If it needs to be in any current id then i would have chosen Therapy as well.
However, Therapy sounds like something temporary, like a treatment. Those aids are more permanent, at least in my view. Just like glasses.
I would have added a new id. But there is no more room in the section.
Another question for Johnny.
The pack has 13.41 for receipts. You explicitly list in 12.16 to store any receipts there.
In 14.22 you suggest storing software receipts. What is the reason that you didn’t also suggest to store software receipts in 13.41?
I think
13.41 would be general purchases; food, clothing etc.
12.16 would be warranties, receipts for large purchases or electrical purchases such as kitchen appliances, drills, hoover/vacuum, rug doctor,
13.41 would be software. my very very very limited IT knowledge would go no further than assuming this is for software licences such as Microsoft Office licence, virus protection…
I think that’s okay.
You can … but it might make more sense in some than others. I would probably tend to say, if you’ve got folders, put everything in a folder. And don’t worry if you’ve got some folders with only one thing in them.
This also depends on your OS. Windows splits files from folders in the view, even if they’re alphabetically adjacent. On a Mac, they all appear inline. (I think? I’m on my iPad now.)
Software just felt different enough. The receipt for some bit of software is very much in my online mind. Very distinct from the receipt for my new hammer, say.
There are receipts scattered throughout the system. Actually I didn’t realise just how many! Search your index for receipt and see. Life is full of receipts, it seems.
I am going through LA pack and also thinking about how to apply it for me, my husband, son, and (soon) daughter. In my current pre-LA system everything was shared, kinda like Travel category: all birthday certificates together, all taxes together, and everything prefixed with name initials. But there are separate categories “16 Son” and “17 Daughter” with ids 16.01 Health, 16.02 Name selection, 16.03 Daycare. So far, that’s all, just 3 IDs. So, my thoughts right now are:
. Though, I can see that in the future I will store their academic records separately. Perhaps it’s ok to store children’s docs in their own space right away…? (thinking out loud here, hehe)Hey, I have been working through something very similar. My children are 16 and 17 in JD. The idea is that the system will grow with them (and me, because I’ll always want to keep things about them if they’ll let me) when they reach adulthood. I have had to take a break from JD organising but should be back on it next week so I can share the system I am creating for my children then if you are interested?
Yep, very interested!
I’m interested in developing a standard solution for this, which we’ll document in a future version of the pack.
The simplest solution — which is the one we should be looking for in this context — feels like a duplication of category 11 🙋 Me & other living things.
It contains all of the human-specific stuff. Here’s a suggestion, but I don’t have kids so I’ll defer to our resident parents!
16 and call it the name of the person. 16 Jimmy for your boy Jimmy, or 16 Dad or whatever you like.This gives you 16, 17, 18, and 19 to use. I suggest if you’re a full-time carer for more than 4 people you need to expand this out to an area. Also, you’re a saint.
Within this category here are the headers that we defined.
1_.10 ■ Personal records 🗂️
1_.20 ■ Physical health & wellbeing 🫀
1_.30 ■ Mental health & wellbeing 🧠
1_.40 ■ Family 💑
16 Jimmy is going to contain about 50% of the stuff that your main 11 does.1_.50 ■ Friends, clubs, & organisations 🏑
1_.60 ■ Pets & other animals 🐓
11 and ignoring this.1_.70 ■ My brilliant career 🧑🍳
11.70 ■ My brilliant education 🧑🎓 or similar.1_.80 ■ Personal development & who I am 📚
That feels pretty good already. Parents, what do we think?
Particularly relevant to this thread. Join the Slack!
What is the recommended use for the QS:LA pack with the Workshop and Workbook? Use the QS:LA as a starter pack during discovery that comes with built-in categorization during categorization and building the system so you’re just adding your own things to other areas (and maybe other categories and IDs in area 10)? Or is the quick start pack somewhat redundant if I’m following the Workshop and/or Workbook? (Apologies if this would be better on a different thread or as it’s own post.)
I think most people should use our ‘life admin’ by default.
Like the tagline says: we spent hundreds of hours thinking about it so that you don’t have to.
Then use its structure as inspiration, with the workbook/workshop, to design the rest of your life. Because LA specifically only covers the stuff that we all do.
It doesn’t cover your hobbies or niche interests or side hustle or whatever else. Use the workbook for that.
(I’m not sure whether to start a new topic for this, or hijack this thread for a new question. Sorry if I got it wrong!)
Context:
I am just now getting started with my personal JDex, and as my tool of choice, I am considering a move from Workflowy to Obsidian (Bear is Mac-only 
).
Situation:
On Windows, all the emojis in folder names wreaked havoc with my system (e.g. some invalid character between the two emojis at the end of 11.70, and many other places), so I am now starting fresh with the no special characters structure. Then I have meticulously copied all the Markdown files to create your JDex in Bear into each corresponding subfolder in that structure.
Question: That was tedious — am I doing it right??
I am surprised that you use emojis so much (given the barebones monospace style you use everywhere), so you need to know that they are causing problems in non-Mac systems. May I suggest working with a Windows system and working out those kinks? I don’t know, maybe it’s just Windows being odd, but you have to consider that 72% run Windows so it’s not negligible.
I also discover that Obsidian wants to show folders before files; that’s normal and good, but it causes the introduction markdown file (1) to be listed below the rest of the content (2).
– is there any smarter way to do this? I’m new to Obsidian so maybe I’m doing it wrong?
To overcome this issue, I chose to put the JDex slips into their own folder in the 00-09 Area. It isn’t a perfect solution, but you may still consider it.
