Car accidents and other items crossing ID boundaries

10-19 Concepts 14 Build your system
1

New here. First of all, many thanks to John for a great system and a great guide. I read the site contents. I bought the starter kit hoping that it would answer my question but it didn’t.

I plan to have areas based on my five core values in order of priority:

  • 10-19 Health
  • 20-29 People
  • 30-39 Living conditions
  • 40-49 Money
  • 50-59 Fun

10-19 includes things I need to run my body - fitness, nutrition, prescriptions, doctor’s visits, medical procedures, test results, etc.

20-29 includes relationships - information about other people except what falls into other categories (but that’s for the closest family only - I track my children’s health but not friends’). Children’s school stuff goes here.

30-39 includes external things I need to live - house, cars, appliances, electronics, various purchases, etc. Purchase records, deeds, titles, registration, repairs and maintenance records, warranty, shopping lists, routines (perhaps, under 03 or 05) etc.

40-49 includes everything related to money - bank info, financial accounts, investment, bills, budgets, retirement planning, subscriptions and memberships, insurance, etc.

50-59 includes other stuff like vacations, travel, reading, movies, music, hobbies, various interests, etc.

So far so good. Notice that I placed “Insurance” under “Money” and not under respective insured item - health, car, house, etc. This is different from the “Life Admin” structure from the QuickStart and from what many people do. These are the reasons:

  1. All types of insurance have similar structure of items to track: Policies, Claims, Quotes. They are renewed periodically - it makes sense to organize them by year-month of renewal.
  2. Same insurance policy may cover more than one item. E.g. all my cars are under the same policy. Health insurance covers all family members, etc. And ultimately, insurance is not about your health or your car, it’s really about money, if you think about it.

But then someone in your family has a car accident. How would you track it? I’m looking for ideas.

It would include a few items that belong across all areas except “Fun”:

  • Claim under Money - Insurance - Claims
  • Repair records under Cars
  • Medical records under Health
  • The person’s driving records under People

I plan to keep these records in respective categories but link them to the claim somehow. E.g. I’d like to see ALL repairs to my car in one category, regardless of whether they were related to an insurance claim or not. Same for medical treatments. But I’d like to hear how other people deal with this kind of situation.

Sorry for a long post. I thought the details may be helpful. Since my approach is slightly different from the QuickStart template, it may also be useful to others.

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I really like your approach, its very similar to the way i started projecting my JD system a couple of years ago. (at the time there was the old site, more work oriented, the ideas/definitions of ID, category, etc were different, and life admin didn’t exist)

I dont know if or how are you keeping an index, but if you use some notes app, you could link notes between each other. I think its called backlink (altought not all programs have that functionality). For example, on Joplin or in Obsidian you can.

If you have a pure filesystem, you could use links (shortcut) to the respective folders/items. These links could even have an ID, maybe even using the standard zeros philosophy

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Thanks for your reply. I use Obsidian for notes. I’m still experimenting with a way to maintain the index. I totally see the need for it. Tiago Forte emphasized the importance of replicating the folder Names across the systems - notes, file system, email, down to capitalization. It’s convenient to have consistent naming and hierarchy across the systems.

I store all files in Google Drive, and my Obsidian vault is my Google Drive/My Drive directory. Obsidian does not like Windows shortcuts - it sees them as .lnk files, and they don’t work as links. But Google Drive shortcuts appear as regular folders and files. Obsidian allows links to files but not to directories. But I can create a link to some top-level note in the directory I need to jump there in Obsidian.

I may add the links in the 04 category or folder.

Thanks for your ideas.

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I resolved the index issue the one note per id way. I started with a single dedicated index note, but that means doing all things twice.

Ultimately, I’ve resolved using my notes as my filesystem.
All i have are JD notes inside Joplin (but Obsidian would work also), and any file that is not raw text, is attached/embedded inside one note with the ID. That way everything is under an ID (wich is the purpose of J.D).
Then the whole notes program is synched. (so when i sync notes between devices, im also synching files)

So instead of having a real folder structure, its all “virtualized” inside the notes app.

Here is an example i did for a work project, this one is abandoned as i changed to another job position, but the same idea (all files inside joplin) is what i use for my personal data still today

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Thanks for sharing. I love peeking into other people’s ways of organizing things. I’ll take a closer look. But I already see some commonalities with my system. I also use my whole file system as Obsidian vault. So, all my scans and screenshots automatically become Obsidian notes. I don’t even bother to attach them to an MD file. Obsidian opens PDF and images natively.

I still see a value in maintaining the index as a document, in case I can’t access my file system or Obsidian (which is often the case). I’m trying Dynalist to plan and document the ID structure. It’s an outliner by the same company that makes Obsidian. I could use an MD note in Obsidian or a Google Doc - it’s a matter of convenience and accessibility.

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