The readings that prompted these postings were:
Lehikoinen, Juha, Antti Aaltonen, Pertti Huuskonen, and Ilkka Salminen. Personal Content Experience: Managing Digital Life in the Mobile Age. Chichester, England: John Wiley, 2007. [48-51, 84-94, 127-157]
Whittaker, Steve, and Candace Sidner. "Email Overload: Exploring Personal Information Management of Email." Paper presented at the Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, April 13-18, 1996, 276-283.
The following response was to a question about whether a high number of emails are seen as a sign of prestige or importance.
Both of my managers receive upwards of 50-100 emails a day, depending on the crisis du jour. It's more a sign that their world is probably wider than mine and that they have more responsibilities (and more corporate spam to filter out). Both would love to have fewer emails to plow through; sometimes the job feels like it's managing email rather than getting work done.
Piles of unprocessed emails stresses both of them out. So it's not a badge of manhood for them.
One of my managers has been there for 10+ years, and he's a filer; his folder hierarchy is like baroque stained-glass in its intricacy. But for our clients and others on the team who don't file, they know that he *does* file; hence, he's usually the go-to guy for "do you have a copy of that email?" His ability to file and find stuff means they don't have to (and he now has this reputation to live up to, so that adds to his stress). [Update: after backing up his emails to a CD, he deleted about 10,000 emails from his account, some dating back to 2004. And remember, he deleted lots of email too.]
I remember reading somewhere that our brains have a 'doing' function and a 'thinking' function. The trick is, that they don't work at the same time. Reacting to email is a satisfying 'doing' activity, so most people probably don't think too much about how to file something so they can find it later; they're too concerned with taking care of business now. Sometimes we'll think ahead and plan an elaborate system to process our emails, but when we start doing it, the system is awkward or cumbersome; I'd class making folders and filing as a system that some people find cumbersome.
Another part of the issue may be the just-in-case vs just-in-time mentality. A lot of us filers and packrats like to hold on to things just in case we'll need them; but 80% of our files are never seen again. 20% I'll access regularly, but that 20% is different for every user, which is why filing still winds up becoming a personal matter, even in a business setting.
I wonder if things would be different if we asked people to create their own filing systems as if someone else would be using them next year. Would they then take a little more time to create folders, to make life a little easier for the next person? They may be able to create just enough metadata for us to get by.
In what ways are your own personal information management practices similar to or different from those described in the two readings?I'm one of those unfortunates who believes there must be one true way to do anything; as a result, I keep shifting things around and never have a stable setup. My wife, OTOH, doesn't seem to have this problem.re email: My email strategies for work and personal are different. In general, I'm more organized than the article subjects, partly because my role in the team is be the unofficial archivist and because experience with our customers has shown that I'm better at keeping these records than they are.
At work, my strategies shift and vary based on the work I'm doing and the tools I'm using. I used Outlook differently from Lotus Notes, for example. In general, I find myself dumbing down the email interfaces so they're as simple to use as possible. I tend to create folders for each project I'm involved with and emails go there. Because we have storage restrictions, I will archive emails (usually emails with big attachments) to a separate database on my hard drive; I have an agent set up to archive mails over 6 months old. For the database on my hard drive, I have full-text indexing turned on as this lets me search inside PDFs, Word files, etc. (Can't do this with my active email database.)
After attempting to segregate mails by project AND fiscal year, I decided last year to keep all project-related emails in one project folder and be done with it. (Notes lets you keep a file in more than one folder, basically a shortcut to the email, but I rarely use that.) I rarely think about metadata or context; like the article subjects, I'm concerned with the next deadline or commitment and long-term storage and access isn't part of my everyday thinking.
We've found that it's best after a project is over or some disaster has happened, to draft a Word file that summarizes the incident, what we did, our rationale, important facts, etc. It helps to draw everything together in one place in a coherent narrative. Often, important meetings or phone calls are not documented elsewhere, and they sometimes need to be captured. I then email it to as many people as request to see it (safety in numbers; in case I delete my copy, someone else may have it); I also save it to our Notes document database on the network where it's backed up and available for others to see.
[Aside: It strikes me that the Notes article is all about jumbled collections of individual items--call them 'words.' The Symbian developers are creating a framework to turn individual words into 'phrases' with simple grammar -- "is part of," "was taken on," "is used by," and so on. But there's no technological way to turn those phrases into any meaningful sentences or a narrative, except in the mind of the user.]
My personal mail is kept in Gmail, with minimal labels (I don't use multiple tags). I find the searches powerful enough that I only use labels for short-term personal projects.
Previously, I used Yahoo mail for several years; I archived all of that mail to my hard drive in 2006, and have gone back to it less than 10 times, I'd say. I just haven't needed to. I use Copernic Desktop Search to scour files for keywords if I can't find a particular document.
My files are organized primarily by directory name, but I have duplicates that have built up over time, and haven't figured out a strategy to deal with them. I depend on the directory and file names to provide whatever context I need to figure out what they are. I may append keywords to filenames, but not often.
My photos are organized in directory folders by year, then by month, then by subjects. Music files are organized in directory folders by genre, artist, etc. I don't really trust Picasa or iTunes or MediaMonkey to organize these things for me because their organization tends to be proprietary and require much organizational fiddling by myself, whereas they can all read the files in my directories, which I can arrange once and then forget about it.
I tend to think hierarchically and alphabetically, so that's how I tend to arrange my files on disk; I fall back to Copernic when I just can't find it by scanning folder and file names.
