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 Likes
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. ↩︎

2 Likes
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:

1 Like
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: ↩︎

5 Likes
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.

5 Likes
6

So, it’s just after 9am on Monday morning. I’ve spent some time building out my JDex based on the structure above. In the end, I settled for OneNote. As I’ve mentioned before I work in a highly locked-down corporate environment, and out of the available options, OneNote has the least friction. It isn’t ideal, but it’ll do.

As mentioned elsewhere, notes and information in cloud systems massively outweigh actual files in my working day, so I’ve started out with a JDex first approach. I’ll create indexed folders in the filesystem (which syncs with OneDrive) as I need to.

I implemented the standard zeroes from the start. If I don’t find myself using them, I might delete the relevant notes in OneNote again, but I appreciate standardisation so I put them in all the categories.

My plan for the next couple of days is to just let it ferment in my brain - I’ll think about where stuff I encounter would go, without actually using the system in anger. Once I’m happy that the structure holds, I’ll start putting new IDs into the JDex.

Moving old things in feels like a Herculean task at the moment, and I’m definitely not going to wait for that before I start using JD because I’d never start.

Onwards!

3 Likes
7

So, an update. Over the last week, I’ve been adding things to the Index as they come up, largely within the categories I’ve planned out. I’m using one-note-per-ID, which is working well for me. I did realise that I’m missing a category from my original planned outline, which I’ve added.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, my hands are pretty tied when it comes to what software to use for the index and notes. After a bit of experimentation, I’ve stuck to good old OneNote. I tried the new-fangled Microsoft Loop, the newly Markdown-enabled Notepad and briefly flirted weith building something in Python, but in the end, better the devil you know.

My structure in OneNote is:

  • A new top-level notebook called JDex
  • A section group per area, named 00-09 System management etc.
  • A section per category
  • A note per ID.

The ID-level notes contain information about the topic, and a pointer to other locations:

  • Important email threads are tagged (“categorised” in Outlook-speak) with the JD ID, and thrown in the archive. This actually works really well.
  • I have a top-level folder in OneDrive called !JD which has a handful of folders (named by JD ID) referred to from the index. I don’t use files as often as many here, but I do keep some.
  • Where I can’t control naming or metadata of a resource I need to track, I link directly to it from the index. This is really common for my use-case, since we use cloud services like Jira, Confluence, SharePoint etc.

My goals for my system are:

  • 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.

It’s early days, and too soon to judge, but I feel like it’s going OK so far. There’s a big archive of “stuff” that will need to be dealt with - at the moment, I’m only processing new information and work into JD, except for when an older thing flickers back into my consciousness and needs dealing with.

Another week coming up: I’ll stick at it and see how it goes.

2 Likes
8

Thinking back shudders to my time in the corporate world, I feel that there are at least two distinct problems to solve. Likely many more, of course. Here’s what I mean.

First problem: where is it? This is a thing you know exists, but in the labyrinthine corporate structure, made worse by SharePoint’s sheer unwillingness to help you understand where it saves stuff, means that nobody has any idea where.

Typically people solve this problem by keeping emails that they know contain these magical links. Needing to go to this place again they rummage through their email, find a link, and there they are. This takes minutes every time.

You now dominate this space. Tackle this first. Get really good at this.

Second problem: what is it or the deeper problem of knowledge. Who has what in what state and when did they do things and what are we using where to solve what and so on. A more complex problem, one that I know you want to solve.

You’ll get there. Recognise your wins in the first space and take inspiration from them.

Loving the updates!

2 Likes
9
1 Like
10

Hi everyone, a quick update from the trenches.

My JD system has been up and running for three weeks or so. The biggest thing to say is that the JDex is becoming the central piece in my workflow. I’m actively using it, and it is slowly becoming a habit. The structure hasn’t changed much since I finished the initial exercises - I’ve added a couple of categories and I think I might split out a category or two, but basically all that virtual Post It wrangling paid off.

I made a list of places information might be:

Email

Paper notebook

Teams messages, chats

Sharepoint docs

Local docs

Service platform tickets

Jira

ALM

Intranet

Vendor websites

The JDex is really helping here, especially since many of those possible locations are not under my control. I’ve realised that I’m an outlier in the JD space in that files aren’t the best-all-and-end-all to me. It’s all those other places where the gold ore is.

There has been a bit of “where should this live?” tension. I’ve learned that when I have a choice of possible categories to raise an ID, then one of them tends tends to feel more “right” than the other. If neither feel right, maybe I’m missing a category.

