Organization Help

Not “organizational help” as that’s a different topic entirely…

As people running a small business, we at OSE appreciate when people mention us for our work, and I assume so do people at the other businesses we work with. I try to mention the clients when I discuss a project award, and we discussed our marketing consultants when we discussed our rebranding a couple of years ago. Along those lines, I want to praise Johnny Decimal, a small company that exists to organize data, specifically files.

As context for why I ended up first reading about J.D. and then purchasing their “Small Business System”, it’s worth talking about our files. In December 2016, when we moved to our current office, we had paper files for every project and every category in administration, as well as computer files for both. We began a digitization process, now complete, that turned all of the paper – letter sized, 11×17, and full-size drawings – into PDFs on a cloud server with a local back-up copy. As it happened, and quite luckily, that process ended shortly before Covid forced us into first a work-from-home arrangement, and then into hybrid work. We have about 1,100,000 files just for projects, occupying some 4TB of storage; we have more in administration, an archive, our library, and so on.

Our file organization was a bit of a kludge, having been set up in 2007 when our office was two people and partially reorganized in 2012. So I started looking around at the various organizational systems and stumbled across repeated references to John Noble who, like John Chapman becoming Johnny Appleseed, has a professional name based on his work. Johnny Decimal may have started as a single person’s idea, but it’s now a group of products designed specifically around the problem we were facing: how do you organize all that stuff? To make a long and excruciatingly-detailed story short, we have adjusted out digital filing system mostly along the J.D. lines and it has improved workflow for us. The earth didn’t move, but maybe it doesn’t have to for things to be a little better, a little smoother than they were before.

Maybe their products will work for you, maybe they won’t. But if you’ve got a small business and organizational problems, I think you’ll benefit by reading here.