I’ve been contemplating the Johnny Decimal system for a while, and I’m going to give it a try.
I have two challenges that are preventing me from moving forward and would like some experienced JDers to help me reason these out.
For brevity, I’ll stick with one challenge per thread: Challenge #1: Brainstorming Content
Johnny writes here that I should write down everything that I do, with the intent to derive areas & categories from them.
But if my goal is to create my own system where I know where everything is: Is it better to ask myself what documents I produce rather than what I do when generating this list?
For context, I’m an electrical engineer turned product strategist. I often take on coding and learning projects, and I produce strategy documents though I’m always evolving those documents & methods.
When listing “what I do”, it’s unclear how granular I should get, not to mention each “what I do” has MANY outputs.
- Product Manager (Strategy docs, Planning docs, Market Research, Product Metrics, etc.)
- Engineering Manager (Product Description docs, Product Specifications, etc.)
- Project Manager (Timelines, templates, checklists, etc.)
- Learner (Checklists, learning plans, project plans, projects themselves, etc.)
- Email Processor (this feels too granular, but if I follow the instructions verbatim, this would be one of them).
- etc…
Listing what I produce would give me:
- Product Strategy Documents
- Product Planning Documents
- Engineering Specifications
- Marketing Plans
- Project Schedules
- Skill Practice & References
- etc…
At first glance, this second list seems more concrete to me, and allows me to categorize a lot easier. However, I can see how creating this second list may impede me in the future when I find I must create a new form of document or output.
Would you please expound on the brainstorming part of this exercise for me? Thanks in advance!