Indexing - Trying to get round the corner

J.D Concepts 11 Core concepts
1

Hi,

Found the JD a few days ago on night shift and love the idea. I use insynchq to keep my dektop/laptop/VMs synced.
The folder name I created was Alexandria and everything fits in it following the JD process.

00-09_Administration
10-19_Personal_Admin_and_Life
20-29_Work_and_Professional
30-39_Fitness
40-49_Personal_Development
50-59_Ethical_Hacking
60-69_Computing_and_Systems_Administration
70-79_Reference_and_Knowledge_Base
80-89_Miscellaneous_Temporary
90-99_Archive

My question: Is this structure too deep or it it the right size (down 3):

60-69_Computing_and_Systems_Administration
├── 60_Hardware
│   ├── 60.01_Laptops
│   │   ├── Aarrd-001
│   │   └── Aarrd-002
│   │       ├── 20240628_laptop_G16.txt
│   │       └── 20250822_bookmarks.html
│   ├── 60.02_Desktops

Any comments appreciated.

Regards

K

2

Your 60.01 structure looks fine, but I’d say that your areas are likely too broad. I’d encourage you to try to compress them a bit.

You’ve used them all up. So what happens when you get a new hobby, or something? You always want to leave room to grow.

30-39 Fitness stands out. An entire area for fitness? I reckon that could probably be merged with 40-49, making it general personal development, some of which is fitness.

Similarly 50-59 & 60-69.

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3

Johnny,

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I did aim to fill them out, and you are right I need to be aware that don’t need to.

With your comments I can easily merge the two 30-39 and 40-49 and to be honest I can also merge 40-49, 50-59, and 60-69 to get two.

Thanks again.

:slight_smile:

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4

I think a bunch of things around nesting areas just clicked for me in reading this thread… :scream:

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5

Yes, as JD said, 30-39 is very broad, I have no idea what ethical hacking and computer and systems administration is but I’d say even they could probably fit in the same category.

6

And, uh, the more I think about it, the more I think I’m gonna need to go to 3 levels (XX.XX.XX) for my System.

Take 12 :house_with_garden: Where I live and how I get around for example…

For me, 12.10 will be “House”. Now, to be able to manage everything for my house, and have referenceable ID’s where I can group stuff together, I’ll need a 3rd level of ID (12.10.XX).

Same for 11 :person_beard:t2: Me & Other Living Things.

11.10 will be Health. So I’ll need that 3rd level to be able to create references where I need them…

Now, I realise that I could use the Title to group stuff together, like:

11.10 Health - Supplements
11.11 Health - Gym
11.12 Health - “Health Issue 1”
11.13 Health - …
11.20 Personal Documents - Doc. Set 1
11.21 Personal Documents - Doc. Set 2
11.22 Personal Documents - …
11.30 ….
11.31

But that seems like a bit of a wall of text when viewing area, and I’d rather be able to “drill” down and only see what I need to. It also only gives me max. 10 locations (that will get used up QUICKLY!) instead of max. 100…

I think I might have over complicated this by using WorkFlowy for my JDEX!!! :joy:

7

Can you give some examples of how you envision needing that third level?

8

Sure. :grinning_face:

So, If 12=Where I live and how I get around, then, within that, I would definitely need to add a section for Home (12.11, for arguments sake).

Within that, there would be too many potential sections within Home to not have a reference/ID.

I can kind of see the benefit in not having ID’s, and just organising everything alphabetically in Home.

Hmmmmm…. I’m starting to see how this should work. And how, having ID’s for everything at the lower level is potentially a bad idea, since it locks the structure in.

Say I had a folder (for example) for “Manuals”, with no ID. I could start filling that with manuals, until it became logical to split manuals again (say, to split it into “Manuals - Electrical” and “Manuals - Domestic Appliances”.

Yeah - I can kind of see how you need to allow for some flexibility at the lower levels, which, is removed if you start numbering everything… :thinking:

Some more thinking needed for me here I think!

