海角大神

Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance book or other book of interest.

I鈥檓 pretty passionate about organization 鈥� after all, I named David Allen鈥檚 book Getting Things Done as one of the . I鈥檓 also (obviously) passionate about how information technology and the internet can change people鈥檚 lives.

This book, by former CIO of Google, Douglas C. Merrill, hits the joint between those two passions quite firmly. It looks at how people organize all of the information they need to maintain their life on a daily basis and talks about how recent advances in technology (particularly cloud computing 鈥� where you save your data on a web server, a la Gmail or Facebook) have potentially changed or improved how we organize ourselves.

Intriguing stuff, but is there enough meat there to fill up a whole book with ideas?

1 | Cocktail Parties & Cap鈥檔 Crunch
Our brain is a strange little machine. It鈥檚 pretty poor at retaining a large number of little pieces of information, but it is very good at taking lots of little pieces of information and making sense of them. That鈥檚 why, over time, successful humans have developed external aids to help with storing those little pieces of external information.

Think of our schedules. Most of us who have a lot of appointments to keep maintain some sort of written schedule 鈥� I sure do. Why? Because without it, you鈥檒l have a lot of little pieces of information floating around in your brain (each appointment) and if you forget one, it鈥檚 a major problem. So we get into the routine of storing it all externally and just remembering to check the schedule all the time.

2 | Summer Vacations, Suburbia & Factory Shifts
An awful lot of societal structures are woefully inefficient. Many, many people work a nine-to-five schedule (or something close), so there are resultant traffic jams, causing long commutes and tons of lost productivity 鈥� I don鈥檛 know about you, but I鈥檇 prefer to be working than sitting in traffic. School students have long summer vacations during which their learning and skills get rusty. The list goes on and on 鈥� the way things were always done might have been efficient in the past compared to the alternatives, but society has changed so much that these things have become inefficient.

Instead of just forcing yourself into these inefficient structures, why not see if you can change a rule or two. Do some homeschooling during the summer. Ask if you can shift your work schedule to two hours earlier 鈥� or two hours later 鈥� so you can avoid the morning and evening rushes. Look into telecommuting if your job allows it. If something seems inefficient 鈥� and every time you鈥檙e sitting idle, there鈥檚 probably an inefficiency 鈥� look for ways around it so you can actually fill your time with meaning.

3 | Racecars, Basketball Shorts & Opera
All of us have constraints in life. I work at home with three young children 鈥� that certainly introduces some constraints. The big challenge is to determine which constraints are real and which ones are imagined. If you can figure out that you鈥檙e just imagining a constraint, then it鈥檚 no longer a constraint.

Take naptime, for example. I used to view this as a pretty long constraint on other activities, as I鈥檇 stay near the kids until they were asleep (they鈥檙e good at going to sleep by themselves at night, but during naptime when the sun is shining outside, they can sometimes get antsy). What I eventually learned is that the constraint was much smaller than I imagined. Once a story is read and they鈥檙e laying down, the perfect time has arrived to open my laptop and get a few things done.

What constraints in your life are real constraints?

4 | Climb That Mountain or Chill in the Barcalounger?
What is it that I want to achieve above all else? Why do I want to achieve it? What happens if I don鈥檛 achieve it? What exactly do I have to do to make it happen? The more you ask yourself these questions and reflect on your answers, the more you begin to put the big things you want in life front and center.

What do I want to achieve above all else? I want to be a successful writer and a successful father. Those are my front-and-center goals 鈥� the other goals I have are almost always subordinate to those two things. Other things really don鈥檛 matter in comparison. What does success mean in those areas? That鈥檚 a much longer answer, but after a lot of reflection, I think I know what success is there, too.

5 | Beyond Taylorism & Trapper Keepers
Once upon a time, organizing information meant keeping it in hierarchical structures that made it easy to dig down and locate a specific piece of information 鈥� think of the Dewey Decimal System or a complex filing system.

Today, though, information technology allows us to have all of that data electronically and, more important, it鈥檚 all searchable. Instead of digging for a file in a huge filing cabinet, we can just search for it if we have it stored electronically.

This gets around a lot of differences: different filing methods, different constraints, different personal quirks. Everyone simply searches for what they want.

Think about Wikipedia versus an old printed set of World Book encyclopedias, for example.

6 | Paris, France or Paris, Vegas?
In fact, the best skill one can build for managing information in the future is the ability to know how to search effectively and accurately for a specific piece of information. This means learning the nuances of various search engines, knowing how they work, and knowing how to apply them.

Using Google means more than just going to the search field and typing in what you want, for example. There鈥檚 quite a lot of syntax that goes into really narrowing down what you want, from using the 鈥渟ite:鈥� prefix to narrow down searches within a particular site to using 鈥�-鈥� as a prefix to exclude terms. There鈥檚 even more useful syntax within specific programs like when you鈥檙e searching through old emails.

