Tada! My first draft Johnny.Decimal system (and some personal reflection)

J.D Concepts 14 Build your system
1

Hi everyone. I’ve reached that point where I have a skeleton structure for my system, and I’d love some feedback. I’ll share it in the next post, but first - and I can’t believe I’m doing this - I want to share a note I wrote to myself that I think outlines why I need something like JD. I’m very rarely this open online.

Background

I forget more than I retain. I have a poor memory, which means that I need to rely on a prosthetic memory (a phrase I saw on here which perfectly describes what I need).

My current system is poor. I have tried to implement PARA but this has largely failed because I’ve ended up with four well-defined categories, with chaos underneath. I still can’t find anything, I’m not maintaining the system and it’s expanding and becoming overwhelming.

I am not skilled in note-taking. I either don’t take notes at all during meetings, write them in a paper notebook and never look back, or throw them somewhere in the chaos system in OneNote. Often, in the heat of the moment, I can’t decide where a note should go in the PARA system, or I don’t have time to create a folder, so I put it somewhere random.

As well as the main PARA notebook in OneNote, I have various other OneNote notebooks that have been opened, used and closed, never to be looked at again. Not to mention the email (all the email…), SharePoint documents, workflow tool notifications, Teams messages…

All of this has led to a poor relationship with note-taking in general. I hate being in the situation where I think I probably have a relevant note somewhere, because that means I will have to engage with my chaotic notes and might fail to find anything - to the extend that sometimes I think its psychologically easier to assume I don’t have any relevant info and start from scratch. This wastes time, and drives procrastination.

Goals

  • Be able to find whatever information I need, quickly and easily and without fuss.
  • Develop a reputation for being “the guy who knows”.
  • Improve my relationship with note-taking. Stop being afraid of my notes. Reduce procrastination.
2

This is my draft outline. It doesn’t include numbering yet, or individual IDs - this is at the AC level. Also, the order isn’t fixed.

Scope

In scope for my system is anything to do with my job, including day-to-day work, projects and planning, role-specific and colleague-specific information, our technology, my career progression, learning and development, and understanding the wider industry and technical landscape.

Not included is anything that does not relate to work, and career / L&D information which does not relate to work.

Outline JD system (each bullet is a category)

Things I do

This area relates to my tasks, work, output and deliverables

  • Big designs The big-ticket stuff. Application-level designs.
  • Work packages Design notes / diagrams etc for smaller bundles of work - incident responses and CRs. See here.
  • Regular meetings One ID per meeting that I regularly need to make notes for (there are a lot of meetings).
  • Being an Architect All the stuff that I do because I’m an Architect, other than project-specific. Includes extra duties as a result of being a Lead Architect, and other “extra” roles.
  • Admin Keep track of all the admin that I need to do.

Things I know

This area relates to sources of knowledge, reference information etc.

  • About our busines and industry[1] Want to know how the wider business outside Tech works? Look here. Includes industry information.
  • About my business domain[1:1] All about the specific part of the business that I do designs for. This is really a subset of About our business and industry but I think it’s important enough to get its own category.
  • Ways of working How we do things: policies, how-tos etc.
  • Technical documentation All the technology.
  • Unsorted personal repos[2] AKA The archive of chaos. Will eventually be absorbed into JD, but keeping a note of what is where until then will help.

Me and other people

This area is about me and my relationship to work and the people I work with. As a rough guideline, if I were to leave the business, I’d be happy to share information in the other areas on my way out, but this is properly private (or as much as it can be while existing in work systems, at least.)

  • Learning and personal development Training (both technical and soft-skills), career development. Goals. Thoughts on what’s going well, and where I can improve.
  • People and relationships Anything to with the people that I work with, and my relationship with them.
  • Pay and benefits Anything to do with contractal stuff, renumeration, pension, company car, total package etc.
  • Being productive This is where I document my approach to productivity, and keep daily, weekly and monthly reviews.

Thoughts

So that’s it. Following a process of discovery and building, I’ve got to a structure that is simpler than I thought it would be (14 categories across 3 areas). I initially had much narrower Areas and Categories, and then broadened them out again. This feels manageable. :grinning_face:

I’m going to dwell on the structure for a bit before implementing it. I daresay there’ll be another post about tools, because I’m quite limited in my options.

  1. There are more specific names for this area in my actual draft. ↩︎ ↩︎

  2. I’m not sure whether this is the right thing to do, but the reality is I’m not going to process all my old chaos into JD overnight, and I don’t want to wait until I’ve managed all the old stuff before I start benefiting from better organisation for the new stuff. ↩︎

3

So, so relatable. Really annoying when it’s some measurement I have to drive 40 minutes to retake…

It’s uncanny how often that has happened to me!

