Use Letter instead of Digit for an Area

Johnny.Decimal University Workbook/Workshop
1

Hey everyone,

I’m still fiddling with my system (or better systems) for the businesses I need to keep track of.

A business usually consists of 4-5 categories, so it makes sense to me to have one area per business.

Overall, it will probably be a Nextcloud folder structure that might or might not be shared with others.

So for me it feels a bit odd to give one business the area A=1 and another one A=2, and then I share only the internals of A=2 with a partner …

Is it reasonable to have (for example) the PetFood Business as A=P (P0-P9 PetFood Inc..) and the Discounter as D0-D9?

You are welcome to tell me that it does not make sense at all.

My Businesses
- D0-D9 Discounter Ltd
  - D1 General Administration
    - D01.10 Company agreements & Bylaws
- P0-P9 Discounter Ltd
  - P1 General Administration
    - P01.10 Company agreements & Bylaws
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If it looks right and it feels right and it works right … it’s probably alright?

Nothing about this makes me feel like I need to go and lie down. :smiley:

2 Likes
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Maybe only in bliss of a perfect system? :wink:

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As a concept, here are the Pro’s & Con’s I came to.

Pro’s:

  1. More room to grow.
  2. No double Areas (Health & Fitness) because they are similar.
  3. Categories can be organized alphabetically for ease of manual navigation.

Con’s:

  1. The system becomes language locked (not all alphabets are the same).
  2. It may complicate category organization.
  3. Numerical priority of Areas is not an option.

I’m sure if you think about it, there are more things to consider. My opinion is that if it were about adding more Areas it is as simple as increasing the number count by one place (001-010) and if it were as simple as needing to organize the Areas in a simple way by name, then that type of business is simpler than name for compartmentalizing.

5

Thank you for your input :slight_smile:

It might be very specific to my use case, and so the cons aren’t really applicable. Getting started with the SBS, I ended up needing 4x the 10-19 Business administration for 4 different small businesses. The rest of the SBS does not really match my use case, so I’m still figuring out the best way to handle my different roles in the different businesses :wink:

For now my plan is one system for business administration (with letter areas) and then a more classical JDS for the one business I’m mostly involved in the operations.

But the operations part is a whole new can of worms :sweat_smile: