[photo credit: "Knowledge Management," originally uploaded by F. Montino]
Today's Boston KM Forum Meeting at Bentley University focused on "Personal Knowledge Management," and I was fortunate to attend three interesting and divergent sessions.
The first was a panel discussion focused on personal information management. The speaker from I took away the most actionable content was Stever Robbins, aka "The Get-it-Done Guy." Although the panel mostly focused on e-mail management (and I don't subscribe to much of what I heard, being of the "store it in a pile and use search and metadata to find everything" school), the following ideas were of note:
- Reduce any KM tool to Return on Investment (ROI). What is the cost of getting the information in & out of the system?
- Test ANY tool you want to use to see if it makes you more productive. Just because you use something a lot DOES NOT mean you like it, or that it makes you more productive (e.g., iPhone, heroin, etc.).
- Take a "deathbed" perspective once in a while. How important is this e-mail, or document, or presentation, REALLY, in the big picture?
- Use the same structure to manage your data on every platform (consistent folder taxonomy, tags, etc.), and keep it simple: no more than 4 or 5 top-level folders.
- For all you "Inbox Zero" devotees, try this: move EVERYTHING to your deleted items folder, then "rescue" the really important ones.
- The degree to which noise or echoes are being made about a topic is more related to the topic's velocity than its value. Weigh content from trusted, primary sources high and tune out the rest (e.g., US Geological Survey usually > a blog about geology).
(to be continued in part 2)
