December already. Where does it go?
I wonder if the solution to that problem isnât to do more but to figure out ahead of time what to do less of.
Instead of manually editing five pages, rolling back to a site backup and re-uploading a âSALE (Deal Expired: See you in 2026!)â page?
And now weâre in to change management, as noted in a footnote. Definitely an interesting thought: figure out, first, what to do. Document what you will do. Do it. And now that documentation becomes your configuration.
Probably overkill for my scenario? Probably not viable, long-term? I donât know.
No, I donât think itâs overkill. Weâre just well into the territory of needing a checklist system that can be updated over time. Something youâre realizing/referencing the Japanese do systematically.
Some system of work where once you or someone realizes that something was done inefficiently, a checklist somewhere reflects a new best practice for next time.
edit: for what itâs worth, i think this is a key missing bit in most productivity advice. Even David Allen wrote a whole book talking about how âtask lists and folders are all you needâ and off handedly mentioned that checklists should exist at all levels.
Are you familiar with Atul Gawande? The Checklist Manifesto | Atul Gawande
First time hearing of it, bought the audiobook and will âreadâ it today and tomorrow.
Love that book. Iâm due to read it again.
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Voodoo within! Including an updated cdj() courtesy of Murrax on Discord.
it lets you go into subfolders too, searching by substring, e.g.
cdj 31.14 COMSM0067puts me in~/Documents/31 Formal Education/31.14 University of Bristol/+COMSM0067 Advanced Topics in Programming Languages, or if I forget the unit code I can docdj 31.14 languages
Every action I take on my business MUST start and end in my JDex.
This idea has been tickling me for a while. Your post landed in a fortuitous configuration of neurons and activities, and I tried the following.
I took an index card and drew some âtext boxesâ at the top.
parent topic (project) | title | chron-id | tag
Then I took this along to the shop.
See, the trouble is that some shop work is straightforward â resaw those boards, sweep the floor â but shop work is also sometimes figuring out. The title here: âclarify what comes out of piece with rot?â Iâm sawing stock from large slabs, and some pieces had dry rot I had to work around. I had made a cutlist previously, but just at the end of the last workday I had realized I might be able to rearrange things around the bad part and then it would all fit better and I would save a lot of wood. So I need to puzzle again. Which is a quarter of an hour or more hard thinking.
If I would get this cleared up and then proceed immediately into action, you might think it doesnât matter anymore and this information can safely be forgotten. Sadly, no. I did not in fact finish the resawing work, so will have to continue in a few days time. Large heavy slabs will need to be lifted around, lists double checked to make sure Iâm not sawing the wrong piece. Experience shows that I will get confused and spend just as much time as initially going over it all again. And in fact â you never know when something like this will get parked for weeks and all context will be long gone and you have no idea where you were at.
So these are precisely the kinds of bits of information that need to be filed back into the JDex, and theyâre also the kind that invariably gets lost.
The âparent topicâ and âtagsâ fields on my index card are things from my JDex. So what I have achieved, at least, is that at the end of the day when I go back to my desk, Iâll already know where to file this. Thatâs a win for my future exhausted self!
After the picture was taken, I did the figuring out and noted which slab each component would come from, and that card is now beside me on the desk and the information will be easy to file.
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Iâll be the pedant who points out that this is zsh-shell specific, but in any case this is some very sweet globbing! I love that you can do this with pure shell functionality.
This is lovely! I wish I had more need for JD on a physical medium. Doesnât suit my current lifestyle, but one day I too shall carry around index cards with IDs.
Thatâs how it all began, iânâit? With numbers on printouts? One day you will return, sonâŚ
Lol! Did you just innit me?! 
Indeed it did. Because I didnât want to have to print an ugly filepath on the bottom of a document that we had stuck to the wall. Good memory, sir.
Edit: here it is. One of the very first Johnny.Decimal numbers ever to exist.
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So I did end up reading this book and it still leaves a hollow spot for me. Aside from its classification of the two types of checklists and the situations where responsibility has to be rapidly diffused, I didnât really feel like the book had substance. It was a story of how someone adapted aviation best practices to surgery practices.
At least for me, it didnât immediately hint at:
- How this could related to personal knowledge use.
- Best practices for finding relevant checklists, even though it was a central point multiple times in different stories.
My experience with most bestseller non-fiction books of the last decade or so. None had much more to offer within its covers than the one big idea in the title and back cover blurb.
The idea is extremely compelling -
But rarely have I read a recent book that expanded on its idea in useful detail or with rigorous references. Which is odd, because to have had and applied such an idea surely the author must have had a lot of thoughts and experience?
So, I am a notes-first kind of person.
Everything in my system is either a note or a folder or a file. If a note is about a file, then the note and the file share the same name with a hyphen in it JD.ID-a, for example. If a note is about a folder then itâs an underscore. Iâm toying with the idea of an ellipses (JD.IDâŚa) being a checklist.
I would say a third of the book was story-telling about when a checklist was useful to someone else, a third of the book was story-telling about how the author interacted with the authorities and other surgical staff when discussing adapting checklists, and a third of the book was the authorâs thoughts on how to write a good checklist.
Because the audience was meant to be other surgeons reviewing âhow to have good cleanliness practices in an Operating Roomâ, the most detail ever elaborated on was how to not make a checklist exhausting to follow leading to its being ignored entirely.
Mostly, the book was an ad for a success story the author had with the WHO surgical-directing group, and was less about how to repeat that successâŚ
This is probably a necessary â though not sufficient â first rule in my new checklist for when Iâm browsing in bookstores: am I in the intended audience?