TDLR
- Know what you are designing: collections of stuff, focus on nouns.
- Rule stuff out
- Know your ‘givens’
- Know your tools? - umm…
I’m so bad with limits and boundaries that I have developed a fascination with how Octopuses relate to their tentacles
Collections (stuff) not Systems
Gazing in despair at my (e)wall of notes I thrashed around for some organising principles. Having once reorganised complex organisations along principles of systems thinking and business process orientation, I now look on my personal ‘system’ in terms of a stack of practices.
Fascinating, and such a good rabbit hole, but somehow still utterly bewildering in relation to the job in hand.
Then the blindingly obvious and often stated, struck home in force: “It’s about stuff. I’m trying to organise stuff”
I turned from thinking about systems to thinking about collections. Collections contain nouns.
Stop thinking in terms of verbs and stop thinking in terms of relationships - these are all about systems. Just think about the nouns. Later, you can worry about other things, but for now, be simple.
Rule stuff out
This was one that I had thought about - photos - out, novels - out, music - out.
But it is worth keeping up and refining, particularly at the edge-cases.
Novels out but some books in - what is it that makes them important to organise? Specifically, for me, now?
Know your givens
When considering how I should approach my collection of notes from client sessions I became rather obsessed about hierarchies and relationships.
I do have some reporting structures - I have some clients that come through an agency - they invoice the clients and I invoice the agency - so they want me to tell them, per company, what work I’ve done with which individuals and groups.
Having pretty much designed a super-sophisticated automated reporting structure I just had a series of wicked little thoughts to myself:
- I can’t be arsed to fill out this record - why would I want to?
- I know my clients really well, why do I need to add in all these details?
- It doesn’t actually take me much to compile this from scratch every month - couldn’t I just make it a bit easier?
Given that I am a sole practitioner who knows my clients…
I’ve ended up with files with a standard file name - I can find and group them really fast in Bear, and the addition of a couple of ‘utility’ tags gives me a really complete thinking environment throughout the cycles of my work - and it is dead simple.
Later I may forget details, so fine, there are notes for that in the overall index, but not in session notes, and I don’t have to include explicit links in the session records - I can just focus on the notes I actually need to maintain and improve the work I am doing and on what I need to best serve those clients.
On the value of knowing my tools
Some of the simplification came from knowing/playing with some of the tools I know I will be using.
One of the current impulses for organising my stuff is that I am migrating off Tana, and I have adopted a tool-set for writing, which I am enjoying and can make good use of.
Knowing that Bear does text searches, means that I can think in terms of a document ‘database’ rather than a relational database.
It has helped me to work out the minimum viable, and practically useful document names for the purpose.
But in other cases it hasn’t helped at all - rather it has muddied the waters and make me a little crazy, and I tend in that direction all to easily.
As much as possible I have found it best to avoid any thoughts of tools and aim for the simplest, the very minimal set of collections that cover the scope, and only use knowledge of tools for the occasional ‘aha’ moment.