The messy library.

As I end my working week, I am recalling an interaction I had with Carl Pullein on YouTube. Carl runs a successful time management consultancy and I recommend his courses and new book. His recent video blog was about the methods for organising work before the age of digital - I vaguely recall those times and it turns out the I was at the tail end of methods that had been practised for at least 100 years. Products like the Franklin Organiser and the Filofax were born out of this.

I usually make quick notes as I am going along through my day but today there was bugger all entered aside from my calls and must do lists. I had a productive catch up day which got me thinking about the different tools that have overlapping information.

At a recent trade show I had business cards from conversations of folk I had met. I logged the follow up actions in a spreadsheet entering the contact names and emails. Each key contact was sent a personal email. The spreadsheet was copied into the last slide of the show report which also had selected photos and observations.

The report was created in my personal folder on one drive and then I uploaded to a Teams channel folder. Following this, I emailed a link to two colleagues and ask them to input. The Teams folder then was stuffed with the dozens of photo’s and videos the three of us took. The photo’s and videos are also stored on three separate iCloud accounts probably for eternity.

The business cards were also added to my digital address book (I must get a card reader app). We have  proprietary sales tracking software where the contacts were separately added along with business opportunities registered several were new potential customers so their details we also logged. The report will also need to be uploaded to this software as I do not have the permissions for this I had to email my it to my colleague in marketing.

Then I was replying and following up on various things on emails and teams. Some stuff hadn’t been touched for a few weeks to I had to hunt the latest information in three locations 1) my head 2) in my note book and 3) on the computer. 1 and 2 are in my grasp but 3 was the usual pain - overlapping data sources and communication methods.

How the company work's isn’t unusual in modern business. Our company is well organised with systems and processes. But modern organisations generate vast amounts of data with a lot of overlap and duplication. All with speed.

Our software tools have become self serving, with a deluge of their own reminders, pop ups, and new features they feel compelled to tell us about. All with distraction.

All with speed. All with distraction. All over lapping.

I felt this morning of being in an endless messy library searching for something I know is in there but where all the books, pages, words and pictures are duplicated and jumbled up.  

Later in the morning, I needed a quick refresher on a specific aspect of bio mechanical science. I contacted my new AI ‘friend’ who explained it quickly and succinctly like they taught it every day.

If AI is able to pull the information I needed  from the trillions of gigabytes that is the internet could it also document and file as speedily they could search, efficiently process and report without overlap for work?






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