Announcing a new Johnny.Decimal initiative: Thank God I Filed it! (on Friday).[1]
Okay, this one’s a little tongue-in-cheek. But I think there’s something to be had here.
Filing is boring
I’m constantly aware that I run this website for a thing which most people find really boring. Let’s not fool ourselves: even if you’re in to this sort of thing, filing things isn’t ‘fun’.
The result is that we don’t do it. We know we should. We might even have a really neat place to file things. (You’re welcome.) And still we don’t!
So TGIF is a little prompt. Here’s the challenge:
This Friday, make an effort to file at least one thing. Make it the thing that caused you the most problems this week.
Invest an hour
Let’s say you set aside an hour to do this. This is why we picked Friday: it’s a perfect 3pm-on-a-Friday sort of job. You’re almost finished, your brain is fried, so why don’t you do something menial that helps future you?
In an hour, aim to file four (4) things. Just four. No stress.
If you do this every week for a year, in a year you’ve filed 200 things. And I bet you don’t routinely use 200 things! We’re talking your logo, your pricing chart, your list of suppliers.
So in a year, you might not have much left to do. That’d be nice.
Share your success
Let us know on the forum in this post if this helps!
Noting that I am an atheist and do not believe in any of the gods, but for purposes of the initialism it would have been punitive to lower-case this instance. ↩︎
This is just what I need to get me on the path to being better organized. I love challenges, and have already started this one moments ago by creating a recurring task, with a reminder, in my Notion enviro.
The task: to get off my butt and take an hour to find, collate, designate, file 5 assets — and then note in either my J.D system or J.D Biz system where I filed it.
I’m even thinking of testing the new Raycast feature that doesn’t allow anything else to disturb me while taking on this task.
Funnily enough, I wanted to do this by myself this year, but having accountability through a group effort would also be nice.
I’m not sticking to the “thing that brought most grief this week” because this wasn’t that kind of week for me. Let’s see what happens next week.
Today I filed away:
A playing card from a board game. I changed countries recently, and my friend group and I split a board game into parts we each got to keep with the promise that to play that board game again we’d have to come together somewhere in the world with all the pieces. Filed that card in a new binder I’ve made for memories.
My old Passport. I renewed my passport in 2024, so to maintain my travel record I kept my old one for now. Filed it in my admin binder.
A piece of artwork a friend made, it was just an off-the-cuff sketch a friend made, but I’ve kept that piece of paper all these years. Now It’s in my memories binder same as #1 above.
I recently bought a label printer. It came with a ton of paperwork that I’ve now recycled. I held on to the paper that specifically contained information on the tape refills ordering information. Went and found that information online and filed the .pdf in my office maintenance folder in my digital JD system.
During the half hour I did this today, I probably took a picture of a bunch of memories I don’t need to keep the physical reminder of, and tossed a bunch of reference materials (receipts etc.) that had been piling up. I probably threw away 5x what I actually kept (~20 items or so).
If anyone else is interested, I bought this label printer, with an extra off the shelf 9V power supply. I’ve also bought a bunch of linen binders with some local art supply plastic sleeves. Each of my linen binders got their own individual JD.ID. Each plastic sleeve inside then gets labeled with the JD.ID of what’s being filed in it. I find that being serious about organizing my “filed” life this year is very satisfying.
Yup… used a block of time I knew I had available and today I did something I swore I would do ages ago – keep track of all of my subscriptions, how much I’m paying for them, and notes on whether I actually need the subs or not.
A couple of weeks or so ago I came across a very tidy Notion template that was all about “Subscriptions”. Looked like it fit the bill, so I added the link to my growing Bear files _ and there has sat until your “challenge”.
Today I started my Challenge hour by downloading and installing the Sub template (so very easy to do). I did this when the automated reminder I set in Notion to do the challenge gave me a nudge as I requested it to do.
Today I spent an hour:
Opening Bear – where I had started to list my subs
downloading the Sub template
installing the Sub template, and a Bills Payment template into Notion
starting to enter subs in New Sub in the new Subs template, and adding basic info like, name of sub, use case, and a tab to show category it is most strongly aligned with.
I will enter more data like $$ paid, payments dates, and flag some of them as “Cease To Be” as the due date comes closer
I got only part way in this task but it felt so very good to know by spending this hour each Friday, and that once I complete this specific task, I’ll have a better idea of just how many $$ I may be able to save by cancelled a few redundant or useless subs!
