So, I’m reading Getting Things Done and I’m enjoying it. I think that there’s a lot of good info in it and it will be very useful. However, I’ve run across one snag…
The author, David Allen, is really big on having a good general knowledge filing system. He seems to think it’s the cornerstone of keeping your life in check, but the filing system described in his book is entirely paper based. He even talks about printing out emails you want to save so that you can file them.
I “live my life online”. I work on a computer all day. I telecommute. I deal with email, IM, PDF, HTML, etc. Almost all of the data that I would want to index and search on is electronic. To make things worse, I’ve got a work computer and a personal computer which are two different OS’s.
How does one keep all of his (or her) electronic bits in order and organized so that you can find what you want when you want it? I’ve got Google Desktop on my work machine and Spotlight on my personal machine but I’ve had less than stellar success with each of them. I do use Yahoo!’s MyWeb to tag and aggregate bookmarks that I care about but it’s an effort to go there because the system isn’t integrated with my desktop, it’s separate and online. I’ve heard about del.icio.us and ma.gnolia and they’re in a very similar vein to Yahoo!’s tool, but they all feel like they’re intended more for discovery and sharing, not storage and organizing.
Also, this completely ignores emails. I can use the above-mentioned tools to tag URLs and this provides a rather sophisticated, if simple, tool for organization, but I don’t have a similar means for email (that I know of). At work I use Outlook and at home I use Mail. I’d consider a different mail client at home if it was stable and did everything I needed but I don’t know of anything out there that meets my needs (IMAP is a big one).
Anyway, I don’t have a solution, nor do I expect to find the perfect one anytime soon. I’d be interested in hearing about how others are solving this problem and I’ll definitely let you know if I figure out a better way.
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July 13th, 2006 at 6:57 am
I’m struggling to see the need for a massive electronic organizational component to my life. I keep track of my financial data with Microsoft Money and a few electronic websites. My “to do” list is maintained through Microsoft Outlook, as is my contact list. For misc. topics I store notepad files on my desktop. I have an Excel spreadsheet for story submissions, a notepad text file for reading list (where I keep track of books I haven’t purchased but want to), and the Outlook calendar manages my schedule.
Emails get dropped into a specific folder within my mailbox, based on their content, importance, and urgency. Booksmarks are stored in folders within my browser based on interest groups (gardening, cooking, writing, technical, etc.)
I question the need to become much more organized than that, at least in my life.
July 14th, 2006 at 9:02 am
Storage and organization are the other side of the coin from sharing and discovery in Ma.gnolia. By allowing you to assign tags or keywords to each bookmark, you don’t need to overtly organize bookmarks at any point. Instead, organization happens in response to immediate needs.
The traditional way to organize bookmarks is to put them into folders, naming the folders to describe the category of contents. This quickly becomes troublesome as many items can reasonably organized in different ways. For example, suppose you’re a fan of U2 front man and activist, Bono. Bono is active in both music and in aiding victims of poverty. How do we find one good folder to put bookmarks about his work into?
With tags, you could assign the keywords “music” “u2″ “bono” “activism” and “poverty”, depending on what the bookmarked webpage talks about and your own interests. Later, you can pull up everything about Bono by searching for the ‘Bono’ tag. You could refine the search to include only the stuff about his music by searching for “Bono” “music” and “u2″. Instantly, you have lists that are built from the keywords you search for, so your ‘folders’ become virtual and dynamic. The bookmarks you find depend on what you need at the moment, where with regular folders you would need to guess your future bookmark retrieval needs.
I hope that helps a bit. Organization with tags is a dynamic thing and quite new, so it can take a bit of effort to get used to. But once you are used to it, you will never think of folders again.
July 14th, 2006 at 10:32 pm
Thanks for the feedback, Ernest and Todd. It’s kept me thinking more about what I think I want and what I think I need.
I’m working on a follow up post with my further thoughts that should be up later tonight.
-Matt
July 14th, 2006 at 11:43 pm
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