How to Select the Right Categories in Organizing Your Information

How to Select the Right Categories in Organizing Your Information

Managing information is about creating convenient categories. When you are organizing your documents or files you have to place them in groups that you can easily remember. Overly complex category schemes are impractical for rapid use. When the pressure is on or when you have to find something in a pinch simplicity is crucial.

Keeping things simple is not such an easy task. You have to fight for simplicity. It's very easy to allow your organizational system to balloon and sprawl into many disjointed categories. Simplicity is difficult because it challenges you to be succinct and efficient. 

Create categories of convenience

Align the categories that you organize your information around with the different activities of your life. This will help ensure your knowledge organization systems are simple and easy to use. 

Create categories based upon major activities. Examples bill payments, contacting, project proposals, marketing.

Of course as the context and activities in your life change so will your organizational scheme. Whether you are using Google Drive, OneNote or a physical file cabinet the categories you create in the form of folders or metadata tags should align with life activities.

Context, context, context is everything

Ok, so it's important to note that there is no "one size fits all "organizational scheme. The context of your life will drive the way you think,, organize and seek to retrieve information.

The more your system aligns with these realities, the easier it is to use. When you achieve life/ system alignment you will achieve an intuitive organizational design. Your life's cues will reinforce your system.

Minimize Stress by Capturing Your Open Loops

Minimize stress by capturing all of your action items and to-do’s in a list. This simple personal knowledge management practice emphasizes getting daily commitments out of your head and into your system. Ultimately this practice will free you from the pressure of trying to remember everything and the dread of forgetting something.

You are never too busy to take inventory of all of your important work.When life starts to feel like it’s spiraling out of control it may be due to losing track of important tasks. This can easily happen if an accurate account is not taken of upcoming urgencies and commitments.

Getting caught off guard wrecks havoc on productivity. Two practices are helpful in avoiding this situation.

1. Capture Your Open Loops in a List
2. Review List on a Daily and Weekly Basis

Capture Your Open Loops

When you capture all of your open loops you are essentially documenting all of your to do’s whether big or small. Regardless of how insignificant an action item is to the conscious mind, the unconscious mind will track it just the same. This can siphon mental energy away from achieving truly important work. Remember if it is on your mind, it should be on your list. David Allen author of Getting Things Done often states that minds are good for thinking of ideas not on keeping track of them. He is a strong advocate of the practice of documenting action items immediately into an external system as they arise.

This basic practice will help you regain a sense of control. You may also notice you are able to sleep better at night as your mind can relax knowing that you have captured all of your to do’s in a reliable system. Review your action lists on a weekly and daily cadence

Once you have all of your open loops captured it’s important that you review them on a weekly and daily basis.

The Weekly Review

Your weekly review is when you audit your to-do lists and plan your activities for the next 7 days. This review will help you ensure you are current on all of your action items and that nothing is falling through the cracks.

If you are familiar with the Agile Scrum methodology the weekly review is similar to the sprint planning session at the beginning of the week. Don’t skimp on the weekly review,  it is the cornerstone of personal productivity. A good weekly review session today will spare you a lot of unnecessary rework and firefighting tomorrow.

It is recommended that 1–2 hours is carved out at the beginning of the week to conduct this session. You may be thinking that you don’t have time for this. I thought the same thing too, however, I found that the 1–2 hours I invested in planning saved me 5–7 hours in avoidable rework and firefighting. Planning makes productivity easier.

The Daily Review

Your daily review is all about getting focused for the day. This review helps you dial in on the 2–3 priorities that you need to achieve. The clarity alone regarding your daily work will provide you a tremendous sense of control and accomplishment. It’s recommended that you dedicate a brief 10–15-minute block of time in the morning to review your priorities. This is similar to the daily stand up in agile scrum.

Next Actions:

1. Capture Action Items Instantly in Your System. Get into the habit of instantly documenting your action items. This basic practice will ensure all open loops are captured.
2. Research a Task Management System. Tools like Salesforce, Asana, Basecamp or Wunderlist are great options that span a variety of price points. Pick something that will let you create tasks quickly.
3. Use Your Task Management System in Meetings. Use your task management system during meetings. Capture changes and notes directly into your system as this eliminates the double handling of information.
4. Use the Mobile App. Most every task management system has a mobile app. Be sure to download. This will increase the access you have to important to-dos.

Relationships are the building blocks of knowledge

"Only a human being can nurture relationships. It has to be done with flair and transparency, and it can’t be done from a script. The memories and connections and experiences of the person in the center of this culture are difficult to scale and hard to replace".

- Seth Goden

Relationships are valuable. We need relationships to create and innovate. Our human connections set the stage for our learning and self-development. Without relationships we would not have access to the vast reservoir of knowledge residing in the minds of our colleagues and co-workers.

Cultivating and preserving relationships is a critical driver in enhancing our ability to get work done.

Knowing who we can seek out to deepen our understanding of a topic is valuable. When we have a connection with that person we are better able to have candid conversations often leading to an increased sharing of knowledge.When you consider that 80% of organizational knowledge resides in the minds of people as tacit insight, it is easy to see how nurturing relationships is key to tapping into this vast resource.

Just as relationships increase the flow of insight, friction and misunderstanding can decrease the flow. Working through this though challenging is worth the effort. With improved relationships comes improved satisfaction and performance.
A few additional thoughts:

• Play the connector. Seek to introduce people. Keep an eye out for potential partnerships that would benefit the organization.
• Connect knowledge resources to experts. When sharing  knowledge resources be sure to attribute the work to the experts that helped produce them. Ensure people know who and where within the organization expertise resides. 
• Play host. Create events for people to meet and share ideas face to face.

Knowledge (retrieval) is Power

"The ability to preserve knowledge is nothing without the ability to retrieve it. Retrieval is power".

The preservation of knowledge for reuse is the backbone of a businesses' ability to compete. Every action we take and problem we solve creates knowledge. Insight is a byproduct of living.

Today we have an array of tools that can capture knowledge the moment it is created. Platforms like Salesforce and SharePoint make it possible to generate reusable documentation as we are addressing business issues.
The trick is how do we find the right information at the right time? The power and potential of knowledge is only realized when it can be quickly retrieved. The value of knowledge diminishes if it is difficult to find.

It is here that having a scheme to organize knowledge is helpful. Categorizing information based upon an agreed hierarchy of  terms is essential. A technical word for this scheme is taxonomy. Taxonomies organize concepts and the terms used to describe them in a consistent manner. It is important to create taxonomies based upon the perspectives and knowledge of the end user. The terms used must make sense to the end user. Terms requiring special knowledge or training foreign to the target audience are not great candidates for inclusion in the taxonomy.

When content is captured it can be tagged with established taxonomic terms known as meta data. Most platforms allow users to filter searches based upon this meta data expediting the speed of knowledge retrieval.

For a deeper dive regarding taxonomies checkout:

• The Accidental Taxonomist