Areas and categories advice needed

J.D Concepts 14 Build your system
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Hi all, newbie here. I’m working through the workshop and workbook.I would appreciate thoughts from those who have gone through this already! Most of my life stuff will fall into the standard kinds of categories within one area except these things I am stuck on.

  1. I have received a particular award for several years in a row where the program involves a lot of discussions under NDA (non disclosure agreement) for those awardees. (Future product direction types of non-public discussions). I’m leaning towards an area for that by itself because I can somewhat segregate that, vs intermingling files and notes. (If I do a file search and things come up in that distinct numbering I would know visually it’s under NDA for example).

  2. I’m acting as a power of attorney and health care proxy for a relative who is in long term care. Essentially I have records for them that span the typical life gamut. I think an area for this makes sense too since it feels like there is more complexity than simply having IDs within a category for this family member. At some point I may need to do this with/for my parents too as they are approaching the same stage in life.

  3. I have my own business (consulting) - incorporated but “small” in the context of business, no employees, nothing super complex. I know it could be its own system but I think I could get away with this being an area too. If it were larger or more complex I would go with its own system.

  4. The last one is harder to explain. I struggle with how to categorize education vs learning for fun vs learning for a hobby I’m interested in. Examples: I have some certifications in Power BI and inspiration docs where I save dashboards I like or snippets of DAX code. I have saved links or docs about things I’d like to build some day (with wood), and plans for a workbench that I started building during COVID (LOL, still working on it). I have development code files (Visual Studio and SQL) for a hobby project I built a few years ago and ideas and scripts or notes for other projects I’d like to build. I happen to be a CPA and have annual tracking I need to do and courses I need to take to keep up certain standards (prof development hours). All seem very random and distinct but very much related in some broad sense. Maybe these are all just IDs within a single broad category of “personal and professional development”??

Thanks in advance to anyone with thoughts or ideas!

Jen

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Hi @jen and welcome!

I can offer a few insights on the points that I have some experience with. I’ll try to keep it brief :slight_smile:

Seems to me like a good clean reason for a split. In my admin with my wife, I settled on Areas as the level at which we sync and back up, purely for the reason of maintaining (business) privacy. Also, I would guess that you’ll remember both to look in that area for notes on this topic, and to put things in that area – because the whole NDA thing will be prominently attached to those notes in your mind.

Sounds logical … my approach, which hasn’t seen much real stress-testing yet, is to have an ID for ‘friends, family and their places’ where I have a record for my parents’ house and the maintenance I do there for them. But I could see how with a legal aspect to it you would want to keep this very seperate.

As a sole proprietor, I most definitely think one area is more than enough for a small business. And that’s including two separate areas of enterprise (software development and woodworking). IDs might fill up with lots of files over time, but with good file naming patterns that’s not a problem. More important – to me at least – is having as few categories and IDs as possible so I can oversee the entire system at a glance.

On the wall beside me is a map of my system, and it has … [counting] … seven categories and 28 IDs. I’m not happy with the names of my categories yet – some ambiguity – but I am pretty certain that I have the right amount.

In the Life Admin pack and the Small Business System, Johnny and Lucy split things over multiple categories in multiple areas, because that’s the way it ‘shakes out’ in the decimal system. And that has great value too, the hierarchy helps to make it unambiguous what goes where. That’s the shortcoming of my current approach.

This is the one I’m most interested in and also have no answer for :slight_smile: I struggle with this myself, but I am tending more and more towards the perspective that this kind of notes should be dealt with separately from the JD system[1]. I’m currently trying out a completely flat bucket for all these notes, with good interlinking between them and using good titles to relate free-form notes back to ‘threads’ in my thinking for which I want to track the evolution over time. The point being, admininistration can be unambiguously filed in categories and stays there, but engaging with the world through ideas is a constantly morphing field. Many notes have value at the moment, and it’s nice to have a record of them, but they are a stepping stone: the act of taking them transforms your mind, and your mind is what you take with you into the future.

  1. They could be intermingled, but they need a different kind of addressing scheme. ↩︎

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Hi Jen,

Maybe look at 13 System expansion • Johnny.Decimal

It could be a way to keep divided but standarized system for your relatives, or expand the limited amount of IDs for your business, etc.

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Thank you, @hans!

With #2 (Relative/POA situation), I did consider that approach but a single ID feels too limiting. I’m nearly at the “1 year into this role” stage and I see a separate area as basically her “Life Admin” since I quite literally have documents or files from every area of her life before she was put in LTC, plus the ongoing medical/financial/tax/legal things. At this point I’m keeping things that likely are not relevant anymore but I’ve never done this thing for someone before and don’t know what I don’t know.

#3 My business isn’t even as complicated as that since the woodworking and software development things I note in #4 are purely personal interests. At most, they are work-adjacent in the sense that the topics often are things I would like to expand my business to include (at least on the tech/dev side) but I’m nowhere near talented enough in those areas to sell my services!