Thanks for sharing. Good luck and it goes without saying that we’re interested to hear more and help as much as we can.

If you feel like for any ‘thing’ its unambiguous which area it should go in, I think you’re on the right track. Categories, even better.

Hmm, JD had the same effect on me :thinking:

4

I think, @Rogfrich, that we are very similar people.

In my last job – the one I quit to do this – I felt the same. Honestly, at times I felt stupid. There was so much going on, it felt almost impossible to keep track of it all. There wasn’t time to actually do the job, and be on top of everything.

Worse, my boss was one of those guys who seems to remember all the small details. So not having them to hand was doubly bad. Who said what about which piece of software now? How does he know this and I don’t?

Until I realised that he only knew all those small details because, despite holding the lofty title of Program Manager, he spent his entire day in his email or chat just shuttling around tiny details.

That’s what he was. A tiny-detail conduit. A shuttle service for tiny details. Here to there and back again. Which, maybe, is what a Program Manager does. I dunno. Maybe he was really great at his job? Maybe. I’m discrete enough not to say much more.[1]

I realised this job was never going to work for me, because I’ve seen how things work when stuff is organised. Work is nicer. People get along. ‘Job satisfaction’ becomes a thing. But that permanent stress, that cortisol-inducing 25% of permanent, niggling stress, from not knowing what’s going on, whether you’re updating old stuff, working on old information … it’s horrible.

And this is why ‘my memory’ was shot. My memory is just fine, thank you very much, when I’m remembering stuff that matters, that’s sane and normal and organised, that I give a shit about, that isn’t a waste of my mental energy, that isn’t a pointless slog.

All of which is to say, in a really round-about way, that this system might not solve all of your problems. Keeping notes about what’s going on is still going to be an uphill struggle. But what you’ve acknowledged? realised? here, with us – thank you – is that you’re one of the Organised Ones. It matters to you, like it matters to us. Just getting through the day moving around pieces of information isn’t good enough. Because it’s fucking not! It’s fucking absurd that so many people do that, day in, day out.

Your system looks great. I’m glad it’s as small as it is.

Top tip, which I mention in the workshop at 22 where I’m in a suit. I found tremendous success in using my notes as a place of sanity by collecting all of the URLs for other people’s SharePoints, change systems, timesheet systems, request systems, mandatory training systems, all that shite – organise them in your notes app, in your own neat IDs.

Because you don’t need to/can’t even if you wanted to move those items. You can’t actually re-organise some other team’s SharePoint. But your notes can become an alias, a soft-link to the thing. And this is one of the ways you become That Guy Who Knows Where Shit Is. It’s really powerful and takes no time.

I’d love to follow this journey. As someone who is no longer in the corporate workplace but who has a deep, deep desire to make it better for those who are, you’re our man on the ground.

Godspeed! x

  1. LOL! Like fuck I am. He was a fucking shambles. The project was a shambles. It was practically criminal the money we were wasting; and this was Australian taxpayers’ money. Plans changed from hour to hour. Staff attrition was through the roof. The quality of work was shocking. It was one of the worst run projects I’ve ever had the misfortune to work on.

    Fortunately, it was so bad it made me quit! It got to the point where I couldn’t in good conscience turn up and take the money. I’m serious: that’s one of the reasons I left. And here we are. :upside_down_face: ↩︎

1 Like
5

Blimey. At least I can usually restart from the comfort of my office chair!

Thank you. This community feels like a great place to be. Speaking of which…

Wow, this has spelled out exactly how I feel, right down to the boss with the incredible memory for detail. Thank you, this was very helpful and inspiring. In particular, the bolded part hit home. I realised that I can very well remember:

  • The recipe for the pasta arabiata sauce we like
  • Our home phone number from when I was a kid
  • How to play loads of different scales on the guitar
  • Which film my wife and I went to see on our first date

… and lots of other stuff. Thank you, that was an important lesson.

This is at the core of my question the other day, which - although I didn’t word it as well as this - was really about how I manage all the information in “other people’s SharePoints, change systems, timesheet systems, request systems, mandatory training systems, all that shite” - and work with it to produce solutions. I think that between the Work packages and admin categories, I’ve got the capability to do this “soft linking” to our Incident and CR tracking systems.

Agent @Rogfrich reporting for duty. :saluting_face: Happy to share my thoughts as I go.

1 Like