Digital Organization

I've never been the most organized person in the world.  I'm not the least organized either.  Sometimes I think I am an anal-retentive-wannabe.  I feel a vague uneasiness when things are out of order, which is most of the time.  Not that "out of order" means that things need to be perfect by any stretch.  For example, here's a picture of cubicle at work, which I haven't actually cleaned for weeks: 

(trust me it looks worse in real life!)

When I do clean up around the house, I feel like I can think more clearly.  In this way I'm a little schizophrenic, or maybe just stupid.  I know I feel better when things are clean and orderly, but I'm just too lazy or distracted to do anything about it!  Maybe it's a chicken and egg sort of thing.

With the age of the personal computer, we have a whole new non-physical realm to deal with in terms of organization.  We need to organize information, whether that's in the way of files, email, bookmarks, whatever.  In this area, which I'm admittedly sometimes more familiar with than the physical world, as disturbing as that is to contemplate, I'm not that better.  Often it gets to the point where I'm getting warnings of only having 100MB of free space before I think, hmmm, I better clean things up.  Certainly having done this for a couple of decades now, I may be a little better than the average person, but it is still a struggle, and one that seems increasingly challenging as my roles in the physical world becomes more substantive.

My main organizational issues right now center around two key parts of my digital life – email and bookmarks.  Thankfully when it comes to RSS feeds, Bloglines has allowed me to get pretty organized, although of course I'm woefully behind at actually keeping up with all of the blog entries that I should be reading.

I first started collecting email back in '92 when I got my first email account in grad school.  Somehow I decided that I wanted to hold onto these emails and because not a whole lot of people had email back then, my correspondence probably amounted to a hundred or so messages per year, maybe less.  So every six months or a year I'd spend a half hour saving these to text files with a specific naming format including the name of the recipient, sender, and the date, plus a, b, c, d, etc. for multiple messages for a single day from/to the same person. 

This continued until the Internet Bubble of the late 90's made the flow of email so great that the time needed to do this expanded from 30 minutes to a whole day.  So, the last archive of this kind happened sometime in 2000.  By that time I had also started using Outlook as my email client and while it was probably just as easy (or difficult) to archive messages than it had been with Pine or Eudora, my laziness had gotten the better of me.  Then in 2001 I started dating my now wife, and since then my time for such tasks has decreased even more!

In 2002 I started using a portable device to read email while away from the computer - The Danger Sidekick.  Because of T-Mobile's nonsensical resistance to allowing users to sync their Outlook data on the device, I was at a bit of a disadvantage. 

Luckily, last summer, this changed dramatically when I bought my friend's Treo 600.  Around this same time I found a company (1and1)that among other things hosts outlook data so that you can access it remotely either via "Outlook Web Access" (a web interface to Outlook), or via an actual Outlook client or via a regular IMAP email client.  1and1 had by far the cheapest plan at only $6.99 per month and so far I've been pretty satisfied.  After doing some searching, I finally settled on an excellent IMAP client for the Treo called ChatterEmail that let me synch whatever folders I wanted to.  It's still not practical to keep thousands of full messages from years of correspondence, it isn't impossible.  But ChatterEmail doesn't use external cards the way some others do (Snappermail comes to mind).  Still, for my needs, I felt ChatterEmail's advantages outweighed this disadvantage, especially since it's rare that I go searching for email that's older than a year.

So, now that everything was more or less set up, what did I do?  Not much.  I know many people use an extensive folder system, even directing their email into various folders when they are received.  I was never that big a user of folders, although I did use them in a minor way.  So, recently, this lack of using such a powerful email organizational feature was gnawing at me and I figured I needed to come up with some strategic ways of using folders.  What I came up with, ironically, involves more manual work.  But at least it promotes organization.  Basically I let things lie in the inbox for a while – sometimes it could be for an hour, sometimes for days or even weeks – but eventually sooner or later I have to go through and "clean house" which involves just going through the last umpteen messages and deleting stuff I know I don't want to keep and taking other stuff and putting them in the appropriate folder.  Luckily, I keep most personal mail from friends and family in my inbox, so don't need to anything with these.  This folder is synched with my Treo.  I keep the last 3-6 months of messages in my inbox, and archive the rest going back a year or so to a separate folder which is still accessible on my hosted exchange account (but not the Treo).  Last night I went through all the messages in my inbox and this archived inbox and created three or four folders for additional subjects that I figure I might need to go back and look at some time in the future: blog-related stuff, registration information, online purchases, posts with links to various references that I eventually want to read relating to photography, the Treo, etc.  Currently I'm not synching these, but I figure eventually I can download these to the Treo very easily as needed.

