Information Management

Our brain can only store so much information. Knowledge, as they say, is power. Being able to store more information and more knowledge gives us more power…if we can find it and recall it in a timely manner. Managing and storing information is something that appears so far away from sexy it’s not funny but the practice of building standard practices and principles for storing and recalling information can make you stand out above the rest, make heaps more money or get a better job which in turn can buy you whatever you want. Maybe just a little bit sexy!

“Information is knowledge. Knowledge is power…If you can fucken find it!” Yours truly

Information Architecture

We get bombarded with more information than ever before. To deal with this volume of data, having a basic architecture and a set of principles for information can help us manage, store, and discard the information that we find useful and useless, as well as create the structure and mechanisms to be able to recall that information quickly and efficiently. The main reason we store it in the first place; to be able to find and look at it again at a later date.
I’ve created a simple, light weight architecture that’s a great place to start. I’ve refined it over 10 years and it enables me to record and recall information within seconds. I’ve categorised the information I generate and want to store and use into the following basic architecture. Feel to use it exactly or try it out to create your own, the most important take away here is actually having an architecture and principles and continually refining it for what works best for you. Start with the following categories to master your information collection and recall:
Notes – For anything useful I want to capture or any brainstorming or planning. If Richard Branson still takes notes for everything, someone who has started 6 separate billion dollar companies, I reckon it might be useful for us mere mortals to do so too.
Files – For any and every type of information file that can be stored
Music – For all music grouping and usage
Images – For all images I capture on any of my devices
Mail – For all email work and personal
Secrets – For all password and secret management


For each category, essentially you want to do the following things:
Decide on the technology platform(s) you want to use and rationalise all of the information into them. As an example, I might choose Microsoft’s OneNote for all note taking. What you want to move away from is having all information in one category fractured across a wide range of different tools. Invest the time to keep these to just the ones you want/need.
Create a categorisation strategy and structure that allows you to find things rapidly
Ensure you know how the search function works so you can find anything instantly that may not be sitting in the right category
Create any usage principles relevant to the type of information you are storing. E.g. I don’t create folders for emails as the search capability is so good now that I’ve doubled down on learning how to search over taking time to move things into separate folders.
Choose products that sit on cloud based storage so you can access your information from any device, at any time.

I’ve gone into immense detail in this subject, to keep you from glazing over or falling asleep whilst driving for those listening along. I’ve created an article on my site for very specific examples of how you can implement your information management and architecture across the to categories to get started. It can be found at www.successby1000cuts.com/blog/informationmanatement

Take Note[[ I think you can reduce the note-taking options and importance down to one paragraph. It’s not crucial to discuss in detail, so outline the options and summarise the pros and cons in a sentence and conclude with your recommendation.]]
Whenever we are in a meaningful situation, we will be exchanging information and also being given new information. In these meaningful situations, there is normally multiple sources of information being generated on top of written or spoken words and pictures. These could be facial expressions, body position and movement, glances between people, instant messages or text messages between a subset of the group, and more. Basically there is a lot going on, our cognitive load is maxed out. Whilst we might try as hard as we can and be able to understand all of these things, remembering what exactly transpired and was shared a week ago, a year ago, ten years from now starts to get a little more challenging.
One of the best ways to capture this is by taking notes of what got discussed, what actions got assigned and agreed, and any other relevant information such as who attended and when and where it transpired. Richard Branson, one of the most successful businessmen and lives in the world, mentions in his second autobiography, “Finding My Virginity” that he always has and still takes notes at everything he attends because of the value he sees in it. This is someone who has started and created not just 1, but 6, billion dollar companies in his lifetime, and he’s not finished yet.
Taking notes can be something so simple, and hardly any more time consuming than turning up. Focus on taking just the important information in dot point form and then any actions required and who was assigned to them. I normally transpose any actions into tasks in my Kanban and prioritise them accordingly based on everything else I have in my list.
This might feel uncofmortable doing in front of other people, especially in more relaxed, social scenarios. It’s up to you how you want to do it. If it feels like it wouldn’t be right, spend 5 minutes directly after whatever catch up you had and write down the key points so you can remember it later. This is becoming more normal in any social situation so feel free to say, “I’m just going to write that down so I don’t forget about it!”.
Even today, I see such a large number of people using pen and paper for taking notes. This is a great step and if it helps you build the habit of taking notes then power to you, start there. Just the act of writing something down is generally enough of a trigger to create a mental signpost in our brain for us to remember to action what we are writing down. One of the biggest challenges with taking notes with pen and paper is your ability to write quickly and neatly enough whilst trying to focus on the meeting or social situation. If you get that nailed, once you’ve been taking notes for a while you’ll run out of pages in your notebook, which means you then get an exciting opportunity to purchase a new spiffy looking one to start the cycle again. The challenge then comes when you want to recall what you had written in your last notebook. As physical notebooks have weight and volume, you’ll generally only carry the one that you are currently writing in which means you can only recall notes back to the start of the current book or have to take an action to look at your old notebook once you get back to wherever its stored. If you have stored it in an easy to find, easy to access location. Even if you can find it, you then need to trawl back through the pages of your potentially speedy and hard to read hand writing to find the actual thing you’re looking for.
What I’m saying here is writing notes down is great, but they are less useful if we can’t recall them quickly and effectively. Enter stage left, the digital notepad or note taking tool. Digital note taking tools allow for categorisation, sectioning, highlighting, pictures, drawing; similar to that of a whiteboard, and store all of your information in the cloud which makes it infinitely accessible from anywhere, at any time, from any device. The most important feature they provide is a powerful search function. This can search across every note you’ve ever taken within moments, rendering the notes actually useful.
I use OneNote, a Microsoft product as it’s part of their productivity suite of tools and I’ve had it for the last 13 years through work so it’s just been the logical choice for me. The mobile app also works well so I can still take notes if I only have my phone with me. Other good notes tools exist like Evernote or even the basic notes apps that come with Apple or Google now have enough functionality and are accessible through a phone or online. I also use note taking tools as a simple scratch pad to shape out ideas and put any thoughts to paper. The initial chapter structure of this book first took form in OneNote!
Whilst the digital note taking tools try to keep features quite simple, they can seem a touch daunting to start. Having a good approach for how you’re going to architect and structure your data so that you can navigate it 10 years later is a great place to start. I’ve found using something like the following approach will allow for infinite scale but still prove navigable 10 years down the track. Most tools will use a naming convention of being able to create a:
Section group
Section
Page
To enable stacking and logical grouping of information. Use this to your advantage with something along the lines of:
Major activity or category
Next level components of activity or subcategories
One to many pages of content for the above components or subcategories
In a work context I use the following:
Department of Home Affairs
Cloud Projects
Kick Off meeting
Status meeting 1
Cloud Gateway workshop
Or in a personal context:
Fitness
Ultra marathon July 2022
Training Plan
Gear
Nutrition
Any other info
The above is a rough guide, try it out, try out any tweaks, work out a system that works for you. Layer this into your retrospectives to see if it is helping. Try searching for something you know you’ve written so you can understand how the search functionality works so that when you do need to find something quickly, you know how to do it. Below is from one of my notebooks in OneNote:


The Files are in the Computer??
The next category of information that you manage daily is basically everything else. This could be photos, copies of emails, documents, pdfs, basically anything that holds useful information you may need to keep. I’ll cover music and images a little further down. Like notes above, information is only useful if you can find it. This means we need to create an information architecture and structure the allows us to find things tomorrow, within 6 months or years down the track. We also want to store it somewhere that will be agnostic of who we work for, what we do for work, where we may be located and what type of technology device and operating system we may be using. Making the right choices early will prevent countless hours of migrating or moving information around or between providers.
I’ve found over the years grouping around high level categories for general life information is a simple and consistent way that can stand the test of time and make for easy storage and retrieval. I’ve then created a separate grouping for specific projects that may have different categories. E.g. I tried to build a mobile app around personal financial management so that got it’s own structure within the bigger structure. If you want to be really neat and aligned, you can even match up your note taking section groups and information folders or at least have rough alignment. I think over time, the categories in my high level Kanban board swimlanes are also starting to conform to the same categories which gives even more alignment.
What this looks like in reality is basically a set of folders with one to many folders within them, which then contain one to many files within the folders. This could look like the following with everything above the actual information being a folder.

