Out with hierarchical filing; in with tags

This week I spent some time organizing two systems which are important to my business and particularly to my "mobile office". Both are Google applications: GMail and Google Docs.

I use both heavily, and because I'm keeping much less information on paper these days, it's crucial that I keep both my emails and documents highly organized. I have to be able to find an email or a Google document when I need it.

Now, the search functions in both of these applications may almost be enough to render unnecessary the efforts I'm about to describe. They work so well that I sometimes suspect that this is true. But I'm just not quite ready to throw everything into one "place" and trust that I'll be able to pull up what I need only by entering search terms. What if I can't quite remember the spelling of a name, or the search terms I feel sure appear in the document aren't there in the form I expect them to be? That could be bad.

But GMail has "labels" and Google Docs has "folders", and I think I've finally begun using both in a smart way.

Despite the names "labels" and "folders", both are really best understood as tags. The concept of tags is somewhat new, and fairly new to me, but I'm beginning to really like it. But it takes a certain shift in thinking to use them well.

Many of us, I guess pretty much distinguishable by age, have always lived in an office environment in which information is organized hierarchically. A document "lives" in only one place, typically a folder or directory, either physical or digital. Files on a PC are arranged this way. In order to find something, it's been necessary to remember the whole hierarchical position of the item.

Hierarchical organization of information can be just right for some things. But for my thousands of emails and Google documents, I quickly realized that my initial "folder" way of thinking and organizing was clumsy and inefficient. As I began to see tags used in other contexts (in Blogger, for example), it dawned on me how much better this system was.

With tags, the idea is simple. To organize your documents, you tack on one, two, or more tags - words or phrases which identify the subject matter of the document. Ideally, the list of tags in your system is kept to a minimum; you don't want to use "United States", "USA" and "The United States of America", but only one of those three.

When I want to find documents that have to do with family, for example, I just click on the tag "family", and there they all are, just as if there was a folder called "family". But several of them are also tagged "travel", and those documents appear in my list of documents tagged "travel". Some of those are also tagged "purchases", and I can see them in that list as well.

In GMail, again, the term used is labels, which fits well. In Google Docs, they're called folders, which I think is a poor choice. My guess is that the designers of the application wanted people to be able to think in the old folder-thinking if they wanted, and in fact, I did for quite some time. But Google Docs items can be "placed in several different folders", and so, if used that way, they're really functioning as tags.

My main point here (since I'm afraid it's buried in verbosity) is that the fairly new concept of using tags or labels to file digital documents is far superior to the old hierarchical way of thinking. And, dull as this subject might seem, it's strategies like this that are allowing me to be organized enough, and mobile enough, to work from Mexico this winter, rendering them considerably less dull, in my humble opinion.

Using an online calendar system - you might want to consider it!

I am going to tell you about something which has helped hugely in organizing my business and my life in general. Before I do, I'll warn you: if you are concerned about using Google's free applications, you don't need to bother reading further. I understand those concerns, and I intend to do more research on them. But for now, personally, I'm not worried.

I knew of the existence of Google Calendar, but didn't feel the need for a new kind of calendar, especially a digital one. However, as I've mentioned here before, I'm on a mission to create an office which depends neither on paper nor on my hard drive, by using online applications wherever possible, so when Google Calendar was recommended in the interesting book Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day by Gina Trapani, I decided to check it out.

For years I've kept myself organized using various paper calendars, and I've never missed any important event for lack of keeping track of my obligations. I actually really like keeping track of stuff on paper, and until my recent push, have avoided digitizing things that could be kept on nice, old-fashioned, tactile, simple, paper.

So what's so great about an online calendar, and about Google Calendar in particular? Why have I switched completely and am now enthusiastically sharing my recommendation? I can probably best answer that with a list of reasons.

1. I use my calendar for a lot more than I used to. Because it's so convenient and efficient to use, I now keep track of a number of obligations and events on it that I used to keep track of in my head, or in numerous and various other places. I really have centralized all of my obligations that are tied to calendar dates. More about how this works below.
2. Google Calendar allows me to set up events so that they automatically repeat. This is perfect for things like (1) yearly large debits to my checking account that I don't want to be surprised by, such as web hosting payments; (2) monthly bills for companies that don't offer anything except for U.S. Mail billing, which I might miss when travelling; (3) weekly events like my Cuban Salsa dance classes; (4) birthdays of family and close friends, which now appear every year.
3. Google Calendar's system of reminders by email is extremely useful to me. Now, I'm aware that for many people, reminders sent by email are not desirable or effective, simply because their inboxes are a mess already, and the resulting information bottleneck doesn't allow for email to be used in this way. This is not the case with me. I have an excellent spam filter system, and I take care of my incoming email so that it is not at all a problem. So, receiving reminders at specific intervals for events on my calendar that I might forget is extremely useful. I only receive reminders I specifically request, and I delete all of these emails as soon as I'm sure I won't forget the event, so they are nothing but helpful.
4. My calendar is available anywhere where I have a computer and an Internet connection. This has not proved to a problem even when I spent 5 weeks in a small remote town in Mexico - there were Internet cafes on literally every block - and I don't plan on being further from civilization than that any time soon.

A good example literally just occurred. I just checked my email, and there's a message from the company who provides my fax service, saying that they need a new debit card number. I went to their site to provide that, and saw that they're going to charge my card again next February 19. Now, there is no way in the world I'm going to remember that date. So I took 60 seconds to access my Google Calendar, add a note on that data and set it to repeat yearly. I don't need a reminder of it, so I didn't set any reminders, but it will show on my calendar that week and I'll know what that funny charge is that my bank shows for a few days before the payee is displayed.

I'm very pleased with the way this is working for me. If you had told me a year ago that I would be using an online calendar on a daily basis, I would have been amazed, because my attitude was truly Hutterite on this question. But the truth is, the more I'm able to free myself from my notebooks and pads of paper and file cabinets, the more time I get to spend away from my office, say, on the beach in that remote town in Mexico. As a psychologist once told me, people can change, but we have to be very motivated!