Aside from all this on my hosted exchange account, I have some earlier Outlook data that I didn't transfer because I was worried about using up the 500MB that the account gave me when I signed up.  Even though they increased it to 1GB, I'm still a little reticent if for no other reason then having to go through an additional three or four years worth of email in that file.  I guess eventually I should go ahead and put the stuff up there…

I'm surprised that there aren't more tools out there to help people archive old email, and even keep it around for searching purposes.  There's a lot of information contained in years of email messages that could be useful to people.  Old addresses, phone numbers, names, etc.  It's very easy to look up my name on the Internet and find up-to-date information about me because I have this blog and post messages online in various places.  But most of my friends don't have this kind of net-visibility, and so if I lose track of someone and they change their contact info, it's sometimes next to impossible to find them again sometimes, unless of course they find me from something I've written and send me a line, as has happened a few times in the last year or so.  The ability to create an archival structured document or set of documents, like a bulletin board with threads (something maybe along the lines that Gmail does?), could be really powerful.  The main challenge in my mind would be not chaining it to a single program.  Maybe creating something in xml or a similar standardized protocol so that developers could create many different viewers for it.

As I mentioned above, bookmarks (or "favorites" in MS parlance) are my next target area for organization.  Again, I used to be better about these when there didn't seem to be as much useful stuff to link to.  I still have the remnants of a decent system bookmarks categorized into folders.  However, I'm sure many of these are outdated – either long gone or simply out of date or not of interest to me anymore.

For a while now, I've been using My Yahoo! as a way to have an online store of bookmarks that I could access from wherever I am, and also to synch my bookmarks from home to work.  It also got around what had become a separation of different bookmarking systems between MS and Netscape, although luckily these systems never got incompatible enough to really hamper the transfer of data from one system to the other.

Since becoming more involved with RSS feeds and using Bloglines as a way to manage the feeds I read, I have been yearning for a similar system for bookmark management.  I have lots of feeds where there is some article that has so much detail that I either want to keep it for later reference, or simply to read it at a later date (because it's too long for my slow reading speed, making it necessary to set aside a good chunk of time to read it).  Bloglines allows you to clip individual entries and put them into hierarchical folders.  This is great for managing such stuff, but unfortunately its interface is not all that friendly to mobile devices (even though it has a specifically mobile version of its site, some functionality is missing and they haven't made any improvements for at least 6 months, despite clamoring from many users), and besides, you can't insert your own links.  For example, there may be a great entry by a blogger that links to something of interest, but also contains many other links.  In Bloglines you can only save that entire entry, not just the link of interest.

I have played a bit with sites like del.icio.us, and furl, but it seems to me that they are either just inelegant compared to Bloglines and/or your browser's bookmark system, or their interface is more about "social bookmarking" (sharing links with others), than it is about managing your own.  There does seem to be some developers using the del.icio.us API to allow one to import and export your bookmarks, so I will need to look into this.  It does seem a little odd that this isn't a feature of del.icio.us to begin with, but whatever.  I think this is just one of those areas thats just going to be a constant work in progress.

But then again, isn't organization constant work?  You can set systems up so that future work is minimized, but there's always some work to do, and due to all the new kinds of information out there, people will always need to do the work to figure out what the best ways to organize things will be.  For example, in the last five years or so, people have been able to rip their music to MP3, and this requires organization both within the ID3 tags and possibly also within a folder structure.  But MP3's are just the beginning.  Photo collections are yet another big organizational task now that digital cameras have become affordable to most. Now that digital video has become more accessible to the masses with the proliferation of processors and hard drives that can handle the much more demanding content, this stuff will need to be organized as well.  The next jump up to high-definition digital video will be even more demanding but eventually will be available to anyone with $500 to spare. 

I think all of this begs a separate but related question:  do we continue to manage all this ourselves on our local systems?  Obviously the push has been more and more towards storing these things online, at least as an important option.  This is being done not only so that one can share the content and information, but simply to access it no matter where you are, as long as you can connect to the Internet – a feat that is becoming almost ubiquitously easy, although you might need some hard currency to do it in third world countries.  Having all your data online is of concern to privacy advocates and to simply to those who are paranoid about losing that data.  Privacy is a valid concern for many, especially considering recent events around the T-Mobile Hacker's breaking in to the Danger servers and getting access to Paris Hilton's personal info on her Sidekick.  And as always, it's important to make copies of your data for local archiving in case of connections or servers going down, as they will do from time to time.  It may be wise for such companies as hosting companies and the like to establish not only their own backup systems but backups that allow their own customers to maintain an up-to-date copy of what's on the server.  Perhaps offering this as special software would actually decrease their backup storage resources required, although it would at the same time increase their bandwidth usage costs.

Right now we are still at the beginning of the information age when it comes to information management.  Those who are tech-savvy can manage their information with a good deal of effort and planning.  Those who aren't tech-savvy have much more of a challenge.  Companies have by and large not seized the opportunity to cater to both sets of users to provide them with a much more seamless way to manage all this stuff both locally and online.  Certainly we are moving in this direction, but I think we still have a long way to go before the average non-techy can simply have all their data organized and managed, backed up, and synched to whatever computer (or portable device) they happen to want to use, view, share, change, etc. at any given time.

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