When it comes to investing time, thought and effort into productively organizing oneself, less is more. In fact, not only is less more, research suggests it may be faster, better and cheaper.
IBM researchers observed that email users who “searched” rather than set up files and folders for their correspondence typically found what they were looking for faster and with fewer errors. Time and overhead associated with creating and managing email folders were, effectively, a waste.
The personal productivity issue knowledge workers and effective executives need to ponder is whether habits of efficiency that once improved performance have decayed into mindless ruts that delay or undermine desired outcomes.
what would really prove more personally productive — folders that sort 15% faster? Or key phrase search capabilities that were 20% better?
Ongoing improvement in email/document/desktop and cloud-centric search frees them from legacy information management behaviors like filing.
They’re “organizing” for flexibility, adaptiveness and immediate response. More accurately, their technologies exist to give them greater speed and flexibility. Their personal organizational ethos reflects a Toyota Production System “just-in-time” attitude.
nstead of better tools for better organizing, people want their organization done for them. Organizing is wasteful; getting its benefits is productivity.
They want what I’ve described earlier as “promptware” — a cue and intervention that creates measurable value in the moment, rather than promised efficiencies in the future.
We’ll likely get more done better if we give less time and thought to organization and greater reflection and care to desired outcomes. Our job today and tomorrow isn’t to organize ourselves better; it’s to get the right technologies that respond to our personal productivity needs. It’s not that we’re becoming too dependent on our technologies to organize us; it’s that we haven’t become dependent enough.