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Keeping track of your stuff
Can we rely on search alone to find the information we need? After using Outlook folders to organize my inbox for many years, I switched to Google Apps and let its search features do the heavy lifting. Want to know how it worked out? Read about the results of my experiment in personal information management.
Organizing by folders versus relying on search is one of the most contentious debates in information management. It’s also one of the most pointless. You can’t know which is better for an organization or for an individual until you know how the business works and what the goals are. Instead of debating, we should be celebrating that there are multiple ways to locate the information we need.
The Shallows is a thoughtful meditation on what the new tools of the Internet Age have in store for the way we live, think, and work. But despite all the hype behind e-readers, online databases, search engines, and real-time streams, Nick Carr is skeptical that these technologies will improve the quality of our thoughts and discussions.
Ideally, we’d like to be able to gather all of our project materials together in one place, but most computer systems don’t let us do that easily. Here are a few tricks to help.
The first question you ask yourself when getting a new message is, “What is this about? How is this relevant?” Once you figure that out, you’ve established the project context for that item. The next step is capturing that context so that you never have to think about those questions again.