#4 is the tough one indeed. I had some clarity overnight but not sure if I recall all that came to me when I should have been sleeping and I didn’t write it down in the middle of the night. DOH! I think the general guideline of keeping it broad until I see what sticks might be the way. I keep trying to test myself with “Where would I look for X?” but often forget about that when I’m in the weeds thinking about the structure.

@julian thank you too, I agree some of the system expansion topics will be useful in the business area for sure, with the “freelancer” examples being similar to what I will need (multiple clients/project scenarios).

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Your #4 is a tricky one. In developing the life admin and then small business systems, we’ve settled on a pattern that seems to sit best with most people.

Which is that you’ve got some parent thing – using PowerBI, being a CPA – and that this should be recognised as the parent.

It is the thing with an ID.

And then learning about the thing is a child of this thing.

Rather than learning about stuff being a parent, and PowerBI being a child.

I think it’s one or the other, and as long as you decide and be consistent, you should be right.

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oh interesting. I like the idea of “things” being the entities.
It reminds me of a practise I’ve adoped recently in freeform notes, that seems to be working.

I create headings like this:

# Working on layout for clientprojX {#DATETIME}
# Recording ideas about markup languages for notekeeping {#DATETIME}
# Taking notes on InterestingVideoX for workbench-build {#DATETIME}

Where it reads like natural language but there’s a pattern: they always start with an -ing verb followed with on or about and end with for UniqueProjectShortName.

UniqueProjectShortName could be IDs in JDex, or they could be ‘threads’ of exploration, thinking. I don’t worry about having threads running that don’t have IDs. And I don’t worry about mixing personal and professional development; that can be clarified later by linking the relevant notes together.

This allows for freeform, organic, flow-of-the-day notetaking (I use this in my daily worklog files), but it ties things into the structure “for free”. And there’s just enough discipline to force me to tie it to something without it feeling constraining.

Using Obsidian or similar, you could use wikilinks or hashtags in the on ... and for ... parts, to ensure you link to existing activities/projects or are aware when you’re creating a new one. But the format is useable as a database of sorts just with plain text search.

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#4 has puzzled me, too. I’m a #3 Input and #7 Learner on the Clifton Strengths, and also a fiction writer. I collect random knowledge that’s not connected to a specific project, like a webinar on Benjamin Franklin or the making of glass. Or like with writing fiction, I may have multiple notes on dialogue.

I ended up using 15.02 Creative pattern • Johnny.Decimal . I called it 70 Library of Input and Learning, then numbered them 70001, etc. Specific classes got their own number, but I also did broader subjects like “Dialogue” because I often pick up snippets that catch my eye, or links. Still thinking about how well it works, considering my numbering goes to 70078. So far.

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Bear in mind, JD wasn’t/isn’t really designed to handle lots of atomic pieces of interrelated and/or disparate knowledge. It’s just not what it’s good at.

So in this sort of scenario, I’d just cut loose on Obsidian and use lots of links and maybe even open that graph view and whatever.

I wouldn’t be trying to shoe-horn this in to JD categories. That’s going to limit your thinking and cause friction.

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I can suggest some things about my system;

  1. I have some funding through different organizations for my work. I have a category for this and organize the sub-folders per year of funding. So for me it’s category 33 and the decimals are years so 33.25 are the files I have generated/received to keep my work going this year. Of course this wouldn’t work if I had to handle the funding for 20 students and coworkers, but it works well for me as a solo person.
  2. No help here as I don’t manage another person. But I do manage a dog, and for him I just have one giant .pdf file listed in my people management category. I think if you’re using the PoA regularly, and if this was a complete life to manage, then yes, a whole area. I like to think of areas as bookshelves, categories as a single binder, and IDs as a slipcase protector inside the binder. If you’re managing a bookshelf’s worth of papers for someone else then an area.
  3. No comment here, as small business system will be an area that solves this for everyone, after all. :smiley:
  4. So; learning is its own area in my system and I’ve organized the categories as if they were floors of a library I’m interested in. The key I found to organizing knowledge vs. the rest of life is drawing a clear distinction between knowledge for the sake of knowledge vs. knowledge that guides action. So, if I’m working on a new protocol to do some wet lab work, that resulting file will be something I open up when I’m at my bench and want to do the thing. But if I’m just answering a curious metaphorical question, then I have a whole category that fits the sort of knowledge I’m building towards. My distinction is somewhere between “is this for a metaphysical question, or for a physical result?” and “if i were to share the result of this work, would it be an exploratory essay or the resulting document itself?” Drawing that line has helped me have a whole learning area. Then, inside this area, I treat every question as if it’s a project. They each fit somewhere within my area 10-19 within an ID somewhere, and now I know I filed away my question/learning potential for processing/scheduling as if it’s just another project.
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I love all the input and ideas. I’ll share more once I’m closer with what I end up with.