Late to the party here! Last friday I was finally getting the places created which I need for some things. This coming friday I will file!
My week schedule has changed recently so that friday is separated from the rest of my work days by thursday off, and I’ve been thinking it’s a good day to consolidate all the backoffice and personal development stuff (to reduce procastination in the rest of the week . This kind of a ritual is perfect.
Today I decided to not be home since we have Éowyn passing through. As such I’m not near my home office with my physical pile of papers I need to sort through. So I went through my mess of digital files to file a bunch.
My 4 things filed today:
I signed up for an introduction to Salsa class just for fun every now and again. Filed my membership confirmation in my temporary events folder. No idea how many times I’ll go so no need to create its own ID I thought. Still marked it as an open project in my to-do list, though.
I’m going to a conference later this year. Sent in my information and safety waiver and saved it in my conferences folder.
While I haven’t actually re-written my personal recipes, I have gone ahead and found all my recipe text files and put them all in one cooking folder. My hope is to start re-writing all of them into the Cooking for Engineers format (1).
I’ve taken like 5 “introduction to statistics” classes over the years. Every time an independent statistician talks about their theoretical underpinnings they always describe it slightly differently. Over the years I’ve heard so many good descriptions, had some great handouts and took a lot of notes, but I think I want to knit them into a whole, rather than a sum of parts, some time this year. Put it all into a “learning statistics” folder.
I’m working on my bookkeeping, so I got my financial statements from the previous year filed. And I started creating folders to put earlier years in archive format – when I used different systems so the raw data isn’t terribly useful but needs to be kept.
Next in my dump folder, I found photos from a photoshoot of me for on my website. I think the only place I’ve used one of those yet is the profile photo on this forum And a few other photos I had collected for the same purpose. I created a folder under ‘Marketing and Communications’ and moved the photos there with proper names according to the scheme I’ve decided on.
So whether that’s two or four or six things kind of depends on how you count …
I’VE BEEN WRITING RECIPES LIKE THAT FOR YEARS! Yet another confirmation of my inner engineer’s late blooming (I didn’t have the secondary school science prerequisites for anything STEMmy. And by the time it dawned on me I could do something about that and go back to uni, the age gap to all those eighteen-year-olds was more than I could bear, especially in a country which fetishizes group projects).
Finally cleaned out the last of the note detritus left over when we switched the office from Box Notes to Obsidian. Depending on how you want to count, that’s one thing or a couple of dozen.
Hi everyone, late to post this week, but still did my filing.
I digitized four piles of papers that I had laying about and put them into the relevant management folders:
A stack of local tradespeople flyers. I’m going to likely need a plumber soon, so have been maintaining a stack for general what-ifs.
Physical sports equipment receipts and their digital warranty registrations.
Four restaurant menus for local places that don’t have online menus so we can call ahead and ask if they have our favourite dishes on offer before driving out to them.
3rd party insurance coverages for our dogs that in physical form included a transaction IDs but when ordered online only have us an account ID. I thought it’s good to keep reference to the transaction IDs from the insurance company’s records perspective.
I don’t have anything to file just now, but I’m spending TGIF tidying up and creating tests for the new small business online JDex. This is the stuff that always gets neglected because it’s boring and you think building new features is more important.
But, like filing, if you don’t do it it’ll come back to bite you later! So I set Friday aside specifically to do it.
Missed filing my filing report from last week… so catching up today.
Had an issue with a shipping charge and all I had to do was find the missing BOL.
Of course over Xmas when things get hectic I tend to use our wee buckets to ‘temporarily’ file things in one of those “this is the perfect place to put this - for now!” spots.
Hours, and buckets later, I had some very nicely sorted buckets, some of which can now go directly into filing cabinets.
Never did find the missing BOL with the shipping Quote so looks like I’m out a few hundred $$ on this one.
But I did find a flashlight that had gone missing about the same time as I had done the pre Xmas cleanup in aisle five routine!
Nice flashlight - not worth $$$ - but at least I won’t be tripping on my ‘temporary’ filing buckets when the power goes out again.
I’ll file next week.
. This kind of a ritual is perfect.
And a few other photos I had collected for the same purpose. I created a folder under ‘Marketing and Communications’ and moved the photos there with proper names according to the scheme I’ve decided on.