Tag: productivity

I started reading Getting Things Done, but then dropped it. I nevertheless quite enjoyed the points about (1) building an organizational system that we trust and (2) doing the action immediately if it takes less than 2 minutes (which I had heard many time before but didn’t know it came from this book).

The book is a bit old fashioned to me. We can argue that the concepts are general, but we are information worker now and the “basket” mentioned in the book have been replaced by web applications, USB keys, and iPhone.

Building then a modern organizational system that we trust is far from easy. We need to balance different dimension that impact our trust in a system, e.g. security, reliability, perennial data format, etc. Well, the usual non-functional requirements.

Ultimately, it’s a matter of time and risk: How long will I need to re-do the work? What are the consequence if I forget this or that?

In my previous job in an ECM company, I increased my awareness about such issues. Managing the massive amount of information produced nowadays is a challenge and business case. I remember I was astonished when I read these numbers for the first time:

Recent estimates show that a typical worker will take 12 minutes to process a single document. Nine of these 12 minutes are spent searching for, retrieving and refiling the document — meaning that only three minutes are spent actually using the information they’ve found.

The average office:
• Makes 19 copies of each document.
• Spends $20 on labor to file each document.
• Loses 1 out of 20 office documents.
• Spends $120 searching for every misfiled document.
• Spends $250 recreating each lost document.
• Spends $25,000 to fill a four-drawer file cabinet and $2,000 annually to maintain it.

The volume of paper documents that organizations must process has increased tenfold in the last five years. Increases in paper volume drive the cost of paper handling higher, which greatly reduces profit margins.

(from Document Management Overview.)

And for the story, I tried first to find this excerpt using a search for “Introduction to enterprise content management” on my hard drive. No result. I then decided to locate it manually. I went to Library > Intranet, communication & ECM and … it was there! It’s funny that even though I recalled what the book was about, the name “Document Management Overview” was completely different from what I tried. Ontology ftw!

Here is what composes my current organizational system:

Getting Things Done is to business what No Broken Window is to software development. Whenever something comes in that requires some action, either do it right now, or at least enter it in a reliable system for later (In the case of development, the system is of course the issue tracker).

More Links

• An awesome comics about GTD.
• Managing the information tsunami
• What are effective ways to assess if someone is good at “getting things done”?

I found a post-it on my desk this morning that was actually there since several months (if not year). It’s a short checklist with questions to answer before deciding whether I will trash or retain a document.

I tend to retain too many documents (electronic and paper)  that consumes space and are useless — I will anyway never read them. This short post-it helps me in my cleaning activity. It helps me take some distance with the material and its importance.

• is it hard to find the document again?
• is the document important regarding legal aspects?
• is the document up to date?
• is the document currently/frequently used?

Then if all answers are “no”, trash it!

It’s amazing how many documents can actually be trashed according to this checklist. Free desktop again!