Separate "11 Self" from Life Admin area

I’m cracking my brain over this for some time now, so want to hear the opinion or experiences of the community.

The Life Admin area predominantly covers the household that I want to share with my significant other. However, the Self section is almost entirely about oneself. In the current default, Johnny suggests to add a suffix after each ID, for example +HUS and +WIF.

This is fine when all is shared, but I don’t need to share all that stuff in the first place. My resume, applications, job searches etc. for example.

In my view these are some alternatives with their (dis)advantages:

Option 1 . Use suffix in shared Life Admin section (11.xx+HUS / 11.xx+WIF) - JD default

  • Each ID is available just once, nu duplication
  • All related documents are near each other
  • Impossible to share Life Admin Area (10-19) and categories (specifically 11) without personal documents
  • Difficult to share Life Admin without personal IDs

Option 2. Use 11. Self for one person as “11. Husband” and another for “16. Wife”

  • Completely separate IDs, so sharing only shared categories is possible
  • Life Admin area can be shared by category
  • Duplication of IDs

Option 3. Move section 11 to another area (e.g. 21 and 22)

  • Life Admin area can be shared completely
  • Personal category can be private
  • Duplication of IDs

Any thoughts from you?

FWIW I have created the sections and IDs of 10-19 area that are needed for the family members for whom it makes sense beneath their ID in 11. For example “11.41 The best partner of all” could contain the whole 11 subtree except for the 11.40 part. Or maybe just the 11.20s and 11.30s.

I’m still not sure if I’ll keep it but so far it is easy to find things because the IDs are the same, just their “parent” changes (directory, ring binder).

Thanks. I’m curious how you manage sharing. Do you share the whole Life Admin area (10-19) or parts of it?

I have my JDex files in iCloud and share the Life Admin with my spouse (but we would like to keep the 11. Self category private for both of us.

I use Syncthing to synchronize specific folders with some ignore directives to exclude specific sub folders. However living in Germany means “the bureaucracy” is trying to kill you with tons of paper so sharing that is as simple as pulling out the properly labelled (area, category, id) ring binder from the shelf. :wink:

Yeah this is definitely an issue that needs an ‘official’ solution. I was just chatting to Lucy about it the other day.

My initial feeling is that option 2 is the way: give each additional member of the family their own category, duplicating 11.

But let’s hear what others do, kick the idea round a bit. Who has actually implemented something like this? How’s it working out for you?

High level requirements

Here’s what I think we’re trying to solve for. In no particular order, and probably not exhaustive.

  • Separation of documentation, for when Alex doesn’t want to see all of Charlie’s stuff.
  • Enabling separation of technology, for when A doesn’t want C’s stuff synchronised to their laptop.
  • Applies to any immediately-close family member: partner, spouse, child.
    • That is, you share a house and daily life, so categories 12 … 15 are probably shared.
  • Consider the situation when Charlie goes to uni. How do they take their system with them?
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A possibly dumb question: since all of Life Admin fits in the 10 area, why not duplicate it if the system will be shared by a family? Use 10 for shared items only, 20 for me-only items, 30 for spouse, etc. As long as you’ve got fewer than eight kids, you’re good.

Because you do want to share much of the rest of the structure?

I guess that’s the core question: what’s shared, and what isn’t? I imagine most/all of 12 Where I live & how I get around 🏡 is?

There’s only one house.

But what if Alice has her own car?

So how do we indicate what’s central/shared, while simultaneously giving people their own stuff, while maintaining sense and order?

Hmmm. If we all live in the same house, it goes in the shared folder. If some of us live in one house and some elsewhere (say two kids have moved out and one has not) then the shared house is shared and the other residences are in their people’s folders. Cars follow the main users: a family car used by whoever gets there first goes in shared, Alice’s car that only she uses in ordinary circumstances goes in her folder.

I’m sure I’m oversimplifying.

This is the question though: what exactly do we mean by ‘her folder’?

Her complete system, that she has on her own laptop?

Her copy of the entirely shared family system?

Or some hybrid of the two (more likely)?

Her area. Shared is 10, Mom is 20, Pop is 30, brother Fred is 40, Alice is 50, sister Jenny is 60.

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My files are currently organized by family members for this very reason - the ease of sharing/archival. I have all files in Google Drive. Kid’s school stuff, health records, memorabilia go to the respective kid’s directories. Wife’s stuff goes under her name. Her whole directory is shared with her.

Common items (house, cars, finances) are in “Other” folder which has stuff that’s related to multiple members of my family. Nobody cares to access these files and, if they do, I can share a specific document.

