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<p>I’ve had a bit of an obsession with spring cleaning recently. I’ve tidied and
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cleaned elements of our physical space (nothing makes you more aware of how much
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junk you have accumulated than a period of lockdown), but I’ve also had
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a ‘services and digital’ spring clean too. It has taken quite a bit of time, but
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I do feel better for it.</p>
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<h3 id="banking">Banking</h3>
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<p>It started with our bank. We’ve been with the same bank since we bought our
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house in the early 2000s. It worked well for us at the time, but since then the
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bank changed hands at least a couple of times, and ended up as part of one of
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the UK’s least loved and worst performing banks. This bank has shut down many of
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its branches, and because the online banking element of our account was specific
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to the original account type, the acquiring bank has done almost nothing to
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update it in the intervening years. If I say the interface would look at home in
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a 1990s Netscape Navigator window, that will give you some idea. It’s incredibly
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slow and difficult to use, and there is very little you can actually <em>do</em> with it
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anyway. You can’t export your transaction data (they send a paper statement
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every month), and most other kinds of transactions need to be done by calling
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the bank.</p>
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<p>We decided that enough was enough. I looked around and chose <a href="https://www.starlingbank.com">Starling Bank</a> from the
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new crop of online-only ‘challenger’ banks. After so many years with our old
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bank, opening an account with Starling was like being transported by time
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machine into a shiny new future. Everything was done through the phone app: you
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do the security checks by taking a photo of a form of photo ID (passport or
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driving licence), record a short video of yourself reading out a statement,
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then wait an hour or two for them to process and check your info. And that’s
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more or less it! Once your account is verified, you immediately have access to a
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virtual bank card which you can add to your Apple Wallet to use for contactless
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or online payments, and your physical card is ordered. You can generate a
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statement for any time range as a PDF, and you can export your
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transactions as a CSV file so that you can analyse your spending however you
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want. The app itself does some simple categorisation (which is pretty good by default,
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but also customisable), and the interface shows you what you have spent today
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and this month, and a list of transactions, to which you can add your own notes
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if the description added by the merchant is a bit obscure. You can even pay in
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cheques by taking a photo of the front and back of the cheque and uploading it,
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which saves the hassle of having to go to a bank and deposit them.</p>
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<p>Setting up our joint account was even more delightful: you have to each have a
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personal account first, then you request a joint account through the app, sit
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close together with the app open on each of your phones, and once you have both agreed on
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your own phone to open the account, everything is set up without needing
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further ID checks. We actually only use our personal accounts to pay in birthday
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gifts and so on, and use the joint account for everything else, as we did with
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our old one. This certainly keeps us honest with each other about our spending,
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as the app sends a notification by default when either one of us spends on the
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account!</p>
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<p>I’m really impressed with Starling Bank. After years of living with such a
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creaky old system, the app feels like magic, and I feel much more in control of
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our account. We have still left some money in the old account for now, as I
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ended up transferring over old standing orders and so on manually. It doesn’t
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hurt to have your eggs in two baskets either, but doing all our day-to-day
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banking from Starling is so much easier.</p>
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<h3 id="johnny-dot-decimal-filing-system">Johnny.Decimal filing system</h3>
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<p>I think it was probably <a href="https://www.baty.blog">Jack Baty</a> (the chief enticer-down-rabbit-holes on
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micro.blog) who pointed me towards John Noble’s <a href="https://johnnydecimal.com">Johnny.Decimal</a> system. This is a
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deceptively simple, but surprisingly powerful system for naming folders in
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areas, categories and items with decimal numbers (a bit like the Dewey Decimal
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system, but less complicated). You can read about the system on the site, but
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the broad idea is that you divide up what you want to file into at most 10
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different areas, and each of those areas into at most 10 different categories,
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and then place folders sequentially numbered with ID numbers within each
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category. So, following on from the Banking examples above, I might have a
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‘Finance’ area from 20-29, within that a ‘Banking’ category as 21, and within
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that a folder named ‘21.02 Starling bank statements’.</p>
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<p>The beauty of the system is that it is systematically organised, so once you
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have settled on a system that works for your brain, you know where everything
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should go, and everything within this filing system is only 3 folders deep. It
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is also suprising (particularly to me, as I find it hard to remember numbers),
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that you quickly get used to the numbers used for items you deal with
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frequently. It also gets around ‘now what did I name that folder?’ moments, as
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if you have an idea of the number range it should fall under. If you use
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something like Alfred or Launchbar, you can start typing the numbers to get a
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list of candidates. You can then either spot what you are looking for, or
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continue to type to filter the list down further. The beauty of having the ‘two
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digits dot two digits’ code at the start of each of the items is that this will
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uniquely identify that item, whereas I may have several files and folders
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containing the word ‘banking’, for example. In Alfred, if I start by typing <code>21.</code> and
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then pause, Alfred will list all the folders under my Banking folder, and I can
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easily continue with <code>02</code> to find the Starling bank statements folder.</p>
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<p>So far, I have only implemented the Johnny.Decimal system for my personal files
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on my home computer<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup>. I had thought that this was going to
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be the easier option, but I hadn’t realised what an absolute mess my files were
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in. Things were scattered all over the place, randomly distributed among
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badly-named folders, and often duplicated. It took my several days of chipping
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away at it in spare moments to get it all organised, but I feel immensely better
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for it. I found some files I thought I had lost, and everything now has its own
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well-defined place to go. Searching for files is <em>much</em> easier than it used to be,
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and I plan to also build myself a few helper tools to make creating new item
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folders more fool-proof (though this is something that John Noble is also
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working on).</p>
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<p>Now that I know it works so well, I will also make the time to organise my work
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files as well. I know that I will need to use the <code>PRO.AC.ID</code> <a href="https://johnnydecimal.com/concepts/multiple-projects/">multiple projects</a>
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variant for work, so that I can accommodate projects like grants, grant
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applications and taught modules which will likely grow beyond the bounds of 10
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discrete units over time (or have already done so). It will be a bit more
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complicated, but I have already figured out how I will divide up the system, so
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I am hoping it will just require a bit of time to rename and shift some files
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around.</p>
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<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
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<hr>
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<ol>
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<li id="fn:1" role="doc-endnote">
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<p>Though given that I am still working from home, all my computers (work and personal) are at home all the time. You know what I mean though… <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
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</li>
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</ol>
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</section>
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