AB: All-Round Nice Guy

If you’re anything like me, your computer is more than just a tool that you use for work - it’s likely that your computer is your virtual ‘filing cabinet’ - full of projects and work in progress, special applications for special purposes, resources and documents for reference when things get tricky, as well as a treasure trove of emails dating back to the last millennium.

I think my oldest email in my email program is dated 1997, and I still have more than a thousand emails that I’ve kept from before the year 2000. I also have more than 10000 photos, fonts and documents from before the year 2000, including 36 really, really bad digital photos from 1997 on one of the world’s first consumer digital cameras. (For all you camera buffs out there, it was less than 1/10 of a megapixel, could only hold 12 shots at a time, and didn’t even have a screen to preview your shots.)

The point of me digging through all my files and emails to tell you how many I have kept is that is that none of it is a big surprise to me - in almost every case, I’ve purposefully filed them away, and I know where they are when I want to access them.

In the real world, the physical world, we have places like Ikea to keep our socks and our shoes and our offices organised - but in the virtual world - inside the computers we rely on so heavily for our businesses, we’re (almost) on our own.

We often file things away badly, and often, we don’t file at all. Our productivity in the real world is seen as critical, but our productivity in the virtual world is often way behind. Sound familiar? Read on!

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THE ‘GETTING THINGS DONE’ PHOENOMENA

Let me introduce you to a concept called ‘Getting Things Done’. It’s an actual ‘movement’ if you will, out there on the Internet - that is, it’s a philosophy of dealing with work as it arrives into your virtual world, so that you can actually process the important stuff, and filter out the non-vital things or the non-urgent things.

Let me say at the outset the the process can be both quite radical and quite enlightening if taken to the extreme - but that a less radical mix of only taking *some* of the philosophy plus some common sense goes a long way. To put it mildly, going the full ‘Getting Things Done’ approach really suits people who also enjoy arranging their sock drawers by colour and fibre content - whereas my morning struggle to find a pair of matching socks from the jumble of navy and black socks is not barrel of fun, but it’s not something I’ve ever felt the need to spend a lazy Sunday stressing over either.

Onwards.

The basic principle of ‘Getting Things Done’ is to assess each inbound task/email/document as it arrives, and quickly despatch it to one of three or four destinations: 1) the trash, 2) a ‘Do it now’ folder, 3) a ‘Delegate it’ folder, or 4) a ‘Defer it for later’ folder.

All junk is to be quickly deleted, and all ‘Do it now’ work is quickly attended to by either a real world action or a virtual one. The ‘Delegate it’ process is to handball the task to the right person with enough information that you won’t need to begin to play ‘email tennis’ to resolve unclarified points. And the ‘Defer it for later’ process is not just to ‘file it away’, but to assign it to a ‘To Do’ folder for either marked for ‘the end of the day’, ‘this week’, or, worst case, ‘the near future’.

The ultimate aim of ‘Getting Things Done’ is to reduce stress and to improve your own personal workflow in both the real world and in the virtual world. The original author, David Allen, has a set of free white papers to ‘purchase’ on his web site, davidco.com - but there are many many others with variations on this basic theme - one site with easy to follow videos regarding organising your desktop is: kinkless.com/article/kinkless_desktop

It’s actually quite a straightforward process in theory, but in practice, it’s hard to get used to - that option of ‘Defer it for later’ is the sticking point for most people - we’ve all been guilty of keeping email inboxes until they’re full of year-old emails, or of keeping lots and lots of files on our desktop so that ‘we know where they are’.

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YOUR EMAIL INBOX

It’s been both the biggest boom to the business world as well as being the new Achilles Heel of the business world - love it or hate it, email is here to stay.

The problem, of course, is that it’s so easy to send an email that the frequency of communication increases, but the quality of the communication decreases. Apart from the etiquettes and sensibilities of replying to ‘replied’ emails (we’ll cover that at a different time!) the most common way of organising your email inbox is ‘all in one big folder’.

Using the built in search functionality of your email program can often overcome hard to pinpoint emails, but nothing can replace an organised system of filing emails, both for organising your day, and for archiving old emails.

The ‘Getting Things Done’ process suggests that incoming emails be quickly despatched to one of four places as outlined above, and then ultimately into a folder called ‘to be archived’.

Once a week or so, all emails in the ‘to be archived’ folder can then be moved into client-specific or project-specific folders, so that they can be easily browsed at any time in the future. Use the ability of your email program to nest your archive folders into logical categories, and also make new archive folders for different jobs within the one project/client, so that you can also see the ‘passing of time’ within each project or client archive folder.

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Next month, spring will be upon us, so I’ll take the opportunity to continue this train of thought in more detail, and I’ll outline ways to spring-clean your computer and apply some of the principles of ‘Getting Things Done’ to your hard drive, your desktop and to your downloads folder. Don’t panic, I won’t be coming around to your house to inspect your sock drawer… yet.

AB out