Anne’s post this week prompted me to think about how I approach reducing the clutter in my own house. I have a rule that something must be thrown out or donated when something new is added. Can we apply the same rule to information? I’d say yes.

Consider what you do with document versions and drafts. How many times do we keep all the old versions of a document hanging around ‘just in case’ we need to retrieve some deleted text. What generally happens is the older versions never seem to go away and we never have a need to access them again. If we establish and follow a process, as suggested by Glen, to delete a prior version when finalizing the next, perhaps we can reduce the amount of information we have to wade through.

This is just one small example of rethinking how we currently create, manage, use, and dispose of our information to reduce the clutter. I am sure you all can think of even more.

What about the information we really want to keep? How do we ensure we can find it when we need it? How many times have you filed away a document at home only to realize you are unable to find it when you need it? If only you had just left it on the pile of papers on the kitchen table, you would be able to find it. Why did you put it in a folder somewhere? Sound familiar? And this problem is just between you and yourself!

Take the same analogy to work where a group uses a shared drive or a SharePoint site to store documents. If everyone uses their own filing structure, indexes, or tags, what are the odds you will be able to find something? You will probably start to keep a copy of everything you think is important on your own personal drive or another folder on the shared drive – just like the pile on top of the kitchen table.

However, if everyone in the group agreed on how to organize the information – what folders and/or metadata to use – you would have more certainty you could find what you need and you might start to get rid of all those copies.

While there is no single answer to paring down the clutter and finding the needle in the haystack, having defined processes in place together with agreed upon classification structures and metadata can get us further down the road towards our goal.