Rather than sorting email into AC.XX folders, I’m using Outlook’s categories - one category for each ID. Slap it on the thread and archive it, and find again by searching for the ID. This has a nice side effect that I can tag with multiple IDs where an email is about more than one thing. However, I did have an “oh s**t” moment the other day when I realised we’re turning on retention rules for email that means they’ll only be be kept on the server for a matter of months - so my JDex will point to disappeared email. I need to think about that.

I’m creating a lot of IDs, especially around incidents and change requests. These have their own IDs that are meaningful across the business, which I’m using. There’s a constant flow of these - several per week - so I’ll breeze past 99 quite quickly. They’re roughly equivalent to the “creative pattern” in that each is a complete piece of work.

11

This is tremendously helpful. Keep them coming!

The more I do this the more I believe this to be a universal truth.

12

Cool to hear!

It’s like magic, isn’t it.

Gulp!

Despite the truth of what both of you say, that indexing external stuff is a great superpower, I don’t sleep easy unless I have a local copy of things I refer to in at least plain text form.

13

It’s an interesting one. Almost all of my “important stuff” at work is in the cloud, in one way or another. Files live in OneDrive - they sync to my laptop, but the remote server is the boss. My email is in Office365 Exchange. Much of my tasking and collaboration is done via tools like Jira and Service Now.

With the best will in the world, I’m not going to store local copies of all that. I just have to trust that it won’t disappear. I’m pretty much OK with that, since these are work tools provided by my employer. If it does disappear, we can’t do any work until it comes back[1]. My employer has accepted that risk in exchange for the benefits that come with cloud computing, and has taken steps to mitigate it as much as possible.

With specific regard to the disappearing email, a policy decision has been made that dictates a six month retention period. I can understand why, but when you’re working on a project with a horizon further out than six months, and a tail going back years, that feels like a problem. There are workarounds - we’re told that a mechanism will exist to exempt specific emails from this retention policy, although it sounds like a faff and can’t be applied to everything. I could forward important emails to OneNote which would solve the problem, but isn’t really in the spirit of the policy[2]. Or I could accept that email is an ephemeral thing now, and harvest the useful knowledge elsewhere in the system, which is more work but probably the right thing to do.

  1. Unless your job is to fix it, in which case you’ll be very busy. ↩︎

  2. You’ll often hear me complaining about the restrictions of corporate IT and specifically how, to use a technical term, OneNote sucks donkey balls, but its integration with Outlook email is really good. A couple of clicks and your email is neatly in a note. ↩︎

14

I’ve actually reached the conclusion that - with the greatest of respect - the chapters in the Workbook could benefit from being reordered so that newbies (of which I am very much one) create the JDex first and then organise their filesystem accordingly. This would cement the message that the JDex is the system, and would make a lot more sense for people like me who aren’t file-centric. Having read through the whole book before starting, I actually did change the order when implementing JD.

2 Likes
15

I’ve lived with this. The org’s view was, probably rightly, that if it’s that important, then email isn’t the place. Which is a nice thing to say, but like so many things in double-scare-quotesthe enterprisedouble-scare-quotes is something that an architect drew on a whiteboard once and is now a thing that thousands of people have to actually do and nobody in the middle of that process bothered to give it much thought which is why jobs suck!

Back at a Large Federal Department the solution was to drag your mail out to Objective (neé HP Trim), a document management system! LOL! That went about as well as one can imagine. If you’re unfamiliar with these technologies, pretend you’ve been told to print your mail then keep it in a safe on the 3rd floor. If you need it you must request access to the safe every time, and if you want to reply to the email you have to re-type it by hand. The safe has no index; to find your mail you ask Terry, the 87-year-old who has the safe key, to find it for you.

It’s a symptom of how broken corporate communication is. We should be communicating these big ideas by discussing them, in person, then writing things down in structured documents that can be referenced later. Instead we do all of that in emails that actually feel more like chat channels. Totally the wrong tool for the job.

1 Like
16

Me: “I’ll keep this up to date as I work with the JD system”.

Also me: “Look! A squirrel!”

I’ve been remiss in posting here, but the good news is that the system is really starting to pay off. I’ve transitioned from “this is all new” to “this makes sense” to just using it without too much thought. I’ve spent a lot less time hunting for information, and crucially I’ve felt more in control of things, which is what I really wanted to achieve.

Given where we are in the massive transformation programme I’m (a small) part of, I’m spending my time working on a lot of small, self contained mini-projects to address defects and incidents. These can range from a few hours’ work to weeks of design work. Sometimes they just need guidance from me, and sometimes I’m in the weeds. Sometime they generate a lot of output, and sometimes I can keep the notes in a single JDex page.

