22.00.0068: Standard ‘life admin’ pack

20-29 Community 22 Blog
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We’ve been spending the last few weeks developing a standard ‘life admin’ pack. The idea is that it’ll handle 95% of what 95% of people need to run their daily lives.

It’s been an interesting process. We did it by the book, starting by ‘discovering’ all of the things that people tell us they need to organise on the forum, email, workshop comments, and looking back at our own lives.

Then to design a structure we cracked open MindNode and we spent a few days just talking it all over. Looking at every decision, questioning it, refining it, moving things around.

And then I moved my entire personal life in to it, which caused us to refine it even further. So I’m proof that this works.

Who’s it for?

At JDHQ we’ve been calling this the ‘JD quick-start’ pack. We’ve designed it for everyone: the idea is that you don’t need deep background — any background, really — in Johnny.Decimal to jump in and use it.

And you shouldn’t have to spend a week ‘getting organised’ to, well, be organised. Everyone needs this stuff.

We’ve spent a hundred hours figuring it out so that you don’t have to.

One area, five categories

I knew I wanted this to be a single area.

The more I do this the more I’m convinced that broader — much broader — categories and IDs are the secret. And that my advice from a decade ago to ‘not create subfolders’ is no longer relevant: see below for the secret to subfolders.

(I think it was good advice at the time. But the landscape has changed; the amount of stuff we all store has grown. That changes how you should think about storing it.)

And we’ve compressed everything in to just five categories.

Dates solve so many problems

You can compress an amazing amount in to a single ID when the first thing you see inside that ID is a list of dates, formatted yyyy-mm-dd so that they sort nicely.[1]

For instance, we’ve designed a single ID:

10-19 Life admin
   15 Travel, events, & entertainment ✈️
      15.41 All short trips

We realised that a ‘short trip’ — one that you don’t really need to plan, you just book and go — doesn’t need its own ID. We all make these trips all the time.

So a single ID is enough, as long as its subfolders look like this:

10-19 Life admin
   15 Travel, events, & entertainment ✈️
      15.41 All short trips
            2024-02-04 Melbourne
            2024-04-18 Sydney
            2024-05-28 Brisbane
            2024-07-13 Adelaide

And in each of those, for a short trip you might just have a flight confirmation and a hotel booking. Simple.

Subheaders

An idea I’ve toyed with over the years, and one that I usually avoid because of its unpredictability.

But in this highly-designed system, it’s really useful: subheaders.

10-19 Life admin
   13 Money earned, saved, owed, & spent 💰
      13.10 ■ Earned 🤑
      13.11 Payslips, invoices, & remittance
      13.12 Expenses & claims
      13.13 Government services
      13.14 Gifts, prizes, inheritance, & windfalls
      13.15 Selling my stuff
      13.20 ■ Saved 📈
      13.21 Budgets & planning
      13.22 Bank accounts
      13.23 Investments & assets
      13.24 Pension

We picked the ‘black square’ symbol because it looks nice in macOS’ Finder.

This works really well in breaking up a long list of IDs.

The emoji really help :stuck_out_tongue:

We’ve sprinkled emoji throughout, and they’re really useful. They give your brain something else to anchor on to.

(When we release the pack there’ll be a version without emoji if you’re the sort of person who takes yourself really seriously.)

The pack

The pack will contain this folder structure as a download, or links to shared folders on all of the usual cloud platforms.

It will contain an index, either as downloadable text files that you can immport in to your notes app of choice, or as a shared Apple Notes link.

And there’ll be a version that you can import in to Bear, which uses its unique nested-tag feature to build a really nice sidebar.

A screenshot of Bear's sidebar. It builds a hierarchy of tags that you can click on. Each tag is one of our categories.
A screenshot of Bear's sidebar. It builds a hierarchy of tags that you can click on. Each tag is one of our categories.760×342 37 KB

It’ll include a PDF manual which details every ID, explains the sorts of things that should (and shouldn’t) go there, and points out any obvious exceptions.

Eventually — not in the first release — we’re going to have a short series of videos which explain the structure and our thinking in more detail.

Money

Its full list price will be US$20. It’ll go on sale for US$10 as it won’t be 100% finished. Obviously if you get it early you’ll get all updates.

If you’re reading this, you can get it on pre-sale now for just US$8. Super special deal for my super special blog subscribers.

We’ll mail you the pack when it’s released later this month.

Sneak peek

This looks really great in your file system. Honestly, I love it.

A screenshot of my Finder, showing the folders as described in this article.
A screenshot of my Finder, showing the folders as described in this article.1581×1068 99.5 KB

Feedback?

I’d love to know what you think of this. Is this the thing you want more of? If not this, what?