9

It looks like you’re really trying to understand this system and make it your own.

I believe your insights here are leading more toward the ‘natural’ way of using a JD system. It is indeed about finding the balance between getting things organised, but not making things brittle by categorizing too much up front.

At the core of JD is the ‘no more than 10 options’ principle. There are 10 areas, and in each area there are ten categories. There should be no overlap between their scopes, so that you make two easy decisions in sequence, and then you know you’re in the right place. Then you get the IDs, and the fact that there are only 100 available (usually) means you should think about this category in a way that doesn’t need more than 100 subdivisions!

(there are obviously exceptions. There are provisions for when a domain really does need more IDs, or when an ID really does need subfolders. Usually these exceptions are for things that repeat over time at a high rate. For example: orders and jobs for a business will number more than 100; tickets from an incident management system should use the ticket number from that system as their ID).

But in general, when thinking how to use IDs, think about how to split up this category in less (often much less) than 100 divisions. And you can optionally go even further, as the Life Admin System does, and create sub-groups using the .x0 IDs as headers. I find this interesting, since it again presents you with a choice between ten alternatives.

(This is adding another level as you proposed – the difference is to not then allow 100 sub-ids, but only 9 under each header. Keep it limited! This is about reducing choice, not expanding it.)

Let me apply this to your example of Home being a section within Where I live and how I get around. If you want to provide yourself space up front to be able to enumerate all possible attributes of your Home, then you will run out of IDs very soon. But the IDs are not IDs of attributes of your house. Maybe ID is not a helpful name. Rather, they are buckets to help you navigate in three easy steps to the place you know for sure something new should be filed. Or where you know for sure you will find something you filed earlier. Hence, the Life Admin System has ID’s like 12.11 Official Documents and 12.14 Inventory. Not an ID for each document relating to your house. Not even an ID for each contract for each house you ever rented. Just a single ID. If you put all those contracts in that folder with the date at the front, it’s easy to find them.

From what I can gather about WorkFlowy, it’s an outliner aimed at effortless nesting and branching to avoid breaking the train of your thought. A JDex is different: it’s a stable set of identifiers which you can refer to in your outliner/notetaking app, but equally in your email subject lines … It’s not something you should be expanding or deepening, the point is to build up ‘muscle memory’ for where things are in it, and for that its structure needs to stabilize.

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10

Really informative stuff, hans. I appreciate it.

Feels like I’m trying to be far to detailed, and granular, when the key is to keep things broad. The perfectionist in me (anxiety?) tries to avoid ambiguity at all costs. That’s something I’d need to work on…

Maybe if I can train my brain to see flexibility, or opportunity, where I see ambiguity? :joy:

11

I went over so many iterations as I was designing my system. I’d spend days mulling over the layout, come up with what felt perfect, and then discover some detail that wasn’t quite accounted for and start the whole process again. I think for me the thing to learn was/is: shortening that cycle: getting up after half an hour to go for a walk and let the subconscious do its thing. Instead of after two days. Invariably if I take physical distance like that, I see the big picture again and the details I was fixated on become less important.

12

What is, “was/is”? I think that’s a new concept to me… But I certainly recognise “letting the subconscious do its thing”. I call that “marinating”. Letting a thought or concept marinate, then coming back to it and see what my brain has made of it in the background.

Perfectionism is definitely a curse, and I’m having to let go of that in order to get any type of useable system built.

13

ah, I meant: this was what I needed to learn in order to make progres on my system, but it still is something I need to learn, because I’m not cured of perfectionism yet!

14

Remember, @Patch, that those categories were very carefully designed by us in the context of the Life Admin System (LAS). Each contains a very dense, curated selection of IDs. Those IDs were designed to be crammed in to those categories.

If you’re not using those IDs, then the categories might not make total sense as a standalone thing. Now, they probably do – I was using something very similar in my pre-LAS life – but it feels worth noting.

In the context of LAS, we encourage extending the end of IDs to get that 3rd level that you seek.

15

I think I will be using the LAS categories.