Make Information Storage as Simple as Possible But No Simpler
- Image by Kasaa via Flickr
In the past I have written about GTD techniques and my ubiquitous capture system and from the beginning I have noticed a shift in my methods and techniques. This week I had a bit of an “ah ha moment” when reading a blog post entitled “File Under: Miscellaneous“.
The problem with the Old World
In the tangible world of wooden desktops, filing cabinets, and hanging file folders (I hate those things!) data capture and retrieval takes a lot of forethought. In my own hard copy files I have a section for Project (major heading) and then a folder for each project (minor heading) I also have a section for hard copy Purchase Requestions that have been returned from my purchasing department. This all appears organized and easy to file and retrieve documents but after a couple months of use (maybe less) you will find a dilemma–where to I store a purchase requestion related to Project X? Now I need to consider a set of rules to handle this consistently.
These indexing and referencing problems become more challenging with much larger collections. Have you ever considered asking why most libraries divide them fiction collections by authors name and their non-fiction by subject? What happens when I want to find a vampire romance novel?
These are problems in the tangible world because I can’t have the same hardcopy in more than one place at a time.
Breaking the Paradigm in the Digital World
When I first started building my electronic capture system it was based on my hardcopy process. Identify information, move it to relevant folder, and retrieve it based on my working knowledge of the system (where do I put my project related purchase requsitions?). This worked well, at least as well has the hardcopy systems that I was already working with.
A couple years into using my capture system I discovered indexing tools I could use to index and search the contents of my desktop like Copernic, Google Desktop, and Windows Search. Each of these tools provides an efficient desktop index that will allow full text search of the documents stored in your computer and when utilized in conjunction with the extended properties if a document (i.e. keywords filed in a Microsoft Office document) can all you to quickly find relevant data in any indexed folder.
This shift from a directory based system and process is no different than the world experienced when they moved from the early version of Yahoo! (remember when it was a directory not a search engine?) to Google. The world recognized directory based systems scaled very poorly the outbreak of the Internet, on a micro level this is what many of us managing electronic capture systems learned. The more data you have, the more referential relevance you have, the more you need to run an index based retrieval process.
The paradigm shift has a little bit of overhead (quite literally some processor overhead to maintain the indexes) but once you embrace the concept most people will recognize there is much less effort involved with an index based system. While I personally choose to maintain some documents in hierarchal folders, like dividing reference documents from projects, to allow me to archive them once they are no longer active other document types, like e-mail, just get moved from the in box to an archive folder. I no longer need to put much mental effort into sorting because it is easier to just search for the information I need when I need it.
Consider the impact of this shift in much larger reference systems, like a library. Google Books epitomizes the strength of full text indexes, consider the search for “ubiquitous capture system getting things done”, I can quickly pull up some relevant passages from the text I want to review and reference. This method would allow me to concurrently store my non-fiction novels both my author and subject making it much easier to find the Twilight series when I want to read vampire romance novels.
By embracing index based systems I made my storage system as simple as possible and never sacrifice the ability to retrieve information much more quickly than my former directory bases system.
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