We sit here and try to work out what people want. It’s much simpler if you just tell us! :slight_smile:

Drop me an email and let me know.

  1. And I recommend the dash as a separator, vs. yyyymmdd , as it really improves readability. I also use the full yyyy , otherwise 24-01-23 is confusing. The extra characters are worth it in both instances. ↩︎

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I, of course, bought it immediately. I’m excited to see how the finished product looks like. Sad to see a potentially future death for the “no subfolders” rule.

I don’t know about anyone else, but for me, if you’re comfortable being in front of the camera, I’d be interested in seeing a youtube video like “I used our new standard organizational admin pack for 30 days” type of challenge video. Doesn’t have to be too long. Just a list of top 5 moments it helped, and top 5 moments you wished for a slightly different structure, along with your opinion on how to avoid re-structuring envy or “productivity” haha.

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Videos were definitely part of the plan. Love these ideas and happy to take more requests!

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And, thank you. We really do appreciate every sale. Every one means something to us. :heart:

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Congrats on releasing this!
I’m very intrigued by the IDs as headings! Is that a solution to the nested folders issue , @clappingcactus :wink: ?

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This is great! I’m constantly fiddling with/reorganizing “life stuff” during my JD journey the past couple years. Will definitely be buying!

Also, the black square to visually break up IDs is genius. I tested it in one of my high traffic areas and it’s already done wonders for my ADHD.

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Iiiiiiiinteresting. Could you elaborate? Is it just that one large lump of STUFF! is now smaller manageable chunks?

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Sorry, my comment was unclear! My use is different, as it appears you’re using the ■ AC.x0 IDs exclusively as empty subheaders.

But essentially, yes. When I’m scanning for an ID, the ■ functions as a kind of… passive visual landmark. As you said, breaks it into chunks. Less overwhelm.

(More below because I don't want to hijack your announcement!)

Not dissimilar to your use here, when I set up my system I sometimes “grouped” what I felt to be naturally related IDs within a category (which also enabled me to reserve future IDs in that “group”), like your ■ 13.10 - 13.15 which then jumps to ■ 13.20. I only did this occasionally out of fear that it would overcomplicate my system, e.g., make it likely that I’d later create 13.21 where 13.16 was called for. In this case, the ■ makes it easier to spot where an unused ID resides.

In my case I did not use empty folders as visual subheaders; a normal AC.x0 ID started (and belonged to) the group, while the group itself lived in my head/index. That could be why ■ is so helpful! But now I’m rethinking it… this would fall apart if there were more than 9 IDs in a “group,” but I suppose one could have more, e.g. ■ 29.20-29.49. (I did this in a couple niche instances, admittedly!) In such cases, a new category might instead be called for.

Back to the point: I definitely risk muddying the waters by using ■ for IDs that end in 0 whether they are “grouped” or just cluttered. I suppose I could use a different icon: ■ in categories with groups, and maybe • to visually break up the rest? Seems complicated. I’ll have to experiment. Admittedly I haven’t used emojis, out of caution that 1) they could break something between clouds/operating systems and 2) they’d visually overwhelm me.

Either way, this has been helpful for me. But my ADHD is quite severe!

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Kind of you not to hijack, but no need!

The reason I’ve avoided this in the past is that it locks you in. Prevents what might be a natural expansion of IDs up and past that header.

So my general advice (not to you) is: don’t do this! But obviously if you’ve given it a great deal of thought, it can work really well.

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Oh this is a very cool thought, that the headers and IDs may co-exist in sequence and without nesting. That was not at all obvious to me from a first glance at the life admin pack! What a thought. I like it.

I think one logical conclusion of JD permitting both dated folders, and folders-as-headers is that meta-files (say a plaintext calendar for a subset of folders) can exist in that “header folder”.

I am afraid this kind of line of thinking just unfortunately breaks the “mental cleanliness” that JD provides to me if I take it to its extreme. I, personally, would end up with “meta files” in the header folder, then “meta files” in the category folder etc.

I have to think a lot more about this, than just a passing curiosity, but my first instinct is both “of course that helps” and “oh good it makes things much worse, where did I take a wrong turn”.

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Same feeling. Maybe it’s a case of different types of thinking (visual vs linguistic, for example). For some reason, it bothers me that there is hierarchy implied but not actually encoded (it’s still a flat list), but I suspect for some people it’s apparently not a problem :man_shrugging:
I guess it makes your ID folder kind of like a document with headers … it took me a while, but I’ve come to embrace the fact that the hierarchy flows seamlessly from folders into documents (i.e. folders are really just higher-level headers). It triggers the same short-circuit in my brain, but I’ve learned to get over it and find it’s a useful way to ‘sneak’ some more structure in.