism' for those of you stuck in some corporate situation. We know you probably can't reconfigure the SharePoint, but we should be able to give you something that helps.

Lucy has spent the week in discovery (ref. Workshop area 20-29) and we just reviewed what she has so far. It's nowhere near ready to share, but here's a teaser at how much we're working with.

We'd love to know what help people need 'at work'. Here's a short survey, every question optional: tell us as much or as little as you like.

This survey link will expire around 13th August 2026.

Typeform survey: Johnny.Decimal 'at work'

Giving structure to ideas

On the topic of structure, we're still trying to figure out how best to give structure to our many, many ideas.

(Image made with tldraw which I've just started using and am enjoying a lot.)

Ideas occur, and are saved mostly as simple lists of text in notes that we label 'P5 Ideas'. This extends the task and project management course's P1-P4 system of prioritisation. A 'P5 idea' is just that: a very low priority thing; not even a task. We have a lot of these ideas through our JDex. Let me see if I can … okay, that explains it! A quick grep across my 29 notes named 'P5 ideas' reveals 894 bullet points. That's a lot to try to make sense of (which is why we mostly can't).

We've got a bunch more stuff saved in the still-needs-a-proper-name 'imaginarium aka megablog'. I try to keep ideas out of Things; they might start life there, captured in my inbox, but at morning review I move them out to a P5 note. An idea isn't a task; don't dilute your task system with them.

I just started reading Bob Doto's A System for Writing – the first time I've really learned about Zettelkasten. (Loving the book so far.) ZK's similarities with our 'imaginarium' are striking: the tracking of many granular ideas, loosely connected, in service of surfacing broader ideas, such that content ideas (writing, for Bob – any content, for us) are revealed and can be planned and produced.

I've yet to find the right tool for this job. It's obviously not 894 bullet points spread across 29 text files. In the imaginarium video you'll see me using Airtable. It's too slow, and not visual enough. I need a database crossed with a whiteboard, and I think it needs to be local to be fast enough. I want to feel like Tom Cruise (eww).

I'll take a look at Notion later, but don't think it'll give me the moving shapes around on a canvas I'm looking for. I don't think Obsidian's Canvas will be enough, and this thing needs an actual relational database. Airtable has proven that much. If you've got any other app ideas, I'm all ears.

When we've figured this one out I'll write it up. I can see it becoming a mini-course: how to have, track, and make use of all your ideas, in the specific context of running a creative business.

Recording the 'projects' update to T&PM this week

As noted in the past, the 'projects' half of the 'task and project management' course needs an update. This is the result of 6+ months of thinking since releasing the course, and reflects how we run our own projects. There was a preview video the other week.

These lessons are mostly planned and I'll be recording them this week and next.

SBS Zoom sessions

The Small Business System Zoom sessions continue, one a week, alternating Tuesday/Thursday across timezones. They're 'intimate', shall we say, with just a handful of regulars so far. But the discussion is interesting, and we always learn something. It'd be good to see you there – and don't worry, if you want to lurk with your camera off, that's okay.

That's all for now. As always, we're here to help. Let us know what you need – just reply to this email.

Purpose, mission, values

Johnny — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 02:00:00 GMT

After discussing this at the last small business meeting, we've thought about and written down our purpose, mission, and values. I'll put a copy here, and add them to their proper home which is our policies page. If it's much later than July 2026 when you read this, you should check there for the latest version. This post won't change.

With thanks to Don and Jeff for the interesting discussion. Don kindly shared a section of his company manual with us, which really helped.

Purpose

Why do we exist?

In the 1980s, it was possible to live your life without using a computer. You might have made furniture by hand and driven it to a store that sold it for you. You paid the road toll with coins and received a paper receipt, your invoice was hand-typed and recorded in a ledger, and your tax return was filled in with a pen. This generated a small handful of physical documentation which was easily managed using a concertina folder: a basic skill you had been taught at school.

The volume of information was manageable. You could find anything, quickly and easily.

Today, that same carpenter – whose job has not changed – needs online accounts for her eToll account and the invoicing software that interfaces with the furniture store and her accountant. Both of these send important documents to her Gmail, which is full of transactional email from the 142 other organisations that she routinely deals with, and the social media accounts that she needs to maintain. Parking her 1982 Land Cruiser outside the furniture store now requires an app.

To help her manage this, her computer provides tools no more sophisticated than Create New Folder. It allows her to save anything anywhere she wants. It positively encourages the duplication of information. At no point was she given any training in these systems, which change constantly and without warning. The people who understand them charge hundreds of dollars an hour.

The volume of information is unmanageable. Nobody can find anything any more. This is stressful and inefficient. Computers were meant to make our lives easier. In this regard, they have done the opposite.

Mission

What are we going to do about it?

We help people manage their information. This information is mostly, but not exclusively, on a computer.

We do this using the Johnny.Decimal system. It's a simple way to organise any information. It provides:

A simple structure that uses numbers instead of the alphabet.
An index of your content that you manage.
Training, software, and support.

We will be the training you never got: we'll show you how to store things so that you can find them again.

We can't make it so that our carpenter doesn't have to use a computer. And that's not our goal: computers are more efficient. Filing your taxes online is better than doing them with a pen.¹

Our mission is to make it so that when she sits down in front of her computer, it is with a sense of calm, not dread. We want her to be able to find her stuff with more confidence, and less stress.

Values

How will we behave while we do it?

Johnny.Decimal is two humans: Johnny and his partner Lucy. We have no desire to grow. Becoming a big corporation wouldn't make us happy. We quit our jobs to do this because we love it; if we stop loving it, then what was the point?

This makes us a deeply 'Personal Business'.² You're dealing with us, and we with you.

We love the satisfaction that comes from helping an individual to be more organised. We love our community. We love the sense of worth that comes from creating something good using our own brains.

We don't seek to be incredibly good 'at business'. We don't follow the same old (dark) patterns, the same old (sleazy) techniques. Surely this means we earn less than we could, that we remain smaller than we might otherwise have grown. We're okay with that.

Because we, personally, seek something simple: we'd like to be able to buy a house and have chickens in the back yard. We think we can achieve that by making good things that people like, and selling them for an honest price. Let us know how we're doing.

Your values

How would we like you to behave towards us?

Company values statements typically don't turn it around to face the customer. But this is our company so we'll do whatever we like. ;-)

I spoke above about how we're proud to be a 'Personal Business'. But please remember that we are still a business. This is how we earn our living.

There is a curious behaviour that I have observed over the years.

Everyone seeks to escape 'the rat race'. This is idolised as the highest form of being: to quit one's job, to 'go indie'.
So one quits one's job and 'goes indie', forfeiting the steady wage.
Now 'a creator', one needs to sell something in order to pay the rent and eat. (Capitalism! Who knew?)
People react to this 'sell-out'. How dare you sell the product of your mind? Information should be free!

My ask of you is this: notice this reaction in your own mind. Be charitable in your assumptions.³ If in doubt, ask the individual before posting about it on social media. We all need to earn money. You might do it by going to work. We do it by selling stuff online.

We're yet to be sold on the utility of an app over coins when paying for parking. ↩
Are.na / Personal Business by Charles Broskoski. It's a great article, please read it. ↩
Hanlon's razor providing a useful heuristic: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." ↩

Once again, we failed to focus

Johnny — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 01:00:00 GMT

Editorial note: This one was drafted a while back, and things have changed. I'll publish it mostly as originally written; see the adjacent posts for more context.

