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February 10, 2006
Organizing digital files
Piggybacking on what David posted on his blog about ways to handle digital filing, I saw a new solution this summer working with a client. This guy was an Outlook user and he saved all of his digital files (Outlook, Word, Excel, pictures etc.) in My Documents, in file folders by topic (of which he had dozens and dozens). He did not use ANY Outlook folders. He only wanted one place to look for all of his digital reference.
Outlook will allow you to drag and drop emails into My Documents folders, or you can be in the email and choose File>Save>change message type to .msg and find the location to save it.
I haven't found it all that cumbersome to have some information in email folders and some My Documents folders, but I can also see the value in having them all in one place or having a great hard drive search tool that works across applications.
I was doing a seminar for a software company last month and one of the participants suggested the X1 search tool, as Eric Mack mentions on David's blog. Now, this guy in my seminar did save all of his emails in Outlook but he only had one email folder called "Archive" which stored everything. He relied on X1 to retrieve what he needed by keyword. The downside I can see with that is if the keyword I'm thinking of doesn't happen to be in that email anywhere then I'm forced to search by other means.
More and more though, I think digital filing will be the next frontier of organization. What once was a paper stack is now just getting stored on a hard drive somewhere. What seems to be working the best for me is to make my system naturally match my thinking so I don't have to "think" when I need something. I want it to be as fast, easy and intuitive as grabbing for something in my paper files.
Posted by Kelly at February 10, 2006 07:11 PM
Comments
Wouldn't it be great if Microsoft could integrate a little "Tagging" in an email. So if it doesn't contain the keywords you want, add some tags, archive it and presto! You have the results in X1, Google Desktop, Copernic, or whatever. Thanks for the post, got me thinking. :)
Kris
Posted by: Kris Vockler at February 13, 2006 01:56 PM
Kris: Microsoft has, in fact, included a way to tag your email in Outlook. Just double-click on an email message to open it in a separate window. Put your cursor on the subject line, and you'll see that it's editable. Add your keywords, and save the email.
Posted by: Lance at February 13, 2006 07:08 PM
I would suggest loading Google Desktop Search to every computer that might "cross file" objects - in Mail, in file folder, in databases.
Posted by: Dave at February 15, 2006 03:03 PM