Personal
Finance
Tax 22
Donation 1
Donation 2
Tax Return 22
Tax 23
Donation 3
Receipt 1
Receipt 2
Travel
Rickshaw Run 22/23
Screenshot of Visa
Receipt of payment
Travel Planning checklist
Bikes
Intense Primer 29
Warranty claim photo 1
Warranty claim photo 2
User manual
Learning
Executive Coaching Certification
Homework 1
Homework 2
Homework 3
Podcast 1
Podcast 2
Work
Customer 1
Project 1
Project 2
Project 3
Customer 2
Project 4
Project 5

The key here is to start and then review every 6 to 12 months to see what is working and what isn’t and slowly refine what works best for you. If things are impossible to find each time you need them, that’s generally a good indication there could be some improvement. Conversely, if you can generally find what you want relatively quickly and with little angst, that’s a pretty good indicator that what you have is working well.

Have a think about what your base logical file architecture would look like, you can even draw it out on paper, a whiteboard or in OneNote with a pen if you have a touch screen device. Once you have what you think is a minimum viable product you want to choose the right platform for you to create it in. Some key considerations and criteria to help you choose:
Cloud Based – you want something that will have all the redundancy and storage you could ever possibly want.
Integrates with Windows, Mac or your Operating System of Choice – Most of the major providers provide either an app or plugin that will allow your storage to show up natively like another folder on the operating system of the devices that you use. E.g. Google has a “Google Drive” app that makes google drive show up as a normal drive in Windows explorer, the native file explorer in the Windows operating system. This means you can use all of the familiar commands and actions from your device.
Cost – This is going to potentially store all of the information you’ll ever need into the future, if you like taking photos and videos etc. This will add up to Gigabytes worth of data, have a look at the storage plans and what the cost will look like over time. They are all pretty competitive now and the cost of storage will continue to get cheaper over time but still worth a look.
What do you already have – If you have an Apple iPhone, you will already have an iCloud account that might already have all of your photos etc. stored already. Same if you have an Android, you will already have a Google Drive and your photos will already be stored in the photos app (which in theory stores them on Google Drive in the background). It makes logical sense if it’s not too expensive to continue using what you already have so double check this before you sign up to new ones.
As mentioned, you can’t really get a bad offering now but the major players in this space at the time of writing are:
Google Drive
Apple iCloud
Microsoft OneDrive
Dropbox
Have a look at the criteria above, make a choice, start and then work it out. As mentioned, it’s a pain to move everything but it can be done. If after looking at the above you find you have all 3 and your information is strewn across all of them I’d suggest rationalising to one. It will be painful but it will save you time and money in the future and your shit will be much easier to find so bite the bullet and do it.
Music[[ I think music playlists are probably ubiquitous and don’t need to be explained here.]]
Music is literally my partner in crime in life, I love listening to music. I listen to it when I’m going to the gym, running, driving, cooking dinner, in the shower, writing this book! I have an eclectic taste in music, I like anything good. One thing I’ve found that has been quite useful to help me find and listen to the music I love is to create playlists around certain genres. That way if you hear a song that you like, you can quickly add it to that playlist so you don’t miss it and can come back and listen to it time and time again.
There are a number of great music platforms on the market now that allow you to pay a minimal subscription fee to get close to unlimited music. They natively have the features to set up and share playlists so that you can collaborate with mates. You can also search for similar genres and playlists that others have set up which is great for discovering similar but different music. Another great feature of most of these platforms is once a playlist finishes, the platform will play similar music in the same genre which can uncover some amazing gems.
I use Spotify for most of my music, it just happened to be the first platform I signed up for and it’s been good enough that I haven’t needed to change. It’s premium offering is around 11 or 12 dollars a month for all the music in the world which is very approachable. The other application I use is called Shazaam which can listen to basically any song that you hear anywhere and tell you what it is called. Gone are the days of hearing an awesome song and not being able to find it. There’s some nice integration with Spotify now so you can open the found song in Spotify and add it to whichever playlist you like.
One final thing playlists allow is to be downloaded to your device (I normally do it to my phone and watch) so you always have your favourite music regardless of if you have network coverage or not which can be lifesaving on remote exercise or camping/adventure trips.
Aside from curating playlists, the search function in the current music apps is awesome, you can basically find anything you want if it’s on the platform immediately so no further information management administration is required.
Images and Video[[ I don’t think this needs its own section either, especially as you do mention it above.]]