We've done it again. And we're sorry – Lucy in particular hates unfinished business – but we started a thing that we shouldn't have, so we're going to cancel it. ~~Two things! Those~~ That thing being our 'Everyday Obsidian' ~~and 'Online security essentials'~~ mini-courses.

Update: We're keeping the security thing for now. I have ideas how it can be an important part of how we help small business. I leave it here to show how these decisions aren't easy.

Once again this is a textbook case of not focusing on what's important. As a very small business, we need to guard our time. We started these things without really thinking them through. At the time they were a welcome distraction: we'd just come out of a months-long zone of focus, merging the two websites. ~~And I really would love to do that online security thing one day. But in hindsight, they were wrong for now.~~

What's our purpose?

We mock 'mission statements', but their value just became apparent to me. We've never written down exactly what it is we're here for: why do we exist?

We still haven't written that down, but if I think out loud it's something like: people need help organising stuff, and we have an interesting method of doing that, so we should try to help them.

Update: I drafted this post weeks ago. Since then we've written down our purpose, mission, and values.

Do explaining Obsidian's features or helping you not get hacked online fit into that? The former, kinda, maybe. But I'm not even that good at Obsidian! You want Obsidian advice there are tens of thousands of hours of that already on YouTube. The latter – having thought on it, I see a place where that fits into what we do.

When we're back at work later this week this is one of the first things we'll be doing: writing down short, practical, human answers to the following questions.

Why do we exist? (Purpose)
What are we going to do about it? (Mission)
How do we behave while we do it? (Values)

Use this as a filter

I think the reason we mock large corporations' mission statements is that they feel like platitudes that someone's had engraved on a plate and then never read again. Certainly that's how I felt at basically every job I had.¹

So how do we make sure that these statements, once codified, serve their purpose? I haven't implemented this yet, but it feels simple enough.

Create a 'new project' template in our JDex.
This template has a checkbox that asks you to consider the project in the context of this just-documented purpose, mission, and values. Does it align with them?

Of course you need to actually give some thought to this whenever you create a new project. Boxes like this can be something you check without thought once it becomes routine. This is something that the two of us should actively discuss together.

This is a work-in-progress. I'll report back.

Most such 'mission statements' can be summed up as: think different and act bravely. Well I tried that and let me tell you, that is not what your corporate middle-manager wants. ↩

SBS Zoom minutes for 2026-07-02

Lucy — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 05:29:11 GMT

Thoughts on purpose, mission, and vision statements

In yesterday's Small Business Zoom call, as well as continuing our system-review experiment,¹ we had a chat about purpose, mission, and vision statements. In the corporate world these are often cheesy and pointless, but are they useful in a small business? We don't have this kind of thing yet so we're looking for advice.

Don² showed us a one-page statement from their office manual that is a kind of mash-up of what they do, why, and how. It's clearly written in normal, human words, and conveys a lot of information and personality.

On the first read I totally get what they do for a living, their values, and what would be expected of me as an employee. There's also a "short" and "really short" version of this page that, I'm guessing, is handy for marketing and other low-word-count situations.

And if you have staff, his advice for writing internal policies was to keep them simple and clear so they don't need to be policed.³ Drinking at work? No. Dress code? Wear clothes. Understood!

Writing these statements can help you define and carve out your niche.

Jeff⁴ told us how he's been working on his statements with a couple of other local business owners. He said it's been a worthwhile exercise for a few reasons. Jeff's family business has been running for about 10 years and it's given him a fresh focus on what they do and why. And it's helped him "define their niche" more clearly by thinking about all the reasons they're different from their competitors.

At JDHQ, we've been wondering if we could use this type of statement to help us make better decisions around time management. Before throwing ourselves head first into a new project or product, can we use it to stop and think:

How does it serve the business?
Does it align with our values and goals?
Is it a good use of our limited time or should we park the idea?

We'll have a go at writing something soon, which will be filed in 11.31 Internal policies. And we'll keep Don and Jeff's thoughts in mind. Although I already know that the dress code will be Uniqlo.

If you have the Small Business System, the next call for this fortnight is Tuesday the 7 July⁵ - email us your questions, mission statements, or cries for help!

Where over the course of a year, we all commit to touching every part of our Small Business System, filing and neatening as we go. Here's a video that talks about the idea. Email Johnny if you'd like a copy of the Baserow prototype. ↩
Old Structures Engineering. ↩
On this note, Johnny came across this quote this morning: “Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.” Aka The Hock Principle. ↩
Lovett Sundries. ↩
Subscribe to the events calendar to see upcoming calls. ↩

Thinking out loud about project management

Johnny — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:40:26 GMT

This is a working draft for figuring out the end of our Task and Project Management course.

I've been thinking a lot about project management for the last 6 months and I'm thinking out loud here, nothing is set in stone. However, me and Lucy are using the concepts mentioned and it's working really well in our business.

Overall, there's nothing radically new in terms of project management principles. But how can these principles work alongside a Johnny.Decimal system to help us complete very-small or very-big projects successfully?

This is a rough-sketch, draft-rehearsal for the final project management modules in the course. We weren't going to publish it, but what the hey, maybe it will help someone or generate practical feedback.

Registration review: Taiwan

Johnny — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 06:53:29 GMT

Vehicle registration plates provide a ubiquitous numbering scheme that's easy to enjoy: just walk around the streets and pay attention. Each country offers its own variant of the form, so in this series I will review each country's registration plates as I encounter them.

These reviews are not scientific and should not be quoted as authoritative.

Introduction

Taiwan's scheme was refreshed in 2012. This review only considers the post-refresh scheme. Older plates are still very common.

Schema

A simple, consistent scheme: AAA-0000. The usual suspects are omitted from the letter prefix – O, I – but Q remains, as we'll see below.

Absurdly, the number 4 is no longer used. I thought this was user preference, as I did see one in the wild. But it seems that the user preference was so strong, they elected to remove it. The plate I saw must have been from an older range.

This broad omission of 4 is common across Asia – it sounds like the word 'death' – as is the equally absurd omission of the West's superstition, 13.¹ (Combined with the fact that the ground floor is represented as 1 means that a room on the 14th floor isn't quite as high as one might hope.)

The scheme allows a theoretical maximum of 24^3 × 9^4 = 90,699,264 plates. Given Taiwan's population of 23.5m people this is a touch under 4 cars each. This doesn't feel like enough, but the most recent plate I saw began CCD indicating that about 10% of plates have been issued in 14 years. So we don't need to worry about them running out.

Special cases

There are special cases for electric vehicles E__-____, rentals R__-____, and so on. I appreciate this additional information being encoded in the plate.

They've also removed a whole bunch of three-letter words from the pool so bad luck if you wanted GAY-0000. Inexplicably, ANT is disallowed. Because that's … an ant?

Issue date

The scheme encodes issue date gracefully: it's pretty obvious by looking at cars that they started at AAA and they're currently somewhere in the early-to-mid-C__s.

This avoids issues of specifically encoding a year into the plate, as we'll see the next time I visit the UK. It also provides a free street game: find the latest plate!

Region awareness

There appears to be no region encoding in the plate. Taiwan is a relatively small island so this probably isn't necessary, but I do like knowing where someone is from.

Schema: 4/5

Pro: simple, obvious, and consistent.
Con: no regional coding, the 4 thing, and it feels punitive to have excluded ANT.

