Stopping Information Management, Time Management, Todo Lists and E-Mail Sorting

Lately i have experimented with a completely unstructured day and way of handling information. It’s inspired a lot by twitters stream, 4 hour work week and a bit also by David Allens mind like water. Just like with twitter where there is no sorting of tweets i simply let information flow on its own as much as possible.

On top of that stream i have my bigger life goals that i am always focused on anyways. This way the information that finds its way into my focus is always somehow aligned automatically.

So the title is not completely correct. In a lot cases it’s actually not stopping information management but having the information sorted automatically or the sorting effort is reduced to an absolute minimum.

Meetings

Generally I am trying to avoid those as much as possible and i don’t do in person meetings. Only Skype or phone. The ones i have i always set to the same time in the week so i can remember them without writing them down. I also put them always in those days and hours where i know i will be online with Skype running. So when the other party contacts me, the meeting starts.

To-do lists:

I don’t use a to-do list because I  have my current goals constantly in mind and i derive the things i want to do from there every day. Since i am constantly working towards those goals my activities align naturally. Stuff that i forget either pops up again (mostly other people bringing it up) or it was not important or related to what my goals are.

Email

In basically stopped organizing email altogether apart from deleting and archiving. I use Gmail with some filters set up from the past that put labels on emails but i could also just work with a completely unaltered setup of Gmail. In those rare cases i go back to old email i simply use the search. I don’t respond to emails a lot. I don’t want to encourage email discussions, so i archive them directly and mostly never hearing about the topic again. The important ones i respond and archive (Gmail labs feature “send and archive”).

Another reason i don’t do o a lot of emails anymore has to-do with systems like yammer or prologue 2 that a lot of companies i work for now use. That means that there is no old school email discussion anymore but a twitter like stream of information that eliminates most emails and does not need sorting or managing.

Documents

I try and avoid creating old school (MS Word) or even google documents as much as possible. I just found that they are not open enough so i am doing mostly blog posts instead of old school documents.

If information has to be in a document i can only do google docs as i don’t have an office suite anymore on my pc. I don’t file documents in google docs anymore i just use they search to go back to an old document.

MP3s

I have no MP3s If i listen to anything i do it online.

Images

Mostly on facebook and through tagging from other people. In case i create images i upload them to my unsorted Flickr stream.

Files

I don’t permanently save any computer files on my hard drive anymore. Everything is in the cloud. In those rare cases where i edit something locally i mostly send it via Gmail/yammer afterwards so its stored there. If its way too big i dump it sometimes in my amazon S3 jungle drive. I don’t sort it though (no folders) because so far i didn’t need to go back even once.

Bookmarks

delicious has been called the graveyard of bookmarks. You bookmark something and never go back. So true in my case. So i just have given up on using bookmarks. I can remember the URLs i use (with the help of firefox awesome bar) for the rest i use bing (just kidding i use google).

News

Digg, Twitter, etc, very few RSS Subscriptions (only blogs that i absolutely find interesting but post very rarely)