E The Magazine For Today's Female Executive August 2018 issue

Dealing with this amount of content is a
real problem that creates a serious headache
for many.
Information Hoarding
Indeed, a big percentage of this information
that you store and process is really
useful. But at the same time, much of them
are just waste. We tend to keep documents
and e-mails not only because of their real
business value, but because of we “like”
them, or consider them to be “possibly relevant”
in the future.
But the chance we never open
these items again is actually very
high.
(I have to admit I am not an exception either.)
Also, many documents become outdated
over the time, and we don’t clean up.
This massive information overload results
in that finding the information we need to
get our jobs done takes more and more
time. Sometimes we cannot even find what
we are looking for, and we re-create the
same content, over and over again. This
leads to more and more duplicated and
multiplied content, and besides the find ability
challenges we have to face with, it is also
hard (or sometimes impossible) to decide
which document is the most valid, upto-date
version.
These challenges all drive us to the conclusion:
we need something that helps. The
first thing to consider is de-cluttering. Identifying
the clutter in your information inventory
is not as easy as it might sound, though.
Some techniques you can use:
Organize: Using folders in file structure,
e-mails and other information management
systems is evident, yet many of us don’t
use its full potentials. We can create folders
and subfolders, and organize our files and e
-mails into these, to improve quick findability
in the future.
For example, you can order your e-mails
into folders by customer, project, event,
year, etc. It’s always up to your preferences,
defined in advance. I have a separate folder
for Events, where I add a sub-folder to
each conference and workshop I speak or
teach at. To keep it clean, I also created a
sub-folder called “Past” for the events in the
past.
I also have a separate
folder for
customer projects
as well as community
engagements.
(Illustration A)
The result is more time spent with
searching and less success with
finding what we need.
Page 114 E The Magazine for Today’s Female Executive
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