Design

A simple plate, stamped metal, black on white in its standard form. I prefer an embossing over a cheaper-looking laminate so top marks here.

The typeface is slightly condensed which looks nice on the plate. But I like a plate to fill the space given for it on the vehicle, and a narrow plate rarely does that.

Theoretically that's a - dash separating the letters and numbers, but it's shown as a dot on most (all?) plates. I would have stretched that out a little, at least on cars where there's plenty of room.

Points for a nice `Q`

If you're going to use a Q you really have to make sure it looks like a Q. Taiwan is a clear pass in this category.

Markings at the bottom

Apparently they moved the screw holes exclusively to the top to allow for those markings, barely visible, at the bottom. I wouldn't have bothered.

Design: 3/5

Pro: stamped metal. A nice typeface.
Con: no other adornments. Kinda plain. Doesn't fill the space.

Summary

Overall Taiwan scores 7/10: not bad for our first entrant. It's an inoffensive plate that does the job without trying to get in your face. I just wish that they'd put a touch more into its design.

13 is not excluded from the registration scheme, to be clear. I refer to its common omission from building floor numbers. ↩

A realisation on the nature of information storage

Johnny — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 03:34:24 GMT

In opening up the ID for the topic of this afternoon's Small Business Zoom session – 33.22 Annual SBS TGIF cycle – I had one of those tiny niggles of annoyance that comes from not being able to instantly recall the location of a thing.¹

Moments later the ID was found, and with it a deep realisation about the nature of systems like Johnny.Decimal: that, at the very least, they force you to store your information somewhere.

This is best demonstrated with the counter-point: storing your information nowhere. By which I mean, on your Desktop. Or just in a floating text document that you never dare close. Or in a chat window, or in one of 40 SharePoint folders whose locations you can never recall.

Forcing you to choose an actual place – an ID, that you had to create – is a touch annoying. It's extra work: I've never pretended that it was 'free' from a mental perspective.

But, when trying to find this thing just now, there was a baseline sense of comfort: the thing is somewhere.

I'm very impatient. ↩

In need of numbers?

Johnny — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 02:32:49 GMT

It took me a while to figure out what this even was. So much potential…

The Filing Association of New York

Johnny — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 08:53:20 GMT

Via Don, news of the annual meeting of the Filing Association of New York. The after-dinner at Gonfaroni's – closed for 96 years, sadly – sounds like a hoot.

Of course this is charming and quaint, but it makes obvious something that I think about all the time: the fact that, in the past, people used to actively work on the problem of filing. It was a profession; there was a local Association that met regularly.

These filing associations turned into organisations like ARMA, the Association of Records Managers and Administrators. So it's not like we totally forgot how to file stuff. But – at least in my professional experience – it's not something the normal office worker is ever exposed to.

And when filing is something you're forced to do, it tends to be in service of checking a compliance box. Those of us who've had the pleasure of using an enterprise 'document management system' – looking at you, HP TRIM – know that they rarely make a thing easier to find. They just make your mistakes harder to correct.¹

Yet it remains the situation that the average office worker is the one creating volumes of stuff; this worker being given little to no training in the still-essential field of filing. No wonder our systems are such a mess.

No wonder nobody can find anything any more.

Every single such system hosting a folder named z_deleted.² ↩
Addendum: In reading the linked PDF, which I encourage you to at least browse if you've never known the horror of a corporate DMS, I draw your attention to the screenshot on page 42: zDeleted BCS Terms.

This behaviour is so pervasive it's in the training manual. ↩

This week at JDHQ – 2026-06-15

Johnny — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 04:55:55 GMT

Originally sent to the mailing list.

As promised (to ourselves), we've had a bit of time off here in Taiwan. So this is just a quick note to remind you that the first of the weekly Small Business sessions is this Thursday 18th June at 16:00 +8.

That's morning if you're in Europe, daytime for EMEA and into Asia, and evening in Oceania. The session next Tuesday 23rd June at 06:00 +8 is nicer for those of you in the Americas.

Zoom links for both of those are on the SBS events page at JDHQ – subscribe to the calendar there for the most up-to-date information.

We'll be kicking off the annual cycle with something easy, just to test out the process: your travel administration and records. As a reminder, the calendar has been designed to touch every aspect of your business over the course of the year. It's a light check-in to make sure that everything's in order and that you haven't forgotten, say, to renew your company's annual travel insurance policy.

I'll be sending those of you who asked for the Baserow template a link in the next couple of days. We'll go through it in the session so there's no pre-work required.

Of course if you're not already in the Small Business System, there's still time to upgrade your account. See you Thursday.

Hobbling my app launcher

Johnny — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 01:47:30 GMT

I've been using an app launcher/switcher since at least 2011 – the date my Alfred v1 licence was created in 1Password – and for unknown years before that, when Quicksilver was the new thing.

App launchers do just that: they help you launch apps. Why grab the mouse and shuffle on over to the Dock when your fingers are already on the keyboard? We've had this capability for decades: Windows 3.0's File Manager had a File → Run… menu, with Windows 95 adding the keyboard shortcut Win-R. From there, type a thing and it'll launch.¹ Alfred, Raycast and their ilk just do this faster and better.

Speed ≠ efficiency

Lately, I've noticed these tools getting in the way. I have Raycast bound to Cmd-Space and testing shows that I can switch from whatever I'm doing to anything else in 150ms: essentially instantly.²

This sounds like a benefit. But when I can switch to anything, instantly, that's what I find myself doing, and way too often. It's like all friction has been removed, and what remains isn't good. What remains is a slippery mess.

The other behaviour I've noticed is an almost manic switching between two apps. Safari, code, Safari, code. Flick-flick-flick between the two. My fingers are so used to these keyboard sequences I feel like I do them subconsciously! I end up in an app and wonder, what am I doing here? (I was previously using the builtin Cmd-Tab switcher for this, but I broke that habit by turning off the keyboard shortcut.³)

Reintroducing friction

Fortunately, Raycast makes it easy to disable certain apps. Because I don't want to quit Raycast entirely: it's far too useful. I use it as an emoji 👋🏼 and Unicode symbol ▷ ■ ◁ picker. At the former it's way better than macOS' builtin feature, and at the latter it fills a gap that the OS simply doesn't provide.⁴ It's also my clipboard manager, my snippet expander, and the list goes on.⁵

But you can turn off its ability to launch an app by just unchecking the Enabled box in Preferences → Extensions for that app. So that's what I've done for Safari and Discord, to start. As I notice other apps that are distraction magnets, I'll disable those.

Instead, it's back to the trackpad. Swipe-swipe-swipe to the Dock I'll go, and I'll click the icon and it'll take about a second and that already feels like an eternity. And my brain is enjoying that.

In the early versions it wasn't quite this simple. Typing excel won't launch Excel, for example. You need to know the full name of the executable, excel.exe. In modern versions of Windows you should be using the newer search features to do this, although Win-R still brings up trusty Run. ↩
I recorded my screen as I invoked Raycast, typed s, and hit return. This switches me to Safari. Raycast is only on screen for 7 frames of the 50 frames/sec recording. ↩
Using the wonderful Supercharge by Sindre Sorhus. The setting Tweaks → Disable Command+Tab app switcher exists because I asked him to add it. :-) ↩
For emoji, assign a keyboard shortcut to the Raycast builtin feature Search Emoji & Symbols. I use Ctrl-Opt-I.

