Jeffrey C. Long

Many years ago I was involved in my first church plant, pastoring Columbia Basin Mennonite Community. I bring to every job a passion to be absorbed in the information pertinent to my field and this ministry was no exception. I studied, and I wrote notes… and I studied, and I wrote notes… and I studied… Next thing I knew I had accumulated multiple massive three ring binders organized by subject in volume and dividers. These were my first steps on the road to being a personal librarian.

Then came the internet and the task grew. Suddenly all of my interests had newfound resources available to explore. And the data that I had to cope with increased exponentially. Now, my family had to trip over stacks of printouts of pages that I thought I might need. And my bookmarks/favorites directory became unmanageable.

I think all of us have to learn to be a personal librarian to some extent or another. Whether it is handling the newspaper, bills, tax returns, coupons, VHS tapes, CD collections, journals, books, magazines… you get the point. Here’s a few tips from someone who’s been working to manage this stuff for awhile.

1. Use the garbage. My favorite garbage can (yes, I have a favorite) is at the post office. When I get my mail from the P.O. Box, half and sometimes more gets put in the circular file there at the post office. It doesn’t even come home. I think that this feature is possibly worth the cost of a P.O. Box. Keep your garbage cans empty so that you don’t have a psychological aversion to putting things into it.

2. Think digital. Some companies will allow you to stop receiving paper bills in the mail if you pay your bills. Email can often replace standard mail. I almost never buy a magazine anymore. I can either read the magazine online, or an equivalent is available online. Everything you can do to reduce the amount of paper in your life gives you more space and less to cope with as you organize the physical things in your world.

Technorati Tags: gettingthingdone, GettingThingsDone, lifehacks

3. For Physical items, use a flat alphabetical file cabinet labeled with a labeler. This is one of the top ten lessons I’ve gained from Getting Things Done. My previous organization system revolved around categories with alphabetical subdivisions. One problem with this was I often found I couldn’t remember which category something had been filed under. By keeping it flat, it is as easy to find something as looking for it’s name. And the labeler is both fun and makes things look more pleasing to the eye which encourages keeping the file system current.

4. Backup regularly. If you are going to keep all this stuff digital, you’d better have backups. I’ve lately become obsessed with backups and security. One of my friends humorously talks of his data losses as “The Crash of ’99″ or “The Crash of ’03.” I’ve experienced total data loss and it ain’t pretty. It’s even worse now that we keep our photos in digital format. Not only can data be lost, but irreplaceable family history. So I’m backing up to hard media like CD and DVD, backing up to an ftp server and will eventually keep some things off site in a safety deposit box. I know that sounds like overkill, but I’ve spent too much time getting to where I am now and I don’t want to lose it with a hard drive crash, thief or fire.

5. Develop a personal taxonomy. I will devote a whole post to this someday. This was a serendipitous discovery while using del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is like bookmarking favorites on the internet, except that they are stored online and instead of assigning categories to separate folders, you tag each item with multiple tags. So, for example, instead of being forced to bookmark this post in one folder, such as “backup,” you could tag it with multiple tags, like “backup,” “scanning” “librarian” “mac.” Then later on, if you wanted to find something on the subject of scanning, you could put it in a search box and up would pop this post. To see an example you can see my tagged bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/jeffreyclong

The serendipitous discovery was that initally, most often when I tagged something, it was a new tag. It took a long time to get all my personal taxonomy into the program. But eventually, I found that I was rarely adding a new tag. My personal taxonomy had solidified. I had a mind map of most of my interests.

6. Garden your system. Clean up tags. Empty folders. Go through everything. Clean up your inbox. Just because you don’t have physical junk hanging around doesn’t mean that you can let your hard drive go to pot. Look at all those piles of stuff on your hard drive. Were you born in a barn?