Tip For Getting More Organized: Don’t

I figured this out before HBR and before the IBM researchers.  (Sweet comfort to learn that I’m in front of Harvard and IBM on something.)  Searching, searching, searching, searching.  Hundreds (thousands?) of searches over the years…searching yet being unable to find an email.   Or being unable to find an important presentation.  Or a file that I needed to get in my hands right away. Years of trying different schemes.  Different software applications.  Stacking hard copies in drawers.  Folders bulging.  Creating a few well intentioned and labeled Outlook email File Folders exploding to 10, and then 15 and then 20.  An overflowing plate of spaghetti with red sauce spewing all over.  Frustration boiling over.  Needing to start the work over knowing that your best ideas are buried in a deep, dark corner of your hard drive.

Forgettaboutit.  I gave up.  Scrap the attempts and the time to organize.

I reverted to one outlook file folder to save all of my emails. (Archiving periodically)

I use one software search program – X1 – to rip through searches to find what I need in my computer in seconds.  (See my review of X1)

I now work and SEARCH in peace.

Now, here’s the brain trust at HBR and IBM essentially telling you the same thing in a recent post.  A few top excerpts:

HBR Blog Network: Tip for Getting More Organized: Don’t

…How much time do you spend each day getting better organized? Cut it in half.

…When it comes to investing time, thought and effort into productively organizing oneself, less is more. In fact, not only is less more, research suggests it may be faster, better and cheaper.

…(researchers) observed that email users who “searched” rather than set up files and folders for their correspondence typically found what they were looking for faster and with fewer errors. Time and overhead associated with creating and managing email folders were, effectively, a waste.

…By combining threading with search, technology makes an economic virtue of virtual disorganization. The personal productivity issue knowledge workers and effective executives need to ponder is whether habits of efficiency that once improved performance have decayed into mindless ruts that delay or undermine desired outcomes. Are folders and filing systems worth fifteen to twenty-five minutes a day of contemplative classification and sort for serious managers?

…Obsessive Type As might insist hands-on organizational design is essential to getting a firm grasp on essential correspondence. More measured assessment argues that this is exactly the sort of administrivia where the energy literally isn’t worth the effort. To frame the productivity issue more starkly: what would really prove more personally productive — folders that sort 15% faster? Or key phrase search capabilities that were 20% better?

…Not a single colleague or client I know would pick the former. Their personal productivity paradigms have shifted. The notion of “getting organized” has the aroma of anachronism. Ongoing improvement in email/document/desktop and cloud-centric search frees them from legacy information management behaviors like filing.

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