For Unicode, install the extension Unicode Symbols Search. I bind that to Ctrl-Opt-U. ↩
Bind the builtin Clipboard History to Ctrl-Opt-C. ↩

SwissMicros calculators

Johnny — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 01:29:10 GMT

I have no use for a desk calculator, but as soon as I have a desk again I'm buying a SwissMicros DM41L.

Figure 0217A. SwissMicros DM41L.

If you need scientific, the DM42n has you covered.

Figure 0217B. SwissMicros DM42n.

Identifier: Taiwanese survey markers

Johnny — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 01:59:05 GMT

I first saw this sort of identifier years ago in Melbourne and, once I dig out the old photos, I'll do a retrospective post. I was obsessed with them long before Johnny.Decimal was an idea. It's quite obvious that I have a certain type of brain.

But right now I'm in Taiwan, and what a lovely surprise to find this in the pavement in the coastal city of Hualien.

Figure 0216A. Hualien survey mark HK33.

That is a survey marker and now that you've seen one, you'll find them everywhere. I'm not sure how standard it is to offer a public lookup for these things – Melbourne has one – but even if you do find a site, the software tends to be … shall we say 'specialised'? By which I mean, from the 1990s, and hideous. (Usually some flavour of ArcGIS.)

And, as I'm learning, there isn't necessarily one type of marker and one city website that references it. Here in Taipei there seem to be different data sets for the departments of 'Land Administration' vs. 'Urban Development'.

All of which is to say that I tried getting links to these markers, and failed. So just enjoy the photos. ;-)

Figure 0216B. Taipei survey mark 114148.

Figure 0216C. Taipei survey mark HA173.

Deciding to work for myself

Lucy — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 04:06:48 GMT

Lucy here. I thought I'd try writing about little things I've noticed about being self-employed/having a small business. In case it helps anyone else who has, or is about to, take the leap. We'll see how this goes.

I started doing extra freelance work early in my career to supplement my salary. So I gained a bit of experience at having a 'side hustle', although no one called it that yet. This continued for about 5 years alongside salaried jobs. But when I think about seriously deciding to work for myself, it's a specific time.

I had a decade's worth of in-house experience with smaller local companies and large global networks. So I knew what working for other people was like. And I was tired. I knew I wanted a change and was contemplating going thermonuclear - retraining to something totally different.

I don't hate what I do

Fortunately, before enrolling in an expensive multi-year course I had a thought. I decided to commit to 100% self-employment in my current field, and to set myself up as a proper business. After a few months I had a revelation: I don't hate what I do. I just didn't really enjoy who I used to work for and the way I had to work.¹

Which was a relief because retraining and starting from scratch is a lot of effort. I'm not saying don't retrain, I fully endorse new adventures. But for me, I'm glad I gave my career a second chance with self-employment. I didn't lose my hard-earned experience and contacts. And my new-found autonomy helped me enjoy work, without all the workplace stuff that drives people crazy getting in the way.

There's not really any groundbreaking advice here, just some moral support. If you're good at something, earn a decent wage from it, but are sick of it, self-employment might be worth a try before walking away from everything. You can still enrol in that jet-ski-instructor course and make a gradual change if it's your true calling. ;-)

If you're reading this and you used to be my manager and we liked each other, you know what I mean – it's the whole 'big workplace' thing that I wasn't good at. If you used to be my manager and you got drunk in your lunch hour every day, you were part of the problem. ↩

This week at JDHQ – 2026-06-01

Johnny — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 02:19:05 GMT

Originally sent to the mailing list.

As we prepare for a Big Move tomorrow, I can feel the energy levels wane. This is how we work these days, our life measured in phases: we Move To A Place, there's a time of Great Disruption, we get settled, then we Work Hard And Do Little Else For A Long Time. Coming to the end of that final phase – let's call it 10 weeks of 6-days-a-week – is a relief. It's needed.

Tomorrow we fly to Taiwan. So we'll spend a week Figuring Out The New Place: where to get a healthy, cheap breakfast. Where to buy the things we couldn't bring with us: scissors, aerosols. How to get around; where to walk; where to work. It's fun and, faced with a new place, I typically walk around wide-eyed with wonder as Lucy steers me out of the path of traffic.

This is also the one-year anniversary of us living on the road. It's both exhilarating, and exhausting. So we might stretch out next week and have a bit of a holiday. We need to see and walk in trees and grass and birds; take small regional trains to towns with no attractions. If this email doesn't turn up next Monday, that's why.

Small Business System annual calendar

The big news this week is that we're introducing an annual 'maintenance calendar' for SBS: the idea is that you 'touch' every part of your business over the course of a year, just giving it a look. Tidy it up, make sure that the essentials are there. Did your compliance certificate expire without you realising? Now's the time to spot that and fix it up.

This shouldn't take more than 45 minutes every couple of weeks, but by this time next year you'll have a really nice awareness of the entire business, and a comfort that can only come from knowing that you've at least looked at it all.

To support this, there are now weekly sessions in the SBS events calendar that run in perpetuity. They alternate Tuesday/Thursday (in my Asian timezone) and morning/evening each week. The first is on Thursday June 18th – this is the slot that's best for the Europeans and Asia/Oceania, where it's the morning/afternoon of that day. The following week's Tuesday 23rd slot works best for the Americas, where it's afternoon/evening on Monday 22nd. Over the course of a month, there should be a slot to suit everyone.

I'll be using the maintenance calendar to drive these meetings and, of course, you can bring any ad-hoc questions. See the blog post for more information, and let me know if you'd like to be in my trial group for the tracker shown.

What we did last week

Planned and launched the SBS calendar.
Recommendation: PikaPods.
New JDU playlist: Organising our small business.

Announcing the SBS annual maintenance calendar

Johnny — Fri, 29 May 2026 05:15:53 GMT

Evolving the idea of 'TGIF' (Thank God I Filed it) from last year, we're launching the annual Small Business System 'maintenance calendar'.¹

The idea of TGIF was that if you 'touch' your system, tidying it up a smidge, but you do that regularly – on a Friday afternoon, say – then you'll be in a much better shape than if you hadn't done that. Your life will be neater and less stressful.

SBS, spread over the year

The SBS contains everything that every small business needs to operate. So if we group it up into ~25 pieces and spread those out over the year such that they get a fortnight each, and then TGIF each of them in that fortnight, after a year we'll have touched every part of the business.

And if we do that together, on the now-weekly Zoom sessions that I've scheduled, we can keep each other honest and motivated.

Get the tracker

I've set this up as a Baserow (online database) template. If you're an SBS member, email me and I'll work directly with the first handful of respondents. If this proves popular I'll build it into JDHQ.

This isn't 'doing the work'

To be clear, I'm not asking you to do any actual work – say, all of your 21 Products design – in this fortnight. Only that you check in with that part of your system, and to make sure that:

Your files are neat.
- Archive old stuff. Make sure everything's named well.
- Find stuff you know is missing and put it there.
Your JDex is in order.
- Archive old entries.
- Deal with those big notes that you've been putting off.

I imagine this might take 45 minutes? Really not long at all.

Starts on June 9th

I've scheduled Zoom sessions every Tuesday/Thursday morning/evening, alternating across weeks, from June 9th in perpetuity.

