Junk the junk: Dealing with the information explosion. By Steve Roth
I am a hoarder. I have always been a hoarder. My school desk used to be a treasure trove of ‘useful’ items – old pens, bits of rubber, half eaten cheese sandwiches, broken bits of action man, the frames out of airfix kits, sticks. Most lay in the desk for years – just in case. Regrettably I can’t have a desk at work. But I have something almost as good – Outlook. Anything even remotely ‘useful’, contacts I will never contact, things that I’ll ‘get round to’ – when I have the time, can all be stored in Outlook. No doubt they will still be there when I retire.
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What's the problem!
I don't see what the problem is. Outlook seems a very good place to store information to me, with very easy ways to search by date or recipient etc. If you're worried about server space, just use the Archive features to keep mail older than say 3 months on your local disk, and back that up every now and then. But don't keep unread mail. If it's not important enough to read immediately, then it's not important enough to keep.
In Excel and Word, all you need is a good directory structure and the stuff you need is easy to find.
Why re-invent the wheel? Just use what you've already got more efficiently.
While on the subject of the paperless office, why do our friends at HMRC encourage us to file tax returns online and then insist that we keep a printed and signed copy?
Storing vs sorting
The key point here for me is 'storing is easier than sorting'. Its a particularly bad habit that we've caught since the information explosion. 'I'll just stick it in a folder'.... to get it out of my immediate line of vision. I'll file it 'just in case'. Its much easier to put it away than make a decision (I know, I have 400 'to read' newsletters in one folder). Not only does excess storing make it difficult to find the right document within the morass of stuff we've collected (never mind the right version), I think half the time it fills us with so much overwhelm that we don't even bother looking! Of course the answer has to be a process, some structure, some rules. One way to improve discipline on storing vs sorting is to have a capacity limit on storage. As long as there is adequate warning that the storage limit is soon to be reached and strong follow through on refusing additional storage, then this can work well. Let's face it, who's going to take the risk of working up to the wire on their storage limit when they are faced with option of having to dump a load of stuff before they can even send out an email. Much better to keep well within the limit by sorting as we go along. Its only the same as in the olden days of purely hard storage - we wouldn't expect the business to keep buying up physical storage locations to accomodate our burgeoning stuff. Would we?