Infovark » Information Management

What I learned when I stopped using email folders

Dean — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 02:40:57 +0000

I remember when Google first began giving out invitations to its “beta” web mail service, Gmail. Back in 2004, techies and pundits predicted that it would mean the end of email as we know it. We could forget about the hassle of email folders and simply search for everything we needed. Google would make sure that access to our information was as fast and accurate as its search results for the general web.

Are email folders obsolete? Or are they still useful in the age of search engines?

Gmail’s search features were fast and accurate, certainly far better than anything than the competition had at the time. But was that enough? Could search alone really do everything a business user needed? I doubted it, but I wasn’t in a position to test it at the time.

After I co-founded Infovark, I could put that claim to the test. We signed up for Google Apps in 2008 and I decided to forgo using folders and rely only on search. (Gmail calls its organization scheme “labels” but they serve the same function as folders.)

My experiment lasted almost three years. Here’s what I discovered.

Conversation View

Conversation view is easily the most popular feature of Gmail. It’s now been adopted by most other email applications. Conversation view automatically groups messages by subject, so it can sometimes fill the void left by abandoning folders. But the reliance on the subject heading can cause trouble if:

You have coworkers that tinker with the subject lines of their messages, breaking a conversation into several smaller, disjointed threads.
You have coworkers that hijack or resurrect old email conversations because they’re too lazy to start a new message chain.
Since conversations drift over time, the collapsed conversation view might have a subject heading that is increasingly irrelevant to the topic being discussed. This can make it much harder to figure out what’s going on unless you read the entire chain. And it makes searching for a particularly important email buried in the middle of a long conversation quite difficult.

None of these things detract from the usefulness of Conversation View itself. After all, most of the time, it does exactly what you want: highlight a chain of messages and make it easy to see the start and end of a thread while avoiding all the junk in the middle.

But it doesn’t quite replace a folder or a label because email subjects are often too granular a way of looking at messages. Sometimes I want a higher-level grouping, to consolidate multiple conversations into the same mental bucket.

I also discovered that I didn’t like to be at the mercy of my fellow collaborators. If they changed the subject line or changed the topic of the thread, I’d have no good way of assigning a message to the right bucket on my side. It works well enough when you have a small team with similar email habits, but all it takes is one or two folks to throw your inbox into disarray.

Living in the moment

Without folders there’s no easy way to pull messages out of the stream of email into a separate area. This has the effect of highlighting the importance of “now” in conversations. Normally, this wasn’t a big deal for me in our small company because the volume of email is generally pretty low.

But when things get busy, I found myself scrolling up and down, moving between pages to find the last few conversations on a particular subject. I noticed it particularly when I got back from business trips or vacations, when I really wanted to sort messages into piles and deal with all the marketing or finance messages in a batch, rather than address each one by one.

It also meant that we would ask each other for status updates more often, even when nothing interesting had happened. What folks were really asking for was a message to get moved to the top of their inbox so that they could keep the issue top of mind. It was easier to ask for an update than to try a dig through the messages from last Wednesday.

The end of history

What really spelled the end of my “search only” experiment was trying to dig up the contracts for our Dell computer leases. (Hence the three years from the start of my experiment.) There were several email conversations where we discussed the specs of the equipment, provided financial documents, arranged for shipping, etc.

I knew roughly when these conversations occurred, but had no idea exactly which words to type into the search box to get the messages I wanted. I could guess that “Dell” and “laptop” and “lease” might bring me results, but what if we hadn’t used those exact words? Or what if those words hadn’t ranked very highly in a chain of messages where we’d talked about computer purchases?

Even if I’d been consistent about using the right terms that would allow me to search and retrieve these messages, what about the folks I was talking to? What if the developers talked about their “machines” or “rigs” or the sales reps used the term “financing options”?

As with subject lines, I was at the mercy of the folks I was corresponding with. If they’d written good, descriptive messages with clear subjects and common terms I’d have no trouble retrieving the emails I needed. But if they hadn’t, I was stuck.

Since I needed to renew my lease and make a few equipment changes, I really needed to see all the stuff from our previous lease. And through search alone, there was no way for me to be sure that I was getting it all.

Conclusion

After that experience, I started using Google’s labels to group and organize messages, much like I’d used folders in Outlook to do the same. Having that extra bit of context around my email conversations makes all the difference in the world when it comes to keeping track of particular topics.

I admit that it took me roughly three years (at a very small company without much email traffic) before the pain got so great I had to put an end to my experiment. And that’s why I think that many people believe you can get away with search alone: If you’re dealing with small volumes of information, without much history, and have little need to consider the broader context, you can get by without organizing things.

