Using JD as a parent!

10-19 Concepts 14 Build your system
1

I am really struggling to organise my areas RE my children.

My current set up is as follows;
11 AREAS
11.01 Finances (mine and children’s information)
11.02 Health, Care and Wellbeing (mine and children’s information)
11.03 Family and Relationships (so far, folder for each of my children and a couple of family members)
11.04 Home (general running a house and homemaking tasks, maintenance, manuals etc)
11.05 Education (mine and children’s information)
11.06 Travel

I’m not sure whether to have a school area for my children and then an education area for my previous education (college, undergrad, masters)
OR
an area for each child which includes all of their school/education, medical information, bank accounts etc.
My son is almost 12 and my daughter is almost 5, with a disability and she is neurodivergent, lots of behavioural issues, she has lots of medical, education and social worker appointments, she is constantly monitored for changes. I think her health, care and wellbeing will become quite bulky, whereas my sons Education starting secondary school will be the bulkier lot of his information.

Wondering how parents are using JD (parents very very involved in day to day stuff).

Thanks in advance. Love reading posts on this forum and learning new things. You are all so interesting!

2

I’m also a JD-using parent and have put a bit of thought into this problem. If I haven’t misunderstood your meaning in your post, I would suggest that you are using IDs (i.e. AC.xx) for very large pieces of information (e.g. your education and both of your children’s education).

For me, the bulk of my system is my stuff and I have three Areas to cover my non-work data (10-19 Life, 20-29 Household& 30-39 Money).

I used to have a 12 People category containing information about all the important people in my life, but this quickly became too cramped. Instead, I have promoted this category to an area, with the structure:

40-49 People
    41 Wife
    42 Child 1
    43 Child 2
    44 Family
    45 Friends
    46 Colleagues

This allows me a lot of space for various IDs for my immediate family for who I will hold a fair bit of data. I try and keep the IDs consistent between these categories (e.g. 4x.01 Health, 4x.02 Education etc).

People for whom I hold less data will then slot into categories 44-46 depending on their relationship to me. In nearly all cases in these categories one ID corresponds to one person or family group. I’m obviously going to hold less information on my cousin than my wife!

I hope this helps, would like to hear what you think.

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3

Disclaimer: my first child was born only yesterday, so I’m probably not in the best position to give advice for your circumstances, but I’ll share my (mostly unedited) thoughts in the hope I can be of some help.

I think an area for each child could be promising. You could standardize the categories between them. Maybe ten categories+100 IDs is too much for each child, though. You could instead devote one area to children, 10-19 Children and then share 11 Education and 12 Health between the two, or maybe one category for each child depending on how much info you might need to keep. Since your daughter has so many things to keep track of, it might make sense to give her her own categories. It depends on what info you need to organize.

If, for example, each medical appointment produces a document or two, but not too many, and they are digital, you can probably fit a lot in a single ID by using a standardized naming system. You could have a Health category 11 and an ID in there: 11.02 Appointments with Dr. Somebody/2024-03-06 Regular checkup.pdf. If you always use the same naming scheme, then it should be pretty easy to find things.

Personally, I haven’t really thought through all the things I might have to keep track of for my child, but health and travel documents are two big things. Health is a top level area in my system, separate from my “Life admin” area. It has a category for me, my wife, and my child. Most document-producing events get an ID. Topics I need to keep notes on also get an ID. Pregnancy notes go in my wife’s category. Child care notes (infant care, infant CPR, etc.) go in my child’s category.

Travel category IDs include things for me, my wife, and my child. IDs include my passport renewal, applying for a consular report of a birth abroad (CRBA, a sort of birth certificate for children of US citizens born abroad), and travel itineraries for trips. In other words, while there are quite a few things to store, I’ve chosen to keep all my family’s things mixed in together, with the exception of health.

For education, my child’s education is still a few years away, but I think I will probably mix it in with my own education category. Since you have much more experience than me, maybe you could show me why that won’t work, though :wink:

4

What?! Congratulations! DM me your address and we’ll send you a sticker for their pram/buggy/whatever. :laughing:

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5

I have kept the structure the same but added “tags” in my file names.
For example, under Health / Exam results, the file names look like this: [kid1]DATE - exam
hope this helps