But I’m moving away from this system. There are too many inconsistencies and ambiguity. In a sense, you have to maintain a separate system for each family member. I want to consolidate uniform information in one place. E.g. “medical visits” and “prescriptions” shall be categories in “Health” area rather than dispersed in 6 places per family member.

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Thank you all for your initial thoughts and insights. Like Johnny, I’m watching this thread for more input until I decide how to structure the personal categories.

I’m using option 1 with one difference: only “totally-not-me” get + tag. Non-tagged ids are default and for my or common files.

Reasons and implications:

  • It is not shared structure right now. I act as house bureaucrat, so all important files go to me. I actually request them as a proper nagging government official :grin:
  • Nevertheless, I treat 11 as not private by default. There are certain ids there that I haven’t used yet, like 11.32, that should be me-only, but in general I see such ids as exceptions. So, if I will share 11, I don’t see much problem. Same for 12 and 13.
  • Now, about splitting the system. As you can guess, I’m fairly optimistic about my family life, so splitting only applies for giving children-related ids to them. Here might be a small potential problem: because I store common and my docs together in “default” ids, what if while splitting I’ll need to give common stuff too? This is hypothetical for now and I can’t come up with a good example. Feels like it something that will be treated on case per case basis when the time comes.

Speaking metaphorically, my digital LA is almost equivalent to paper LA, which is sitting on the shelf free for everyone. Thus:

  • shared to everyone in family who should have access (3 years old should not, lol)
  • when that 3 years old grow up, he’ll just grab his ids. If he needs something from common, please request a copy, hehe.
  • for me-only private ids which are few in number, I’d need some safe box with key? Digitally it’s easy to represent with encrypted directories.

I’m a single parent and don’t share my life admin with a partner. My children have different fathers and very different needs. For example, my daughter has significant medical needs, whereas my son doesn’t but has records in other areas. It’s essential for me to keep their records separate to ensure that one parent doesn’t accidentally receive information about the other child, which is private and not their concern.

While I respect Johnny’s recommendation of using +WIF, I’ve chosen to use initials instead. For instance, if Johnny Noble Decimal were my child (no thanks, Johnny—two kids are more than enough for me as you know!), I’d label documents with JND at the end.

I’ve had personal conversations with Johnny outside the forum, and he suggested using +WIF and keeping family under category 11. However, I decided it’s better for our circumstances to use separate areas for their records. While extending the end of the system works well in general, I think it’s worth considering individual circumstances. If privacy is a concern and you want some records to be accessed only by you, assigning distinct categories (e.g., 16, 17) for each family member may work better.

My current setup for keeping my children’s records separate is still a work in progress, but I can see it being effective as I build and adjust it. Whether this approach works will depend on how many records you need to keep for each person and your specific situation.

Since not all categories are needed yet, I’ve structured their ID folders an extra level deeper. This makes navigating their folders easier and minimises physical distractions. This setup isn’t finalised and hasn’t been tested long-term, but it’s where I am at the moment.

I’ll attach a photo to show my progress.

Here is a photo of my current layout. PS I can hear planes flying across my house! I wonder if they are trying to catch a baddy!

For what it’s worth, I’m trying the following, which is a take on Option 3:

Consider a married couple each with their own business and a drama club they run together.

Person A                         Person B
=============================================   
10-19 Life Admin   ===   10-19 Life Admin
20-29 Biz Admin    =/=   20-29 Biz Admin
30-39 Biz Product  =/=   30-39 Biz Product
40-49 Personal     =/=   40-49 Personal
50-59 Drama Club   ===   40-49 Drama Club

10-19 is shared (i.e. synced and identical for both people).

The next three are numbered identically in each person’s system, but are not shared. Finally, 50-59 is shared/synced.

The principle: the shape of the system is agreed on/shared by all members, but what each section actually contains is specific to each person. However, the members can’t just make new areas for themselves. Only certain agreed-upon sections may be ‘overshadowed’ by a local replacement. It’s reminiscent of object-oriented inheritance in programming terminology. Or the Unicode Private Use Area, if I my use an even geekier example.

This has a slight advantage over making an area for each member, since only one area is used up for each member, instead of, say six areas for a family of six.

To the original question: If there were children, they could have a 40-49 Personal to arrange as they see fit. What is more, this family could agree to split the admin into two areas, one that was unambiguously shared (household admin) and one that was person-bound and not shared. That has the disadvantage of straying farther and farther from standard JD layout.

I echo @aviskase’s sentiment that in a household, the most practical is to have it all be based on trust and delegation and not overengineer it. Hence no need to split things up too much. At the same time, @Jayde20’s case illustrates when that might not be sufficient.