The first group – chosen to be an easy one – is due Friday June 26th. It's 15.10, 15.40+ Travel admin & records. See you on the call, where I'll explain in more detail.

Here's a 6-minute video with more details.

Working title. As always, suggestions welcome. ↩

New playlist: 'Organising our small business'

Tue, 26 May 2026 07:55:14 GMT

We've added a new playlist to JDU: Organising our small business.

These videos show real-life examples of how we run our business with Johnny.Decimal. It's what we do every day at work. New ones will be added as we think of things that you might find useful.

Recommendation: PikaPods

Johnny — Tue, 26 May 2026 01:52:28 GMT

I've mentioned PikaPods twice before. Once in the context of my mailing list software that I host there, and again singing the praises of their support. But here's a proper mini-review, because it's a service that can save your small business a lot of time.

Let's say there's some software you want to run. This post was prompted by them mailing me to say that they now host SuiteCRM, which I've never used but sure looks like fancy CRM software and might be exactly what you need. It's open source, so you could install it yourself by simply:

Provisioning a server. You'll need PHP, Apache, and MySQL running on there. Make sure you lock down remote SSH and don't log in as root!
Downloading SuiteCRM and setting permissions with commands like sudo chown -R www-data:www-data ..
Installing then configuring the database on localhost.
Setting up a cron job using crontab -e -u www-data.

🫠

Now, I understood all that. And I'm not knocking the SuiteCRM team or their instructions: they look really clear. But I was born with a computer between my teeth and it's all I've ever known. You? Maybe not.

How's this instead.

At PikaPods, search for SuiteCRM and click run your own.
Choose whether to run it in the EU or US.
Choose a username and password.
Click Add Pod.

That's it. Your pod is now running at a URL like strong-chicken.pikapod.net. Just browse there and use it.

The leads are weak.

Sounds expensive?

It is as cheap as chips! This pod would cost US$3/month to run. And get this: they're billed by the hour, and you can turn them off! This means it's basically free to install a thing and play with it for a while to see if you like it.

I've already deleted this one. That little experiment cost me $0.00415. (Not kidding.)

Beware: this isn't quite SaaS

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is what you're used to. Gmail is SaaS: you don't care about any of the technical details. You can't care about the details: Google won't let you.

This isn't quite that. You still have to think about your own backups, for example. That's mostly it, but that's important. Each Pod can back itself up to an S3 bucket, and if you need help with that, let me know.

If you want to 'self-host' apps in the simplest way possible for a very reasonable price, I can't recommend PikaPods highly enough.

100 email list unsubscriptions is a good thing

Johnny — Mon, 25 May 2026 04:31:21 GMT

Since sending last week's this week at JDHQ, my email subscriber numbers have gone down by about 100.

I see this as a positive. What's the point having a couple of thousand people on an email list if none of them actually care what you're writing? What would be the benefit in trying to widen this audience by … what, just writing more generically? Writing less about the stuff that I'm actually doing and more about stuff that might 'drive engagement'?

90 engaged people are far more interesting to me than 100 who just never bothered to click 'unsubscribe'.

This week at JDHQ – 2026-05-25

Johnny — Mon, 25 May 2026 04:28:33 GMT

Originally sent to the mailing list.

Last week's staff meeting and then careful management of projects in Things paid off. Lucy often notes that, as small business owners, one of the primary burdens is that you no longer have someone telling you what to do.

As in, sometimes it's nice when someone just tells you what to do! That's easy, right? Turn up to work and just do what you're told, for money, for a week. Terrific. Well that's not how life is when you run your own business – which is the dream, of course – but it's a double-edged dream-sword. Now, as well as doing all the work, you have to make the hard decisions. It can be very easy to just float through a week without doing that, and to feel busy, but to not really achieve much.

So planning and our Monday-morning meeting, which we just had again, is good. (This is obvious. I'll say it anyway.)

What we did last week

We have a new home page for the first time ever.
- Realising that 'the Johnny.Decimal universe' is now much more than the system of numbers, we've made the signed-out new visitor homepage more of an introduction to us.
- johnnydecimal.com/homepage will land you there regardless of your signed-in status.
- I also built one of those 5-email onboarding sequences that I've always avoided. But I heard from people – thanks, Michael – that, done well, they can be really helpful.
- And I think I've done this one well. ~~You can see the 5 steps starting at jdu/welcome/01-install-your-folders. (The emails are mostly one liners pointing you to this sequence of pages.)~~ I've updated it – the emails now only exist as emails. Why make you visit the site if the text is already in your inbox? And now there are 3 not 5.
Launched a new mini-series Everyday Obsidian.
- Lucy's fairly new to Obsidian, and it's a big, complex app.
- In this series I'll show Lucy practical everyday tips for Obsidian. This is 'how normal people use it every day', not 'how to become an Obsidian guru'.
Launched a new mini-series Online security essentials.
- We've been wanting to do this one for a while. It's a little passion project of ours.
- This is the basics of staying safe online, and is something we hope you can send to your non-nerd loved ones. We're each recording it with our dad in mind.
Video:
- The power of process in small business.
- (Will turn this into a playlist at JDU shortly.)
Blog:

What we're working on this week

Continuing the two series as noted above.
We've put 21.30 Learn with Lucy - the command line on hold as we're at capacity.
No Zoom sessions this week – I'm putting a shape to some plans, but we're moving cross-continentally next week which is always a big disruption, so I'm not planning anything new for this week or next.
- (If you live in Taiwan, let us know!)
Did a lot of work last week on 21.14 Task & Project Management update.
- This one definitely benefits from me sitting on it for a while.
- I'm using these techniques actively myself, so the longer I do that, the more sure I am of the final output.
- I'm loving my Things project setup.
- Will be putting out a first draft this week.
In the background we continue to load up the imaginarium with our back-catalogue.

Startup routine

Johnny — Sun, 24 May 2026 02:04:19 GMT

We've both been doing our start-the-day routine for a solid 6 months now. This is the opening of Things, the doing of our morning reviews, the clearing of the inbox, and finally lining up the day's tasks.

This sounds like a chore, but this morning Lucy voiced a feeling that I share: that this routine has become a great comfort. "It's like the scene where they start up the airplane by flicking on all the switches", she said.

That's exactly what it's like. You sit down and strap in. You know a whole bunch of stuff is coming at you but, for now, your job is just to run through this checklist, powering up the various subsystems of your mind. It really is a lovely way to start the day. (I'd record this process for you but it's Sunday. My review tasks come round Monday to Friday so there's not much to show today. Next time I get a good one I'll put it on camera.)

It also put me in mind of this lovely startup sequence. That's my brain in the morning … just a bit at a time … go on … you'll get there …

New miniseries: 'Online security essentials'

Fri, 22 May 2026 06:57:10 GMT

We added the first episodes in a new JDU miniseries: Online security essentials.

We've been wanting to do this one for a while. This is the basics of staying safe online, and is something we hope you can send to your non-nerd loved ones. We're each recording it with our dad in mind.

This one will also be posted on the YouTube channel for maximum reach.

Going to try shutting down my laptop every night

Johnny — Thu, 21 May 2026 13:00:38 GMT

When you have the safety net of 'never close anything', you don't really have to think about where a thing goes. You can just leave things open in a window, unsaved, hoping that someone else will think about it at some point in the future.

Starting today I'm going to quit every app and shut down my laptop at the end of the night.

Will I find it all again in the morning?

