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

J.D Concepts 14 Build your system
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