As I’m staring at my life for the purpose of defining my Scope, the thing that keeps bubbling to the surface is my fledgling home-based Etsy business.
What supplies have I already bought? How much did I spend? Which vendor(s) do I use? When should I expect my order? and the biggest one, WHERE DID I PUT THAT THING?
How well would this system work for organizing the shelves, bins, totes, boxes, cubbies, bottles, etc. where I’ve put supplies? I’m imagining my shelves full of neatly numbered and labeled boxes… but then what? I could make an index for all those things, but how will it actually work?
Is Johnny.Decimal the right system for this use case?
Hey, digitally I use Xero for the finance side of work (I’m a bookkeeper). Then Dropbox (pdfs, documents) and Evernote (for notes).
The Sidetracked Home Executives (very old but good book) have a great system for managing home inventory, which you could make your own with JD for your business. There are some good YouTube videos out there too.
The main time I used this in ‘the real world’ was when we moved house. And even then that was just one ID per box.
I think your success here depends on how rigorous you are in keeping it up to date. Which applies equally to any database, right? You could – with or without JD – make a neat record in Excel or Airtable of everything you had and where it was, and that’d be great. For about six minutes.
But then if you move things around, use things, buy things, sell things – whatever – and don’t update your database, well, now you’ve got an out-of-date database.
This isn’t easy. We’re just not trained as humans to go recording everything we touch in a database.
What JD gets you in this scenario is a quick link to the item, box, shelf, whatever. Rather than describing it in long words – the blue widget in the red box on the middle shelf – you can just stick a little sticker on it, 34.62, and use that as your reference to the item.
2 Likes
Thank you – this is exactly the thought process I needed.
2 Likes
Let us know if this works.
Some of the very first ‘programs’ that I used to try to make were to track the contents of my room. I was 12 years old and the computer was an Amiga 500. 
1 Like
I’m trying to organize my office right now and I realize that I only need JD for things I have trouble finding, which tend to be things that I almost never use. Anything I use semi-regularly I can find within 30 seconds. So I’m going to given an ID to a storage cabinet that I open about every 6 months to look for an uncommon computer cable or audio connector. I usually spend 30 minutes going through everything in the cabinet only to realize that I might have once had that cable, but don’t have it now, and I need to buy a new one. If I make a list of everything in the cabinet and put it in my index I can hopefully avoid this process in the future.
3 Likes