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Saturday, February 21, 2004 |
Because finding filed email is so simple (particularly if you use X1), I find (pun intended) it is convenient, and almost always successful, to search for any personal piece of information that I know to have been referenced in an email. Much more so than tryint to remember where I might have deliberately filed something (even electronic data; yes, I know X1 can be applied to that, too, but it is just easier with email).
Anyway, I find myself emailing things to myself for the sole purpose of later being able to search them out. For instance, a few months ago, I called to get the hours of the walk-in medical clinic run by my doctor's practice. I use it so infrequently, there is zero chance I would remember. I could search it out on the web, but that could still involve a few minutes of poking. So I emailed myself the hours. Tonight I was trying to remember what they were, so I checked my email and in 15 seconds, had my answer.
I know I am not the only one who feels this way. There is lots of evidence that the majority of web users are search dominant, meaning that they would rather just search for something than try to use site navigation features. I have further read, and believe, that many people don't even bother with bookmarks, assuming they can always quickly locate something using Google (not as good an assumption in the pre-Google, pre-Page Rank days). So it seems to me that the searching-your-own-email technique is a logical expression of this tendency, at the level of personal data.
I'm not sure, but I believe that some of David Gelernter's research focuses on this notion.
9:25:07 PM 
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Filing, yeccchh. I hate it more than almost anything else. I hate is so much, I put it off for months at a time. A very bad habit, to be sure. Hating filing is really just a special case of hating paper. If only it were as simple to file, locate and retrieve paper as it is email.
I have a new filing idea. Lots of papers fall into that in-between category: you can't instantly toss them, but you don't need to neatly file them for all eternity. I tend to let those just pile up, and then when I do my very infrequent (think quarterly, except sometimes not that often) binge-filing, I conveniently find that many of them have been overtaken by events, and can be tossed. However, I recognize that is really a very poor system, for several obvious reasons.
So I am thinking that I should handle the in-betweens systematically, but in a fairly lightweight manner. I will create folders by quarter, where I file things based on their expected life. Anything filed in Q2, for example, should be disposable by the end of Q2. So at quarter's end, I just have to quickly leaf through that quarter's folder, to do a sanity check before I toss.
9:15:00 PM
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© Copyright 2005 Erik Neu.
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