I’ve thought of these - from a JD point of view - as being akin to the creative output pattern. They generally have their own ID number from our incident management system, so that’s what I use as the ID in the JDex. I’m keeping these in a single category, and it’s getting very crowded - more IDs in the JDex section than I can see without scrolling, which feels unwieldy. I probably need to think about this and break them up somehow.

But there’s no question for me that JD is helping a lot. I feel much less overwhelm, and more organised. The real test will be in a year’s time when someone asks what was going on with INC1111222. I’m confident I’ll be able to answer that.

17

@Rogfrich I’ve just caught up with this whole thread and it’s fascinating. Now we’re another month in, can you give us an update? How is it going?

1 Like
18

Hi @Alex thanks!

I’ll draft up a proper reply over the weekend (I’m travelling, so I’ll have plenty of time sat on a plane to write it up!)

TL;DR - it’s still proving useful, with some minor teething trouble but nothing that is a show stopper.

19

@Alex - to be fair, I didn’t say which weekend. :slight_smile: Sorry for the delayed reply to this.

After a fairly intensive week back at work post-holiday, I’m forced to admit that those teething troubles I mentioned are a bit more like “growing pains”. I think that I’ve gone too granular on my IDs in general. Mostly it’s OK, but there’s one area where it’s really not working.

I regularly (daily) get involved in work that has IDs assigned to it by a higher power. These can be “incidents” (INCXXXX) or change requests (CRXXXX). Unlike normal businesses, we’re generating INCs and CRs most days. I initially thought of these as being something akin to the JD creative pattern in that they’re fairly self-contained pieces of work with externally-generated references. As such, I followed that approach and created an ID for each, using the external ID (CRXXXX, INCXXXX) instead of the good old AC.XX.

That worked for a bit, but the sheer volume of these pieces of work is causing a problem. I’m up to about 30 INCs and 30 CRs since I started doing JD. These are all in one Category called 14 Work items, so it’s getting a bit crowded. I’m a firm believer in the JDex and using it as the primary location for knowledge about a topic, but my JDex section for 14 Work items is getting so long it’s not really usable any more. And that’s after a couple of months.

I need to rethink things - I’m going to start by rereading the sections on the website about expanding - maybe extending the end might be an option.

I have a similar challenge around less structured work. I have another category 17 Pre-work which is so named because it was intended to store information about work that would eventually get an INCXXX or CRXXX number and therefore move into 14 Work items. Unfortunately, this Category has become a bit of a dumping ground for tasks and work that doesn’t fit anywhere else, with each new piece of work getting a new 17.XX ID. So that’s going the same way as the Work Items category - becoming too full to be usable.

Other than those specific issues - which will require a rethink of how I’m using the system - it’s going well. One tip in particular for fellow corporate drones limited to the Office 365 stack is to use Outlook categorisation[1]. When I have an email that contains info relevant to an ID, I add the ID as a category[2] and toss the email in the archive. That means that later on, I can just stick the ID into the Outlook search bar and it will find everything. It also has the advantage that if someone sends me an email that has info relating to multiple IDs (how rude) I can add both IDs as categories. This approach leads to lots of categories existing, but Outlook doesn’t seem to mind.

OneNote remains the least-worst option available to me for the JDex[3]. I organise it with a single Notebook called JDex. Each area has its own section group, each category is a section, and each ID gets a page within its parent section. I have another notebook called Extra notes where I put notes relating to a given ID that for some reason I don’t want to put directly in the JDex page. That notebook is organised the same as the JDex, but with the possibility of multiple files in each ID (which means an extra level of section group organisation).

Even with the challenges above, I’m still much better off. There are daily instances where I need something, and find it without fuss. I still have “I can’t find that…” moments, but that’s always because either the item I’m looking for predates my JD system[4], or I was lazy and didn’t file something properly.

So there we are. TL;DR - the system needs tuning, but the concept is well and truly proven.

  1. that’s tags to the rest of us ↩︎

  2. just the AC.XX or work item reference ↩︎

  3. while still being less than ideal… ↩︎

  4. I haven’t moved everything old into JD, but I do try to as and when I interact with old knowledge ↩︎

2 Likes
20

I read this, nodding along, remembering my past lives.

Re: 14 Work items getting too long, without knowing OneNote really at all, is that something you could mitigate by, say, reverse-sorting that category? I assume (hope!) that those INCs and CRs eventually get finished in a roughly FIFO order?

Either that or archive them off when they get closed? Just bung them in an archive folder right there in 14.

17 is trickier. ‘Doesn’t fit anywhere else’ is the problem, of course. I think just occasional reflection here, looking at what that stuff is/was and trying to figure out if you’re missing a category, or need to expand the meaning of a category, is the answer.

Always happy to work details out with you here, of course. Thanks as always for the thoughtful posts.