As always with Obsidian, “There’s a Plug-in for that!” … Look about half way down this thread: Same sort order for folder and files - #33 by andrewheekin - Feature requests - Obsidian Forum
(I linked to this thread rather than directly to the plug-in as it puts it in the exact context of the challenge you are trying to resolve. The default behavior of the plug-in is to co-mingle files and folders, which is what you are after.)
Here is the plug-in if you want to cut to the chase: GitHub - SebastianMC/obsidian-custom-sort: Take full control over the order and sorting of folders and notes in File Explorer in Obsidian
Unrelated to the above: where would you put a list of movies you’d like to watch, or the correct™ order of the Star Wars movies, or your house rules for RoboRally?
May I propose these?
15.60 ■ Movies, tv series, games 🎬🎲
15.61 Movies and series 🎬
15.62 Games 🕹️🎲
A better plug-in for this, assuming the note has an identical name to the folder containing it, is Obsidian folder notes.
It makes the note ‘disappear’. Clicking the folder title now reveals the note. Real nice.
Will come back to Windows issues in a sec @torbengb, just making toast!
So, yes, this is the right place, and thanks for the feedback. I’ll tell the story.
None of this is me complaining! I might sound like I’m complaining. I’m not. It’s just fun to explain how this sort of thing explodes in complexity; I find this fascinating.
This is the first Quick Start, so there’s a lot of figuring out that you do. It sounds simple right? Create a folder full of markdown files. LOL no. It’s funny how these things just become complex like they have a mind of their own. You birth this idea and then it runs off and becomes a toddler and you have to try to control it.
We really liked the emoji when we were building this system. The audience I had in mind was not your well-established JD nerd. (Hi, that’s you.) So we wanted to make it friendly and, personally, I find that the emoji really help my brain ‘anchor’ to a category or a header. Especially when you ‘zoom out’, e.g. the system map.
And computers are boring enough. I knew the emoji might cause some discussion but we just decided. Emoji: helpful, and fun. They’re in.
Oh, but it turns out they look like shit on Windows! Because Windows is boring![1] (I do have a Windows VM that I test all this in.) I tried to get a screenshot but my VM isn’t booting. Trust me … emoji in Windows Explorer is like being an auditor at Deloitte.
Update: it booted. I mean look at this. Come on.
So we created the without-emoji folders, and tested those. Turns out some services (Dropbox, and probably others) don’t even support the Unicode ‘black square’ ■ that we use in headers. Oof. So we created a variant without those.
Alright, are we done with variants? Nope. As you’ll see there are a bunch of text/markdown files for your JDex. So there’s a version that plays nice with Bear, which has #Tags with/spaces, and &, allowed# as long as you close the tag. And one with Obsidian’s tags that don’t allow any spaces, or an ampersand, or a comma. And a plain text version with no tags. And each of these files has different content.
Because there’s no such thing as a [[wiki link]] in a text file, so why would I put them in there? They just clutter the text, so I delete those. Oh and then I learn that Obsidian doesn’t need the # Level 1 markdown header at the top of the file, because in the default configuration it uses the name of the file as the header, so I delete those.
And then I learn that most Obsidian users don’t use #tags for this structure anyway, so we create a version with folders, that has your JDex files in those folders.
And then I learn that it is possible to import to Apple Notes, as long as you feed it a very dumb version of HTML. So we create those. That was painful, let me tell you.[2]
At every point when I’m modifying ~160 markdown files I have to be very, very careful not to mess something up. Because I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but we are meticulous. It would kill me to release something with a lazy mistake.
And I’m not modifying them all by hand, that’s impossible. I’m usually doing it with a regex in VSCode. So I check and double check everything, always sure I’ve introduced a mistake.[3]
Okay, so let’s do some really unscientific maths. Here’s our possible permutations:
That’ll do. That’s ~24 possible permutations; 24 × 160 markdown files.
3,840 markdown files. Ouch.
So obviously it’s impossible to give everyone all the combinations. And nor would I want to — I’m already concerned that the folder structure is too complicated. Remember, I’m pitching this at people who have stumbled by my site, people who aren’t necessarily nerds at all. So a folder with 24 permutations that you have to choose from is a nightmare.
Oh and don’t forget I copy the system manual.pdf to each instance of the 11.02 folder. And version.txt. As soon as I mailed everyone to say that the update was available I realised I’d forgotten to do that, so I frantically updated it and re-zipped and uploaded the files. But someone out there has a v1.1.0 system with v1.0.2 manual and that kills me to know.
Oh and when I zipped everything up for v1.1.0, using the same method that I did for v1.0.2, the zip file didn’t work on Windows. I have to compress it with special software otherwise non-Mac users see the Mac’s ‘resource fork’ files. Zip is the only natively cross-platform format. Windows can do 7z, and Mac can do gzip, but neither can do the other out of the box.
So now there are two compressed files available for download.
7,680.
And that’s why you get what you get. 
It turns out that the cook emoji 
is a ZWJ sequence combining 
Person, Zero Width Joiner and 
Cooking (links to Emojipedia which has gone to the dogs, but I couldn’t find anything better).
A bunch of other emoji will also be combinations, but for some reason, some systems — Windows — really don’t like this one. And so you just see a person and a frying pan. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So that’s great.
This has been an interesting experiment. Here’s what I’ve learned, and what I’ll be doing for the Quick Start: Small business pack.
Phew. That was cathartic. I hope it was helpful? Doesn’t solve your problem! 
But at least you know why.
Don’t write me if you love Windows. I’m just joking … kinda. ↩︎
There is zero information online about the format of HTML that Notes will accept. Nothing. This was all trial-and-error. ↩︎
In creating v1.1.0 I had the brilliant idea to check this whole folder in to git. That saved my ass a few times. ↩︎
Wow this was a journey!