Context switching

Johnny — Thu, 21 May 2026 12:21:48 GMT

Still on a quest to figure out the right pattern for work logs (also here and this episode of the Task & Project Management course), I've been tracking what I'm doing in a really simple Baserow table for a couple of days.

It's just thing, started, and finished. If an item isn't finished, it groups up to the top (not shown here), so I have a simple list of stuff I'm still doing. It's been really helpful and I'll keep doing it. (Idea is to template this out as something you can duplicate.)

That's me working on 21 separate tasks, across the breadth of my business, in just 2 days. And I'm sure there are more: I haven't added a row for the fact that I'm typing out this blog post.

The modern world is insane. You can do so much. And at the end of the day your brain is broken. It's pretty obvious why.

I'm not sure what I do with this data yet. It's not like I want to slow down. But this doesn't feel sustainable? (Not complaining! Love my job. Just an observation.)

PSA: PDFs leak data

Johnny — Thu, 21 May 2026 05:48:15 GMT

Lucy just noticed that a PDF she was viewing in her browser revealed something about its history when she hovered over the browser tab. In her case, harmless enough: the shameful fact that she created one of her lovely Excel summary sheets in PowerPoint. (Not even Keynote!)

PDFs are full of invisible data

Chock-full of it. Here's how this can trip you up. Let's say Jim is leaving so the team writes him a lovely message. Nobody really likes Jim, so you save the file on your Desktop with a snarky title.

Then you Print > Save as PDF…, and of course you save the file as Good luck Jim!.pdf.

Oooh but you didn't notice the Title field there, and now that's embedded in the PDF. Jim can just inspect the file or, if you're unlucky, he'll open it in Firefox on the farewell Zoom call and it'll be visible to everyone. Em-barrassing!

You think this will never happen to you? Oh sweet child, it happens all the time. And there's not really much you can do about it other than be aware of it, and remember not to do it.

PDFs contain a lot more information than you can see. Be careful.

Why wouldn't every meeting have an ID?

Johnny — Wed, 20 May 2026 02:24:10 GMT

After our meeting on Monday I'm feeling hyper-organised. All of our active work has a project in Things, which I'll show another day. What I'm doing now is scheduling some of this work, including a meeting with Lucy tomorrow.

For that meeting I've created a work package – again, details to follow – but what's interesting here is that I've used the IDs of all of these things in the appointment title.

I don't see a reason why every single one of my future meetings won't have an ID. (Unless it's just me blocking time/reminding myself to stand up and have a break – see that work/break pair, which I move around throughout the day.)

Right now, in the context of setting up this meeting, I know what it's about. I just created work package W0159~21.39 Home page re-jiggering to make it more SBS-focused. It's in-memory, as we say. So why let it fall out of memory, only to have to recall it tomorrow?

It's these tiny optimisations, applied consistently, that'll make you 1% more efficient.

SBS Zoom sessions tomorrow are open to the public

Johnny — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:01:19 GMT

We have 2 'welcome and roadmap' Zoom sessions already scheduled for SBS tomorrow. I'm going to set up properly-advertised public sessions for those of you interested in but not yet members of SBS, but while I get round to that I thought I'd just open up tomorrow's sessions.

I'll briefly summarise what we're up to, and then it'll be a session for questions. Very casual. No need to register, just turn up.

Session 1

Best for USA (afternoon/evening) or Oceania (morning)
May 20, 2026 06:00 Asia/Ho_Chi_Minh
- Click the link for timezone conversions.
Zoom link.
Click to add to your calendar.

Session 2

Best for Europe (morning/mid-morning) and Asia (morning/afternoon)
May 20, 2026 18:00 Asia/Ho_Chi_Minh
- Click the link for timezone conversions.
Zoom link.
Click to add to your calendar.

undermanager: Three things about data

Johnny — Tue, 19 May 2026 01:41:39 GMT

Great post by Russel Davies at undermanager: 'Three things about data'.

Gather less of it
a. Data is a risk. Every bit of data has to be managed/looked after/cared for. That costs time and money. And most of it is useless.

b. Data is distracting. Most of it is just noise. You're gathering it because you can, just in case, because it seems valuable.

I couldn't agree more. This was the root cause of my data leak the other month, and is a pattern I've come to recognise over the years. We assume that more data is better. And in the past that might have been the case.

But the landscape has shifted. The risks are greater. How about this doozy from Krebs on Security today: CISA Admin Leaked AWS GovCloud Keys on Github.

"Passwords stored in plain text in a csv, backups in git, explicit commands to disable GitHub secrets detection feature," Valadon wrote in an email. "I honestly believed that it was all fake before analyzing the content deeper. This is indeed the worst leak that I've witnessed in my career. It is obviously an individual's mistake, but I believe that it might reveal internal practices."

Critically analyse all data that you hold, especially if it identifies your customers. If you don't need it, purge it. It's time to start shifting our habits away from collecting this stuff in the first place.

There's a lot more in Russell's post. Worth a read.

This week at JDHQ – 2026-05-18

Johnny — Mon, 18 May 2026 05:43:48 GMT

Originally sent to the mailing list.

Given our new focus on small business, I'm going to send a weekly email telling you what we're up to. This reveals the patterns in our own business, and explains what we're doing to help yours.

Don't tune out if you don't run a business! Much of this is relevant to daily life and where that's the case, it'll make its way to JDU.

Inspired by Chiara

This email is inspired by Chiara's weekly updates, which I really enjoy reading.

Chiara started her own small business recently. She helps skilled immigrants land tech and business jobs in Germany. She's one of the Decimal family; obviously passionate about what she does and totally dedicated to it. If you know someone trying to move to Germany, get in touch with her.

Monday morning staff meeting

Spending literally every waking moment with your business partner means that 'the business' becomes this omnipresent thing. As a result we tend not to have many formal meetings. Chats just happen.

We've just had our first Monday morning staff meeting and it was incredibly helpful. We each ran through the projects that we have active this week, and agreed on a couple of specific scheduling points. Details below.

Tracked at: 11.21 Business plan / 11.21+ Monday-morning meeting minutes, with dated headers within that single text file that we'll fill out over time.

What we did last week

Held the first open Zoom sessions for small business.
- You told us that you wanted more focus on the documentation and process – the helping you to run a business – and less on me building some niche software solution. Heard! (And, honestly: great relief. It's what we love doing.)
- There are 2× more sessions this Wednesday. Subscribe to the events calendar (SBS only).
- See below for the longer-term plan for these sessions.
Video:
- An ideas 'registry' organised with structured tags
Blog:

What we're working on this week

IDs in the 20-39 range are specific to our business.

31.21 Emails to the mailing list

Here we are. You'll get one of these every week now. They'll be cross-posted to the blog for longevity. Tell me what you like and what you don't; what's useful and what isn't.

(And for those of you who don't want an email a week, the RSS feed is your friend. All big news will be posted to the blog. I won't be offended if you unsubscribe from this list.)

21.47 Obsidian for your JDex

We use Obsidian for our SBS JDex, and Lucy expressed her frustration last week that she wasn't very good at it. So we're going to do a loosely-planned series where I show her how to get the most of it in this context.

This won't be a comprehensive training course. (There are hundreds of those on YouTube – I guess Nick Milo is a good place to start?) This will be simple, practical advice: how we actually use this tool day-to-day. Expect one a week until Lucy's comfortable with it.

