Table of contents

• Areas
• Categories
• IDs
• Ops manuals
• Further reading
• Advanced

This is a pretty standard system. Here’s a refresher.

Johnny.Decimal groups everything by area, then category, and finally ID. This structure is shown at the top of every page.

Areas

This pack contains five areas

Think of them like areas of your life.

The first is 10-19 Business administration.

(Ignore ‘the zeros’ for now.)

Categories

Within these areas, we’ve designed a bunch of categories

These are categories of stuff that you do or have.

The first is 11 The business & its people. So that’s what goes here.

IDs

An ID is a specific thing inside a category

This is the folder where we store our stuff.

The first ID in category 11 is 11.11 Structure & registrations. It should be pretty obvious what goes here. Each ID has a one-line description to help.

We do not store anything in area or category folders.

The rest of this site documents each ID and provides background into our thinking behind its design. If you need more information, see the Johnny.Decimal website.

Close enough is good enough

We’ve made each ID broad. The idea is that there’s always somewhere to put your thing.

That place might not always feel perfect. It’s impossible to design a perfect system for everyone. Don’t let this get in your way.

If in doubt choose the first place, numerically, that makes sense. This is where your JDex shines.

If you put something somewhere and you’re worried you’ll forget, just add a note in the relevant JDex entry. Then future-you can search your notes and always find it.

Ops manuals

There’s several operations manuals, with many more to come as the system evolves. These are all linked to an ID and appear at the bottom of the page. For example, see 14.23 Backups & recovery.

Further reading

When we wrote the system, we were conscious of not making the IDs too long. So we split supporting information out in to ‘further reading’ entries. These are also at the bottom of a page.

Advanced topic warning. Skip for now if you like.

Advanced

Extending the end and sub-notes

Further readings and ops manuals are both examples of the Johnny.Decimal pattern extend the end.

This is really useful because sometimes when we’re ‘in’ an ID, we want to add extra information to it.

For example, in our JDex we do this by creating a new note, appending + to the ID. So 11.11+ Sales tax might contain extra details about our sales tax registration.

I think of these as sub-notes. Further reading and ops manuals are just a type of sub-note.

It means you don’t clutter the main note. And you can create as many linked sub-notes as you like. They’ll all sort neatly under the ‘parent’ ID.

Give it a go, and ask for help if you’re not sure.