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.

Zoho CRM for Customer Relationship Management

I've been working with Zoho CRM for a couple of weeks now for a client, and I'm really impressed.

Zoho CRM is Customer Relationship Management software, designed to help a business keep track of its customers and sell them more stuff. It has so many features and functions that I don't think I've tried out 1/3 of them yet, but the ones I'm using are excellent.

I've been able to create a database of my client's contacts, and include information on them in custom fields that I create. Having done that, I'm now about to "select and sort" from the database. For instance, I can run a report of all contacts who took a workshop in March or April 2008, and print a report of them showing their names, email addresses, phone numbers, and the names and ages of their children. From that list, I can send a bulk email, or print labels for a snail-mailing.

I'm still waiting to see if the technical support is going to be adequate. So far, it has been a lot less than what I need and hope for. My emails have waited several days for an answer, which is too long. The one phone call I tried was very disappointing; the person on the other end seemed in an enormous rush, and once he had directed me to the menu item which was the first 1% of my question, he made it clear that it was time to get off the phone. I'm hoping that these were anomalies, or that I just haven't yet found the best method of getting support.

Zoho has dozens of other online applications, and they are apparently still in the process of developing them, and integrating them with one another. So things will probably get better. It does seem very promising.