Coming to JDU.

21.48 Email training course

Email?! Who doesn't know how to use email?

Well, the world is getting more complex, and email is now the centre of your digital identity. In this short series – part of a broader series we're planning on online security and hygiene – I'll explain, from first principles, why you need to change your email habits in 2026.

I'll show Lucy how to set up Fastmail, which I started using just the other month, and how and why to migrate to unique email addresses. I'm deeply in love with this product. Eventually we'll get to buying a domain name and setting yourself free from carolscupcakes@gmail.com, setting up the much more professional hello@carolscupcakes.com. I'll walk Lucy – who hasn't the first clue where to start – through this whole process.

Coming to JDU.

21.30 Learn with Lucy – the command line

It's very useful – especially if you manage your own IT situation, as most of us do – to have a basic understanding of the command line. You go to some website, you want to install some software, and it tells you to simply curl -fsSL https://bun.com/install | bash and … now what?

Last year I put up a short series teaching my friend Ellane how to use the command line, from first principles. You'll find that at commandline.johnnydecimal.com, where it will remain.

Lucy started reading through it last week and she had questions. So we're going to use that series and turn it into video.

Coming to JDU.

21.34 Small Business System

This is our overall ID for the system itself. This week we'll be setting up two things.

First, a monthly Zoom session calendar, each month focused on a specific problem. We'll look at data storage and backups in June. How to make sure that your data is stored securely and that it's sufficiently backed up.

This is close to my heart as I run a business with terabytes of assets (video files) from 2× laptops, neither of which can store all of that data. So I have a server at a friend's house and a series of levers and pulleys that keep everything in sync. There's a miniseries on the blog starting with My data storage & backup strategy [0101] if you want to read more.

We'll record these sessions and figure out how to present them as a permanent artefact that you can refer back to.

Second, a weekly calendar based around our idea of 'TGIF', i.e. Thank God I Filed It. So much of business is just keeping on top of stuff. It is, frankly, boring admin. But it's the sort of thing that causes stress if neglected.

Perhaps we can help. If we all commit to tidying up the same thing every week – we'll just start at the start, with your 11.10 ■ Official documents – we can make this into something routine. The idea is that if you follow our annual cadence, you'll never have to do the dreaded 'big clean-up' because there'll be a constant awareness of your entire system.

Coming to SBS

21.14 Task & Project Management

I have a big update to the project management side of things that I've been thinking about since we finished recording the course last year. I'd like to get a blog post out this week so you can give me feedback. While there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution, I'd like to come up with something as close to consensus as possible.

That will then become a handful of videos and some process documentation that we'll add to the end of the existing course. If you're interested, there's a robust discussion in the Discord channel.

Coming to JDU.

Projects that are unlikely to get any time this week

I'd like to spend a little time each day in my own Imaginarium but probably won't have time to move the idea forward.
I'm not giving up software development: I'd really like the very-alpha-version CLI to be something I use every day. Hopefully more time on that next week.

An ideas 'registry' organised with structured tags

Johnny — Sun, 17 May 2026 06:59:38 GMT

This is a super early idea that I've been thinking about for a few months. It’s not ready yet. But you can tell me what sounds good and bad. (And suggest a better name.)

Think small: achieve something / Think big: probably fail

Johnny — Sat, 16 May 2026 09:19:44 GMT

Some time around 1998 I mentioned to my girlfriend's mam, then headmistress at the local infant school, that I could probably make her a website. I had a knock-off copy of Dreamweaver that I barely understood, so off I went.

The problem is one I've come to recognise in myself in the intervening 30 years: thinking way too big. What did she want from this website, which would have been one of perhaps a dozen UK infant school websites in 1998, had it ever existed? She'd have been happy with a handful of pages with a couple of images.

Had I created a handful of pages I could see a future where I got a small contract with Suffolk County Council, slowly learned my trade, and spent the 2000s making a fortune as an independent web developer.

Unfortunately, I had Dreamweaver. Dazzled by this technology, I tried to develop something way beyond my skills. I remember trying to work out some sort of fancy breadcrumb solution. 1998, remember. The internet existed but there was nothing on it. Nobody to tell me what to do.

So I just gave up

That's what I did. I just … stopped. There was never a website. I don't even remembering telling her that I couldn't do it, it just fizzled out.

Start small. Small is achievable. Just do some minimal version. Make a thing that works. Make it good – I'm not saying churn out rubbish – but make it minimal. Now, did people like it? Did you enjoy making it? Okay, now learn a bit more and make it better. And now keep doing that.

A nice surprise in Things

Lucy — Thu, 14 May 2026 03:22:32 GMT

After 6 months of following the process from the Task and Project Management course, the only item in my Things Today view was my start-the-day routine. No category reviews or other cruft. A treat. 😃

I've been diligent about pushing less-important category reviews out to a longer repeat interval. They must have 'shaken out' to the right cadence now. I didn't want to get review fatigue – I'd rather see them less, but spend quality time when we're together.

And I'm getting better at not dumping tasks in Today and letting them pile up because everything is urgent (it's not) and I'll do it all today (I won't). I'm careful with Today now and try to schedule achievable to-dos so it (me) doesn't get sad.

It's weird that I don't have any to-dos in there though. But we just finished a big project so I'm being nice to myself this week.

Figure 0196A. An almost-empty Today view in Lucy's Things app - what a treat.

This left me feeling organised and smug

Until I went to join our first Small Business Zoom call at 6am. And Zoom wouldn't let me in until I'd done a large software update that took ages. And made me late and feel unprofessional. Now I'm the annoying person on Zoom who isn't organised (my sincere apologies to Lyra).

And so I return to my Things-safety-net with my tail between my legs and add a new repeating task in 14 Technology so it won't happen again.¹

Figure 0196B. A new repeating task to ensure Zoom stays up to date.

Note that this repeating task will always appear in Today even if the overall category-review interval for 14 Technology isn't as often. ↩

Position statement: AI-generated apps

Johnny — Wed, 13 May 2026 02:41:53 GMT

So that I have an artefact that I can send to people, or link to when I want to explain my position, here's how I feel about AI-generated apps. If I've sent you this link, it isn't personal. Please don't take it as such (even though I've written it with a heavy dose of snark). :-)

Before now

Before, nobody could make an app. Well, a handful of really specialised software engineers could. But you couldn't.

So, apps were special. An app that did a thing that you needed it to do was probably worthy of attention. Maybe it wasn't any good, but still: an app! Someone spent hundreds of hours making it. Worth a look.

Everyone can make an app

Now, essentially anyone can make an app. Hey Claude, make an app.

What does that mean for your app, that you made? It means that I'm probably not going to look at it, and you shouldn't expect anyone else to care either. Sorry.

This might be unfair! You might have made The Best App. But so has everyone else. And everyone else wants people to check out their app and, well, you can see how that doesn't scale.

Enjoy your own app

I'm not criticising AI-generated apps. It's amazing that you can make an app. What a time we live in.

But don't expect anyone else to care. They're busy. Making apps.

Spend time with your own words

Johnny — Wed, 13 May 2026 01:39:10 GMT

Yesterday me and Lucy spent the day going through categories 21 Products (etc.) and 31 Marketing (etc.) in our own small business JDex. They're where the bulk of our stuff is, and they'd been neglected as we spent a few months with our heads down rebuilding this site.