But that situation is the exception, not the rule. Unless you’ve recently started a new job, purchased a new computer, or set up a new company email system, you’ll likely find that none of those conditions hold. It might take a few months or a few years, but you’ll eventually feel the pinch like I did.

When I finally decided I’d had enough, sorting all my messages into buckets was really painful. And I think a lot of people fall into that trap — they’ve avoided organizing their work for so long, believing those who tell them it isn’t necessary — that when they do feel the need to get organized, it becomes this huge, monstrous task. So they suffer with a system that they’ve outgrown.

“Outgrown” is the operative word here. You can get by with search alone at the start, but if that’s your only strategy for locating what you need, you’ll eventually reach the limits of what it can do. There is no silver bullet when it comes to keeping up with your stuff.

A final note about Gmail and Google Apps

Google has done a lot to entrench the idea that search is the best way to get the information you need. Their Gmail marketing page touts “no more folders, filing, or fumbling” as the number one benefit. Yet folks at Google must know that search alone doesn’t cut it.

Several years ago, they introduced labels, a concept similar to tagging. In May 2011 they added the ability to “nest” labels inside each other, which now makes them capable of mirroring the classic folders-in-folders structure familiar to Windows, Macintosh, and Linux users everywhere. And when I opened my Gmail earlier today, I was greeted with no fewer than five different ways to organize my inbox.

Inbox, inbox, how do I organize thee? Let me count the ways...

When the biggest and best search company on the planet spends considerable engineering effort to sort and categorize your inbox more effectively, it’s a pretty good hint that search alone as a strategy can take you only so far. Beyond that, you’ll need more than one tool in your toolbox — or inbox.

Locating Stuff: Folders vs. Search

Dean — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 18:21:26 +0000

It seems that every few years, experts in the information management space get spun up about the best way to structure information. One of the perennial debates concerns whether to use folder-based navigation or rely upon search. It’s something of a religious war, with adherents on either side.

The latest round began on the AIIM website. I’ll list links to the key blog posts in the debate at the bottom of this article for those who are curious. It’s a lively discussion, as is typical on the Internet when there are strongly held opinions and no clear answer.

Horses for courses

The debate rages on, but are we gathered around the right campfire?

But the debate is largely irrelevant. Most users of content management systems don’t care how they get the information they need, so long as they can get it quickly and easily. If folders get the job done, they use folders. If tags do the trick, they use tags. If search yields good results, they use search.

You can see this at work on the Internet. While search engines like Google are the primary way users get to the sites they need, a lot of folks use browser favorites or social bookmarking sites like Delicious. And once you arrive at the site you want, you’ll usually see some sort of structured, folder-like navigation to get you to the pages you’re interested in. Most folks think nothing of combining these different approaches to locating information within a single browsing session.

So why is the debate about folders versus search so contentious? Among players in the information management industry, it’s a big deal because vendors have to decide where to spend their software development dollars. They have to set priorities, which means placing tagging over search over folders in their work queue, for example. Even if your system of choice has decent implementations of these three different mechanisms, the folks implementing the solution will likely pick one approach to focus on.

As a user of these systems, you have to hope that they picked the right one, whether out of blind faith or careful analysis, or that they spent the considerable engineering or design effort to tackle all three methods at once.

Here at Infovark, we’ve felt this problem acutely. We opted for the “all of the above” approach because we feel that the more ways you have to find a piece of information, the more likely it is to get found. As a result, we’ve spent more time on getting the information architecture right than on anything else. And it shows: Our interface is plain, the documentation is sparse, and… well, you get the idea.

But beyond the investment in maintaining multiple search mechanisms, you’ve got to help people know which one to use when, because each has its strengths. It’s not that one of these approaches is better than another, it’s about which one is more appropriate in a given situation. And that means understanding the context in which the application or website gets used.

You can’t make an informed choice about search versus folders until you know how the business operates and how people get their work done. And the answer may very well be that both are needed.

Like a lot of abstract debates, this one can’t have a clear winner. And that’s a good thing, because different teams will come up with different approaches. It makes it more likely that you’ll find a tool that will work for your particular situation. Is a search engine better than organizing by folders? It depends. You won’t know until you try it yourself and see.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled flame war

OK, here’s that chain of blog posts I promised earlier. The debate rages on. Check them out and go add some fuel to the fire:

Review: The Shallows

Dean — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 01:58:25 +0000

Last year’s beach read was Nick Carr’s book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. It was an opportune moment to consider the arguments made in his fascinating book, since I happened to be unplugged from the Internet and away from my computer and smartphone at the time.

The Shallows is a more thoughtful version of his provocative earlier article in The Atlantic called Is Google Making us Stupid? But both make the same point: the widespread adoption of new information technology is changing not only the way we live and work, but also how we think.

The Shallows by Nick Carr

At first, this doesn’t seem like a controversial claim. The tools we use shape how we interact with the world and influence our view of it. Distances that seem impossibly far away on foot seem trivial with a car or airplane. The spread of cheap artificial lighting has changed the way we perceive the day and night. But the Shallows makes a bolder claim: That use of these tools does more than influence our thoughts and actions — it physically rewires our brains so that we think and behave differently.

The author discusses several recent studies that show that people using web search engines, feed readers, real-time streams, text messaging, and other modern technologies gather and process information in fundamentally different ways than people relying on more traditional sources. They skim and surf across a sea of different media and source materials, accumulating a broad but shallow knowledge of many diverse topics. They become somewhat better at multitasking and switching contexts but less able to concentrate on tasks requiring deep thought. Is this a good thing?

Testing the waters

We tend to assume that technology and progress go hand-in-hand, and that greater access to information will lead to better outcomes and higher productivity. We’ve been putting computers in schools, wiring classrooms to the Internet, boosting e-books and e-reader technology, and rewriting the rules for media and journalism. All this technology is fundamentally reshaping the way we find and share information.

Though Nick Carr is a tech enthusiast and information junkie himself, he’s skeptical that we’re really doing ourselves any favors by enthusiastically jumping in with both feet. But he’s careful not to condemn these new tools, either.

Some of my favorite parts of The Shallows discuss how some previous information technologies also had a dramatic effect on the way people lived, worked, and thought. Many of these earlier innovations were also regarded skeptically or actively resisted.

For example, Socrates thought that the written word would mean the end of rational argument. And the printing press was initially banned outright in many countries. It can take a long time for society to come to grips with changes in information technology, and we’re just beginning the Internet age.

But while previous generations moaned about the sheer volume of printed works or recorded music, the amount of information available to us today is enormous and growing exponentially. It’s hard not to feel overwhelmed by the massive warehouses of data at our disposal, or feel lost or adrift in a sea of random bits. Even though we’ve faced technological revolutions before, the scale of this one is unprecedented.

Carefully wade in

Having had a year to think about the issues Nick Carr raised in The Shallows, I think he’s absolutely right to point out some of the potential pitfalls of these new technologies. But we still don’t know enough to judge whether on balance they will improve society or diminish it. And we’ll likely find ways to mitigate some of the less desirable consequences.

There’s a great historical anecdote in The Shallows that talks about how one monk in the Middle Ages eventually hit upon the trick of reading silently. Not only could he read more quickly, but he could also read more often because he wouldn’t disturb anyone. While some thought him odd, the innovation slowly began to spread across Europe. We’ll likely discover similar tricks to improve the usefulness of these new tools and minimize their annoyances.

Whether you’re a skeptic of Internet culture or an enthusiast, and regardless of whether you read it in old-fashioned print or indulge in the irony of reading it on your Kindle, The Shallows will make you think about when, how and why you use these new tools.

And that is definitely a good thing.

Expanding your project context

Dean — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 02:10:41 +0000

In my last post, I talked about establishing a project context for email. But we knowledge workers don’t live by email alone (as much as some of us may try). How can we establish the context for all those other project materials we encounter?

Ideally, we’d like to bring this project information together into the same place so that we could reference it and work on it as a unit. There’s a few big benefits to working this way:

You know where everything belongs, so you don’t have to wonder or worry about where to put something so you can find it again.
You spend less time hunting for related and relevant information.
You stay focused on one project, avoiding distractions.

In the good ol’ days, when everything was written on paper, it was pretty easy to collect project materials together.

Tape, paper clips, staples, folders: the simple technologies that used to keep our projects organized

But sadly, most software applications keep information segregated from each other, forcing us to flip between multiple tools and websites to get a clear picture of what’s going on. It’s difficult to maintain a unified project context so long as our email and files are separated by the Great Divide, but there are some tricks we can use to simulate a combined view of your information.

Though I’ll show examples from Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Outlook, you should be able to generalize these tips to the office applications you use regularly. Most of them work in similar ways.

Files and email

Fortunately, both your email system and your file system make use of folders to organize information. We can use that to simulate a combined view of your files and email. It’s a simple trick I learned from looking over the shoulders of coworkers and clients as they did their work. I noticed some people moved information around a lot faster, and spent much less time hunting for the things they needed. Here’s how they did it.

First, create a folder in your email for each of your projects, if you don’t have one already. Second, in your Documents folder, create a folder for each of your projects if you don’t have one already.

Make sure that the project names match exactly, including using the same lower or uppercase letters. We want the names to match so that we can recognize our projects at a glance, without actually needing to scan the names to find the one we want. We also want the names to match so that they sort alphabetically into the same position. This allows us to use both our visual and spatial memory to find the project we need, rather than having to read the labels.

Ah, but you’ve already run into a snag, haven’t you? There are folders in your email already. Some of them, like “Personal” and “Travel” don’t map to specific projects. You have a similar problem in your Documents folder, where some annoying programs have decided to dump their files into your work space. This means you can’t easily line up items in your email inbox and your file system.

Getting your projects named and sorted consistently in your files and email is a harder task than it seems at first, but it's worth the effort

There are two ways to solve this problem:

Mirror the folder structure exactly, even if it means you have empty placeholder folders.
Put your projects in a subfolder named Projects in both your inbox and documents. It’s an extra click to drill down, but you get a clean separation.

Most likely, you’ll have to use a mix of both approaches to get your project folders to line up properly. It’s a hassle to set up at first, but once you’ve done it, you’ll notice how much simpler and quicker some basic tasks become.

For example, when a project email comes in, you can put it in your project folder in your inbox. And you know exactly where it’s file attachment should go — into the project folder with the same name in your documents area. Likewise, if you can’t find a file in your documents, you’ll know right where to look for it in your inbox — it’ll be attached to an email in the project folder with the same name.

Neat, huh? But we’re not done yet.

Tasks, contacts, and appointments

Outlook keeps all your calendar events in one big bucket. This is useful when you want to see your master schedule, but what if you want to figure out how much time is being consumed by a particular project?

And how can we group our tasks by project, and associate particular contacts with particular projects?

Outlook's Categories feature is a hidden gem.

Outlook used to support putting each of these items into folders, just like email. But it wasn’t obvious how to do it in older versions of Outlook, and in Outlook 2010 the feature has all but vanished from the user interface. But there’s another way to establish a project context for contacts, tasks and appointments. We can use categories.

Categories are a very useful feature in Outlook, but few people take advantage of it. You can apply a category to any item, including email. Categories can have both a name and a color, and in the case of your Projects, you should make sure that they have both. The color will help you identify at a glance which items belong to which project when you see them on your calendar or address list.

Be careful to name your project categories exactly the same way you do in your folders. Consistency is key. Our goal is to instantly recognize which items belong to which projects, and to know exactly where to look to find what we need.

We’re just getting started

There! You’ve now created a few buckets for your project information. You’ve reduced the scope you’ll need to look at when browsing or searching for information. You’ll be able to find things faster, too, since it’s easy to use folders and categories as search filters. If you’re a true power user, you can set Outlook rules to automatically assign categories and folders to incoming items.

This gets all of your essential project data organized, but most of the real benefits come later: when you can begin pulling items together to get a complete picture of each project, when you can stop working on something and quickly pick it up again later, or when you can get a new coworker up to speed on a project without hunting for stray bits and pieces.

Establish your project context

Dean — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 04:23:48 +0000

If your work life is divided into projects, then most of the information on your computer belongs to a particular project context. It’s usually one of the first things you try to assess when a new item crosses your desk: What is this about? How does it relate to the stuff I’m working on?

Once you figure that out, stop. Take an instant to make that association explicit. Put it in a folder, apply a tag, flag, or label, but do something to associate it with your work in progress. That simple act will save you time later. You won’t have to re-read the item to figure out what it is again. You’ll know what pile to stick it in if you get interrupted, and you’ll know where to look for it later.

Don't just figure out what bucket it belongs in. Put it inside.

I was reminded of this when I got a new cell phone recently. I felt like I was getting flooded with messages, but I knew I wasn’t getting any more mail than usual. I couldn’t figure it out. But then I caught myself at my desk one day, reading my mail again. And then it clicked.

On my old phone, I knew how to label and flag my incoming messages, but I hadn’t figured that out on my new phone yet. As a result, I found myself processing all my email twice. Once when it pinged my smartphone, and again at my desk later on, when I was planning my day.

Hey, I get enough email as it is. I certainly don’t need to double my mental workload.

Next time you get a message, assign it to one of your projects, through whatever method you like best. Establish the project context at the beginning so you never have to perform that mental triage again. It’s one of the simplest things you can do to streamline your work life.