Susan would often return in her memories to the time after John’s death. She was trying to understand what she could do in order to prevent at least some of the situations she went through. She remembered her frustration when Amy and her would go through all the things at his home. They would feel like gold-miners, trying to find hints about anything that needed their attention. Her way to get over the difficult times was to laugh about them. She would often share a story about looking for computer files that would have an interest to be preserved. First of all, they found out that John didn’t have any system for organizing of his files. He was a good photographer and they wanted to keep some of his pictures. Luckily, his photographs were all together. In a folder called ‘holidays’ they found photos from his last trip to Paris. In one of them, his girl-friend was laying naked in an erotic pose on the bed of the hotel room.
Approaches to Information Management
Delete Sensitive Files
Creating an Organizational Structure
Our personal information space is subdivided in regions related to our current activities. We can call them hot, warm and cold. Hot information is the one currently in use, warm information is the one that is related to our current project or task in hands and cold information is all the one that has been archived. The regions should be periodically maintained and the information moved across them to their respective place. The working information should be stored in easily accessible locations, while the archived information may be stored on external devices.
For an easier orientation within our personal information space, we create and curate smaller subsets of the information. Frequently, our collections are related to our current projects, such as planning for summer holidays or working on a marketing report. They may be grouped according to task, for example booking a plane ticket, by information type, such as bills, or by its format like .txt, .jpg, .pdf and so on.
The organizational structures may be flat and have simple or complex hierarchy. Simple collections work best flat, as visibility matters for an easier retrieval. It is especially important for working information, as it may remind us to do a task that is missing in order to complete a project or look for a piece of information that we need in order to finish a task. However, as the amount of files within a folder grows, our capacity to attend the information diminishes. If a collection becomes too extensive, we may consider creating a nested hierarchy. We should be careful when assembling such folders, especially when related to similar topics. We easily multiply the same files across different folders and maintaining them up-to-date and always in the most recent version can become really difficult. A good approach for nested hierarchies is to keep a folder with a flat collection and create a separate folder with subfolders, where we include aliases pointing to the original files.
The nested hierarchies can be bottom-up, consisting of a folder with all the information items, which are afterwards organized according to their common points. They can also be top-down, starting with a general folder, where subfolders are added for common topics as we distribute the respective information between them. Of course, we can employ simpler approaches. We can distribute our files into folders with different properties that are visible and easily recognized. For example, a color can indicate the importance of the files within the folder.
We should delete what we don’t need and always keep only one current version. A number of tools can help us with version tracking. For example, Lion OS X includes a feature called Versions which allows us to return to previous variants of our files. We can also consider using Dropbox, as it allows us to retrieve anterior versions of our documents. While using cloud-based backup systems, we are also protected against sudden disk corruption or loss. Another method, applicable for the documents which we need and are owned by others, is to ask them for those, rather than keep them ourselves. The most important information should be kept apart, discoverable and understandable, even though protected.