Taking my example above, we could go more fine-grained within 10-19 to control what gets synced to each person. I’m using Syncthing so I can use ignore files to control patterns of filenames which get synced to each device. As per Johnny’s description of the problem:

This actually takes us pretty far I think. Assuming privacy/security is not an issue (i.e. this doesn’t work for @Jayde20 ):

  • Alex, on his device, adds an ignore rule for the 10-19 IDs which only relate to Charlie (or for a +CH suffix or something). And vice versa. Now they don’t get each other’s stuff. Maybe there’s a shared NAS or server with a full copy so they can still access each other’s files occasionaly for admin purposes.
  • big datasets are in separate areas, which are not synced between Alex and Charlie at all (or maybe they are synced encrypted, as a backup).
  • when Charlie goes to uni, they don’t have to do anything: everything related to them is already synced!

However, now there’s a security issue: Alex’s personal data are now on a laptop in another city, lying around on library desks or connecting to insecure wifi networks in cafes. At this point, it might be better for Charlie to break the sync connection for 10-19, and delete everything not relevant to their new indepentent life.

And, finally, while this is possible with Syncthing ignore patterns, it gets ugly with more complicated patterns. Imagine trying to not share most of Alice’s ‘stuff’, but she does want to share the paperwork for her car, since Mum and Dad take care of the maintenance … it’s probably possible with careful ordering of ignore/include rules, but not something for your average user.

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Definitely worth a try.

I’m leaning towards option 3, specifically the way suggested by @Hans. Have one personal area or category for the personal stuff, that does not need to be shared (not specifically shielded, but more “my wife does not need access to my stuff”). My purpose is to share anything that we both need, but physically on paper and digitally.

However, there are some IDs that might be worth sharing like (copies of) my ID, birth certificate etc.

Please continue adding to this discussion. I like where this is going.

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I’m also leaning towards #3, like @hans and @trintera. I have a shared folder that syncs with my wife and, unfortunately, I can’t do fancy sharing with Synology Drive. She doesn’t want everything that I save on her machine, so I have to split out things like 11.32 journaling into a different folder specifically for me. Also, the current iteration is focused on one person (I’m thinking 11.41-11.44) so I have to do some tweaking to change those so that we both have a common view of things.

@trintera’s Option 3 is the closest to what I’ve come up with. Although in my system each person has templated area with unique IDs.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to this problem. (see Setting up my kids for success. Planning my system with future generations in mind.

Specifically I want a template for my kids to grow into. After a month or so of use this has solved most of my “where should this go” questions. For instance, yesterday my daughter had an eye exam and I was very quickly able to save her perscription in p52.13 Vision Records & Notes

I find it easy to conceptually differientate between things that relate to all of us and things that relate to one person. Sometimes the difference can be subtle, but generally I can come to a clear solution.

I have run into some issues when I need to store information that applies to more than one person. This is where the p17 Family, Friends, & Neighbors area comes into play. If it can conceptuall be applied to more than one of us it lives here. For instance summer camp registration and receipts can be found in p17.10 Childcare, Afterschool Care, & Summercamp This needs some work eventually as it leads to ambiguity.

Our entire system is saved/synced with Google Drive. Eventually it would be relatively easy to modify access.

Here is my AC.ID plan.
note the “p” infront of the Area is for personal. This is how I differientiate our systems, personal and business.

p00-09 ⚙️ SYSTEM
p10 ⚙️ Family Life Admin - Management
p11 🔨 Things, Pets, & Plants
p12 🏠 Housing, Vehicles
p13 💰 Finance, Legal, & Insurance
p14 💻 Digital Life
p15 ✈️ Entertainment & Travel
p16 📚 Media, Documents & Recipes
p17 📇 Family, Friends, & Neighbors
p19 📦 Archive
p20-29 👩 Name
 ├─ p20 ⚙️ ___ Management
 ├─ p21 🗂️ ID, Certifications, & History
 ├─ p22 ⚕️ Health & Wellness
 ├─ p23 🏫 Learn, Work, Plan, & Dream
 ├─ p24 🧩 Hobbies & Recreation
 ├─ p25 ⚒️ Projects
 ├─ p26 🌏 Online Presence
 ├─ p27 - 
 ├─ p28 - 
 ├─ p29 📦 Archive
p30-39 👨 Name
p40-49 👦 Name
p50-59 👧 Name

I hope this is helpful. Any thoughts?

p.s. does anyone know how to make windows show emoji correctly? Sometimes they’re nice and colorful and other times they’re just black & white line drawings. :person_facepalming: