In the year and a half since we announced our 1.0 release, we’ve made lots of changes. It’s got a new look and a new sense of purpose: to help you organize your project information.

The Infovark home dashboard shows current projects and recent activity

Now you can easily assemble your files, email, contacts, notes and other items together under a single project heading. It makes it easier to find your stuff than ever before. And just like Infovark 1.0, it’s fully synced with Microsoft Outlook and your Windows folders, so you always have the most current information at hand.

What are you waiting for? Go to the download page and give it a try. And be sure to let us know what you think, either here in the comments, via email, or in our support forum.

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And then you have that Outlook inbox that has too many things sitting in it. Maybe one Friday afternoon, in a minor panic, you started to create folders under your inbox, one for each project — and then you shuffled a few items in there to try to lessen the load. But rather than help, this now means you just have an extra place to look. Perhaps you still have several overdue tasks lingering in your outlook tasks folder, again from a time when you were going to make a serious effort to get on top of this…

Screw it, you think. This is the twenty-first century. If Google has taught us anything, it’s that filing and organization are a waste of time. I’ll just use Outlook’s new search feature whenever I want to find something, right? My own personal cloud. Yeah!

Except, after amassing your own sizable cloud, you realize that this plan doesn’t actually work that well. You search, and you search, and you get some results, but not the one email you thought you were looking for. And then you realize that maybe it wasn’t an email, it was in an attachment to an email. But in order to stay under your inbox quota, you might have deleted it. So your pour through your temporary files, opening random word documents with arbitrary filenames like “AC00012$.DOCX” in a vain effort to recover some vital piece of information you thought you had, because it was in your inbox, but now you’re not so sure…

Storing everything isn’t enough. The horrible truth is that, despite our years of progress in computer science, your computer is not as smart as you. Only you can bring the context to your information. And so, you are going to need to a system to do that. Not a computer system — but a human system. A way by which you impart context for each piece of information you deal with.

A  (dramatic gasp) filing system.

Over the last few years, Dean and I have diligently  researched and wrestled with all the traditional approaches to information management. We’ve looked at how businesses file, how librarians file, at taxonomies and ontologies and folksonomical classification. We’ve looked at auto-classifiers, summarizers, relationship-based recommendation algorithms. We’ve struggled with task based GTD philosophies, and mocked the semantic markup efforts to bring meaning to content through metadata.

The point of all this effort has been for us to find a way to make your job easier. To deal with the fact that your day to day information management is a mess. And, after years of discussion, design, development and heartache we think we have found a system that will solve your problem, once and for all.

A system that allows you to bring context to your information, without you having to spend lots of time doing it. A system that rewards you for filing, where you can always find what you need in an instant.

We’re calling it the Keep It Together system, and it’s the human system behind our computer application — Infovark 2.0, which is due for release soon.

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So what have we been up to lately?

Based on the continuing feedback from our initial release of Infovark, we decided to forgo a 1.5 update and push ahead to Infovark 2.0. Our second release brings several major changes.

First, we’re focusing the core of the application on keeping things together. Whether you call it information management or knowledge management or content management, it all boils down to one key principle: having one place to look to find what you need. Infovark will help gather and organize your stuff so you can spend more time doing and less time searching.

Second, we’ve cut out many of the confusing parts of our application. This includes just about anything that caused us to get a bewildered look or blank stare when we tried to explain it. The cuts include one or two features that are dear to our hearts — and may resurface in later versions in different forms — but we think simplicity and ease of use is an important feature, too.

Third, the new focus and stripped-down feature set has allowed us to completely re-engineer the Infovark user interface. Where before we had a separate “Manager” application and a website for everyday use, we now have one consolidated view of your information.

We’re really excited about the new direction the product is taking. As we get closer to launch, we’ll share more details.

Until then, happy varking!

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I am easily distracted.

It’s true.  And just between you and me, the Internet is not helping.

Look at Twitter, overflowing with real-time data streams full of people who are way more interesting than me, doing all kinds of fabulous things at the rate of one every three seconds.

Look at aggregation services like Reddit and Digg, and RSS, which brings me more interesting content in a day than I could possibly consume in a week.

Underneath all of it is the Web itself, pages and pages of interesting stuff which is fundamentally NOT WORK. As Paul Graham says, it’s like somebody snuck a TV onto my desk when I wasn’t looking.

So, in an effort to trick myself into completing tasks, and avoiding a spacewalk off into the unrelated, I decided to browse websites on how to become productive. (This is, in itself, unproductive, I know, but one has to start somewhere)

In my travels, I came across this inspired productivity hack from 43 Folders: 10 + 2. It’s based on the notion that you can do 10 minutes of anything. Just 10 minutes. You can do that, right?

The way it works is that you start yourself a  timer, do those 10 minutes of, you know, your job, and then you can take a 2 minute break to do anything you want. Catch up with the tweetstream. Read your RSS. Heaven forbid, you could even go outside, or stretch. Then after those 2 minutes, you return to the task at hand, or if you like, pick another task that you’ve been avoiding and do that for 10 minutes.

Here’s where all those numbers add up — if you follow this method for an hour, you’ll have done 50 minutes of productive work, and spent 10 minutes being distracted. If you’re like me, you’ll find that this compares pretty favourably with an hour spent without the timer.

I couldn’t find a good Windows timer to help with this hack, so I made one for us – you can download it here. It’s a no-frills Windows only timer, that counts to 10 minutes, plays a dinky sound, then counts to 2 minutes, and then starts again. It’s pretty light on features, but if you find you need it to do something extra, let me know — I might be able to update it.

If I’m not too busy completing all my productive work this year, of course.

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Infovark is Compatible with Windows 7!

You can consider the “Compatible” logo the “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” for software running on the Windows platform.

To achieve this status, Infovark had to pass a series of tests designed by Microsoft to ensure that Infovark installs, uninstalls, and runs smoothly under Microsoft’s latest operating system.

And so, as of today, Infovark is certified for both 32- and 64-bit variants of Windows 7. We also run on Windows XP and Windows Vista. We’ve updated our system requirements page accordingly.

You can read more about the Windows 7 Logo Certification here.

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