There's about 23,000 words across those two folders in maybe 100 separate notes. It was a bit of a chore, honestly. But it needed doing, and I'm glad we did it. Because that's my business in there. Ideas that I've had, patterns, thoughts, notes-for-future-me. Yesterday morning I didn't really know what was in there. Now I do.

I don't think there's a way to shortcut that work. I know it can be tempting to get the machine to do it for you, but would that move you forward? Would you now be in a better situation than we were yesterday morning? I don't think you would be.

They're your words. They're thoughts that came out of your brain. If they're worth anything at all, spend some time with them.

A new website, and a focus on small business

Johnny — Sat, 09 May 2026 04:02:40 GMT

For me, looking back through this website’s version history is like watching the final scenes of Interstellar. Years fly by; visuals of who we were two, three years ago. Three years feels so close but then you see this page and: no, it just can’t be! That page looks so old.

And so it is again. What started as an ID born in Japan – 41.14 New design language – became an all-consuming project. As they do. I don’t even remember when it happened. One day I wasn’t rewriting all of our websites, the next day I was, and the git history tells me that was about 10 weeks ago. Time has lost all meaning.

The major change is that there’s just one website now: johnnydecimal.com. Last year I created JDHQ as its own thing because at the time integrating it with the main site would have been impossibly difficult. But the goal was never to have two websites.

I still like the term ‘JDHQ’, and will continue to use it to refer to the interactive parts of the site: the bits where you sign in and do a thing. (You can create a free account now.) It has a bright future; more below.

A focus on small business

Before I talk more about the website, a point that I think is more important. We’ve made a decision to focus all of our efforts, as a business, on helping other small businesses.

There’s so much overhead when you run a business, and when you’re small, you have to do it all yourself. With last year’s Small Business System (SBS) we hoped to give you a space to put everything: a hundred less decisions to make. Our dream was always to expand to become your ‘operations layer’, to provide you ops manuals and guidance and support. So that’s what we’ll be doing from now.

You’ll find a calendar you can subscribe to in the sidebar of your SBS. The first events – 4× welcome Zoom sessions spread across timezones – are scheduled for next week. There’s also a WhatsApp group for our small business customers. Our job now is to support you: to make your life easier. Tell us what you need to succeed.

Information will still flow to the rest of the system. Problems solved for small business are problems we all face; tools built to help them will help you at home.

No more numbers

The previous site assigned an ID to every page. This was a cute affectation – and that sidebar table of contents was a crowd favourite – but ironically limiting.

The Johnny.Decimal system wasn’t designed to hold a preset list of pages in a specific order, but that’s what the old site did. This is in direct conflict with one of the major benefits of the web over print: you can update a website whenever you want. By giving each page a number, I inadvertently made the old site behave like a book.

As a result, it scarcely changed. There’s content that I haven’t published because I would have had to figure out how to fit it into the structure. That’s no way to run a website. So the numbers have gone.

(Technically, we do still have an ID for each page on the site. These are IDs in my own SBS and they allow us to store the artefacts for each page, e.g. the diagrams. You’ll see these IDs in the figure reference numbers. They’re meaningless and confer no order; which is how it’s meant to be.)

‘Aspirationally calm’

Our design goal was to make a place of calm. The internet is very shouty these days. There’s a lot competing for your attention. I wanted our place to be somewhere you could relax.

So there’s a lot more room. And maybe less of what gave the old site ‘character’? The ▒ shade characters at the start of headers have gone. The thick borders have gone. The line-drawing ‘brackets’ around navigation items have gone. We did try adding some of that back, but every time we decided: no. Too busy.

I’ve been using this design for a month or so and when I go back to the old sites they’re jarring. We refer to them as ‘the old clunkers’. The new place is cohesive, I hope. It’s simple. Because Johnny.Decimal’s job isn’t to get in your face and be all clever. It’s to help you get your work done and then get out of the way.

I have a lot of plans for JDHQ. This section got long, so I recorded a roadmap video. I’ll do these at the start of every month from now.

Housekeeping

Until an hour ago, there were 4 mailing lists: the ‘public’ list that anyone could sign up to, and a list for each of our products. These latter lists were intended for product updates, but I never used them.

I’ve collapsed the lists. There’s just one now and if you got an email today, you’re on it. If you don’t want to be, there's an unsubscribe link in the footer.

The site now has an updates page whose entries appear in the RSS feed. The RSS feed remains the best way of keeping up to date – see RSS: a public service announcement if you don’t know how it works.

Thank you

We can only do this with your continued support. Thank you – especially to those of you who become lifetime members. It makes a massive difference.

I say it every time, and I’ll say it again: tell us what you need. You ask, we make.

Johnny.Decimal (no AI)

JD CLI updated: now creates filesystem folders

If you installed the CLI before today

SBS meeting schedule: Tue 15/Sep moved +3h

Your calendar should update

Feedback welcome

'Project' section of 'Task & Project Management' course re-recorded

Updated based on real-world use

Also see: Work packages

'50-59 Portfolio of creative outputs' becomes 'W0000-9999 Work packages'

Expanding the concept

Introducing 'work packages'

Fixing the numbers

They must link to an ID

How do I migrate from 50-59?

We've also retitled 40-49

See more at the updated Task & Project Management

Footnotes

Small Business System – '50-59 Portfolio of creative outputs' becomes 'W0000-9999 Work packages'

Life Admin System – '.02' says to use it sparingly

Standard zero description

Small Business System – '.02' says to use it sparingly

Standard zero description

Site and product updates

Site changes

Product name updates

Lifetime is back

AI content coming

AI-free features now available

AI-free RSS feed

'Organising our small business' is now 'Working with Johnny.Decimal'

Obsidian links break. Mine don't. (video)

Indicating levels of Johnny.Decimal complexity

Some stuff is advanced

Complexity: 1/3

Complexity: 2/3

Complexity: 3/3

RFC W0192: Use of +, ~, @; clarifying extend-the-end

Defining an ID

Folder structure

What about additional notes?

Proposal 1: ~ is used to indicate a freeform sub-note

Valid: notes inside the ID note

Equivalent: sub-note extracted to its own file

Proposal 2: + means 'extend-the-end'; defining 'extend-the-end'

Formalising how you extend-the-end

You should be able to list all of your extend-the-ends

Standards-in-waiting

Be consistent

A counter-example

You own everything after the +

An example of a code

Keeping notes

Difference between ~ and +

In your filesystem

Proposal 3: @ links Work Packages to their ID

How to feedback

Footnotes

WwJD: Spend less time doing boring admin (video)

WwJD: This is what Johnny.Decimal was designed for (video)

This week at JDHQ – 2026-07-13

'The Work System'

Giving structure to ideas

Recording the 'projects' update to T&PM this week

SBS Zoom sessions

Purpose, mission, values

Purpose

Mission

Values

Your values

Footnotes

Once again, we failed to focus

What's our purpose?

Use this as a filter

Footnotes

SBS Zoom minutes for 2026-07-02

Thoughts on purpose, mission, and vision statements

Footnotes

Thinking out loud about project management

Registration review: Taiwan

How do I migrate from `50-59`?

We've also retitled `40-49`

Proposal 1: `~` is used to indicate a freeform sub-note

Proposal 2: `+` means 'extend-the-end'; defining 'extend-the-end'

You own everything after the `+`

Difference between `~` and `+`

Proposal 3: `@` links Work Packages to their ID

Points for a nice `Q`