This week at JDHQ – 2026-05-25

Originally sent to the mailing list.

Last week's staff meeting and then careful management of projects in Things paid off. Lucy often notes that, as small business owners, one of the primary burdens is that you no longer have someone telling you what to do.

As in, sometimes it's nice when someone just tells you what to do! That's easy, right? Turn up to work and just do what you're told, for money, for a week. Terrific. Well that's not how life is when you run your own business – which is the dream, of course – but it's a double-edged dream-sword. Now, as well as doing all the work, you have to make the hard decisions. It can be very easy to just float through a week without doing that, and to feel busy, but to not really achieve much.

So planning and our Monday-morning meeting, which we just had again, is good. (This is obvious. I'll say it anyway.)

What we did last week

• We have a new home page for the first time ever.
  • Realising that 'the Johnny.Decimal universe' is now much more than the system of numbers, we've made the signed-out new visitor homepage more of an introduction to us.
  • johnnydecimal.com/homepage will land you there regardless of your signed-in status.
  • I also built one of those 5-email onboarding sequences that I've always avoided. But I heard from people – thanks, Michael – that, done well, they can be really helpful.
  • And I think I've done this one well. You can see the 5 steps starting at jdu/welcome/01-install-your-folders. (The emails are mostly one liners pointing you to this sequence of pages.)
• Launched a new mini-series Everyday Obsidian.
  • Lucy's fairly new to Obsidian, and it's a big, complex app.
  • In this series I'll show Lucy practical everyday tips for Obsidian. This is 'how normal people use it every day', not 'how to become an Obsidian guru'.
• Launched a new mini-series Online security essentials.
  • We've been wanting to do this one for a while. It's a little passion project of ours.
  • This is the basics of staying safe online, and is something we hope you can send to your non-nerd loved ones. We're each recording it with our dad in mind.
• Video:
  • The power of process in small business.
  • (Will turn this into a playlist at JDU shortly.)
• Blog:
  • undermanager: Three things about data
  • Why wouldn't every meeting have an ID?
  • PSA: PDFs leak data
  • Context switching
  • Going to try shutting down my laptop every night
  • Startup routine

What we're working on this week

• Continuing the two series as noted above.
• We've put 21.30 Learn with Lucy - the command line on hold as we're at capacity.
• No Zoom sessions this week – I'm putting a shape to some plans, but we're moving cross-continentally next week which is always a big disruption, so I'm not planning anything new for this week or next.
  • (If you live in Taiwan, let us know!)
• Did a lot of work last week on 21.14 Task & Project Management update.
  • This one definitely benefits from me sitting on it for a while.
  • I'm using these techniques actively myself, so the longer I do that, the more sure I am of the final output.
  • I'm loving my Things project setup.
  • Will be putting out a first draft this week.
• In the background we continue to load up the imaginarium with our back-catalogue.