7 | Colored Markers & Filters
There is so much information out there that it鈥檚 impossible to process it all. So where do we begin?

Merrill suggests starting with your goals. For example, you鈥檙e probably reading The Simple Dollar because you have personal financial or personal success goals: paying off debt, building up some savings, getting a better job, or so on. This means that some posts apply to you and your situation and some do not. If it doesn鈥檛 apply, filter it out immediately. Use your energy to read something else.

This is also true when it comes down to the information you save 鈥� old emails and the like. Why are you saving it? What鈥檚 your goal with that information if you retain it? This often helps you figure out how to retain it.

8 | Day-Timer or Digital?
Should you have a document in digital form or in paper form? To put it bluntly, you should always have it in the form that takes the least amount of time for you to manage it once you鈥檝e climbed the learning curve.

For example, I keep my schedule electronically because it takes far less time to enter repeated appointments or to share my schedule with others than it does with a written schedule. On the other hand, it鈥檚 often easier to receive statements in the mail because electronic distribution of paper statements is still sometimes very poor. Paper is still also superior when it comes to jotting down quick notes, though that may change in the near future.

9 | Beyond Send & Receive
Merrill is a huge fan of Gmail for organizing email and contact information and I have to agree with him. The ability to search through mountains of email effortlessly, tag key emails easily, sort them as I wish, and retrieve email from any web browser makes Gmail an indispensable tool for me (and for others).

Much of this chapter focuses on Gmail power tips. In fact, Merrill often argues in favor of just emailing information that you need to retain to your own Gmail account because of the ease of searching it in the future.

10 | Thanks for Sharing
Similarly, Merrill makes an argument for using here, for similar reasons as Gmail 鈥� accessibility and ease of searching. He rails quite a bit against the 鈥渓ocked system鈥� of Outlook/Exchange and Domino, mostly because of the barrier they put between work appointments and personal appointments.

I find Gmail and Gcal to be essential tools for my work and for my personal life thanks to things like integrating weather forecasts into my personal schedule (so my calendar alone can indicate whether today is a good day for an outdoor activity).

11 | A Browser, an Operating System & Some Cool Stickers
Here, Merrill proposes moving collaborative documents online to , enabling you to easily work together with others that have access to a web browser, as well as store all of your documents at a place easily accessible via the web and, of course, searchable. I also use this for some documents, while keeping others offline for my own privacy.

While Merrill does focus pretty heavily on the Google apps, he鈥檚 right on in terms of two key points. First, the more searchable all of your emails, documents, schedules, and other information is, the more useful it is. Second, no one is putting this all together as smoothly as the Google apps do 鈥� and they鈥檙e free.

12 | Avoiding Brain Strain
The best technique for avoiding brain strain is to focus on one activity at a time, because every time you switch activities, some focus and some information is lost in the process. If you鈥檙e about to switch activities, take the time to note your current train of thought on your current activity so that you can pick it up easier when you return.

If your job and life seem to constantly push you to switch focus with frightening regularity, seek out spaces in which you can minimize those focus switches. Turn off your distractions (like your phone) and shut your door so you can bear down on a task.

13 | Checking Email from the Beach
It鈥檚 all about 鈥渨ork-life balance.鈥� In other words, the more efficient you are at your required work tasks and life tasks, the more time you have free for genuine relaxation and enjoyment of life. That鈥檚 why, if you have pockets of down time that don鈥檛 allow for sustained relaxation, you should try to find ways to fill those pockets with some sort of useful activity.

Yes, that does mean you should do things like check your email during a fifteen minute downtime on a Saturday. Doing that, however, frees you up to spend more sustained time involved in activities you care about later. The more efficient your tools are, the easier it is to do these microbursts of tasks.

14 | Dealing with the Unexpected
You鈥檙e going to make mistakes along the way 鈥� no one is perfect. The key is to learn from those mistakes and look for solutions so that these mistakes don鈥檛 repeat themselves.

The book closes with one of the best parts 鈥� a long list of 鈥渟tuff we love,鈥� web applications that solve particular personal information management concerns.

Is Worth Reading?
This is a really useful read if you are already fairly organized as it does a good job of outlining a large number of ways that you can use many recent advances in information technology to organize your personal and professional information. I fall into that category, so I found lots of interesting things in this book.

This book 颈蝉苍鈥檛 a useful read if you鈥檙e not already pretty organized. If you鈥檙e in that group, the stuff in this book won鈥檛 necessarily help you get organized 鈥� it鈥檚 not an organization system in itself, but a bunch of tactics to help improve what it is you already do. If you鈥檙e starting from scratch, I really recommend David Allen鈥檚 excellent book (which I鈥檓 planning to cover in detail in an upcoming series).

I got a lot of good ideas from this book. You might, too.

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