This small posting might be interesting to many public relations and corporate affairs (public affairs) practitioners who struggle with filing emails and other documents. According to the below article, IBM researchers found email users who “searched” rather than set up files and folders found what they were looking for faster. Time spent creating and managing email folders was wasted.
For more click here, but Michael Schrage in the Harvard Business Review blog writes:
“By combining threading with search, technology makes an economic virtue of virtual disorganization. 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. Are folders and filing systems worth fifteen to twenty-five minutes a day of contemplative classification and sort for serious managers?
“Obsessive Type As might insist hands-on organizational design is essential to getting a firm grasp on essential correspondence. More measured assessment argues that this is exactly the sort of administrivia where the energy literally isn’t worth the effort. To frame the productivity issue more starkly: what would really prove more personally productive — folders that sort 15% faster? Or key phrase search capabilities that were 20% better?”
