My JD system is still quite new so I’m still finding new things to fit into it (despite a thorough discovery process, promise). This week I wanted to find a place within my system to plan out childcare during the summer holidays, but it wasn’t immediately clear where this should go.
It only felt like an “ID-sized” thing and clearly comes under the Personal area in my system. Several existing categories seemed relevant: 11 CTO (stuff for me), 12 People (including IDs for my kids education), 14 Travel (it’s when we take holidays after all) and 15 Events (where I have IDs to plan for birthdays and other recurring celebrations).
Thinking it through for a while, as the task is shared between my wife and I, it didn’t belong in 11 CTO. Similarly, it didn’t fit in with any of the categories in 12 People as it didn’t belong to just my wife and I didn’t want to duplicate information within my two children’s categories. We don’t always travel during a school holiday so 14 Travel didn’t make sense.
This left 15 Events, which made more sense the more I thought about it, given that school holidays are a known recurring event that happens each year. I considered having an ID for each specific holiday (summer, Christmas etc), but decided that was excessively detailed as we would rarely be planning more than one holiday period at a time. Also, once a holiday is done the the ID can be cleared as we won’t need this information again, therefore there was no need to have a new ID for each year.
The ultimate result was a single ID 15.17 School holidays, which exists as an Apple Note I have shared with my wife. Overall, I just felt this was a good example of how to work with a JD system: taking some time to think things through, finding the right answer for you and keeping IDs relatively broad (as highlighted by JD recently).