We’ve luckily got some of the most powerful cameras and devices the world has ever seen sitting in our pockets. The amount of visual content we can capture and the size of this is astonishing. Luckily for us most of this data is already being stored in a cloud of some description. Most Android phones will store this in the images app, which is sitting on Google drive in the background and Apple iPhones will be storing this in iCloud. If you haven’t had a play with these, have a look at them. They will generally curate your content by date but with the advancement of machine learning and artificial intelligence, you can search by keywords, faces and you can generally find what you want within seconds. Unless you are violently opposed with this content sitting with a Google or an Apple, then no further work is required. The search is all you need. If you change phone operating systems, there may be merit in transferring everything across so you aren’t being charged for both. Look into the costs, make a decision and action it.
Email[[ The email section feels a bit brief for something that is often the most crippling obstacle to people’s lives. It would be good to remind people of employing scheduling (when to do this?) and healthy tension (answering emails takes all day, but then we get no work done) and deep work. Any advice around these things?]]
Email is one of the standard forms of more formal communication at the time of writing. Basically any subscription service that we sign up to and most things that we purchase online require an email address. From these two functions alone, we get pumped with advertising and spam mail which clogs up our inbox making legitimate communications harder to manage. Thankfully most of the major providers now have very intelligent filtering and categorisation which quarantine or categorise most of the junk out into a separate mailbox keeping your genuine inbox much cleaner. Over time though your inbox will bloat so finding key information can then be a challenge as well.
Perhaps contrary to expectation, I don’t actually use separate folders in my email inboxes! I tried this when I first started using email but I found it quite a lot of management overhead. The main reason that I don’t is because the search function in the major email providers like Microsoft’s Outlook or Google’s Gmail is so powerful that if you take a little time to learn how it works, you can basically find anything quite quickly and efficiently. Moreover, if emails are in separate folders, and once they balloon in size over time, emails are still hard to find in those folders without knowing how to use the search function. This is purely personal preference, if you are using folders and find they are working well, power to you, please continue with what works for you. I am always looking for continuous improvements, and this is one that has seemed to work well for me thus far.
If you work for basically any company, you may have at least a work and a personal email; you may even have multiple personal emails. If this is the case, my advice would be to create some very basic usage principles to help with professionalism, ease of communication, managing risk of hacking/spamming etc. Some very basic principles that you can use:
Work:
Use at least a semi-professional to professional tone.
Only discuss work or work related matters (you never know what audit activities or future activities may happen that will require information you have generated from email).
Work Calendar management. I use this as my central calendar now as it is too complex to try and manage two. I do however set things to private if I need and am careful with who I share full details with.
If you have your own business domain and email, I would group that in this category and all principles would still apply
Personal email – primary:
Long lasting subscriptions (e.g. Audible, Spotify, Gmail, etc.)
All personal and personal business communications
Purchases from respectable sites (although this could still go with the secondary)
Personal email – secondary:
Short lived subscriptions
Purchases
Anything else less secure or more risky
Social Communications[[ Social media, like email, is also an absolute time and energy killer that’s hard to break (and you talk about that)! People could use advice on how to regulate their social media use (there are apps that block you after a certain time, maybe people could schedule, leave their phone on the kitchen bench, etc). Basically, can we flesh out some of the steps to manage social media intruding on our deep work.]]
There is currently a proliferation of social media platforms. From one lens, they have opened up an amazing ability to share rich content almost pervasively. Depending on the type of person you are, what your goals are, what entertains you, and what makes you happy, social media could be great or the devil.
One of the things these platforms have brought with them is some amazing instant messaging and information sharing features. As we grow older and some of our close friends move or we move and we become more dispersed geographically, we still want the ability to maintain regular and social communication. The sharing of meme’s and social platform content can enable us to maintain that closer, less formal, social connection. Most people I know are part of group chats of some description on social platforms that still enable us to have on-going social communication and banter with a wide range of friends with relative ease. This is a great thing especially if you have gravitated to a very busy job, have a new born etc. that renders you with less social time.
The challenge we have is that there are so many of these platforms that we may find we start to get group chats dispersed across a number of platforms, e.g. at the time of writing this looks like, Facebook (or Meta) Messenger, Instagram chats, Snapchat, Whatsapp, Wechat just to name a few. Another challenge is that anyone can add you to any group chat, even if it’s one you don’t want to be a part of so you may find the number of group chats you need to manage growing exponentially and spiraling out of control. There are some very simple tactics that you can employ so that you can still get the fun banter and social interaction between real life catch ups that can help:
When added to a group chat, stick it out for a couple of days or up to a week, if it’s one you want to participate in. If so, continue to collaborate. If there is no value, be ruthless and leave it.
Constantly review which platforms see the highest volume and ask the question to groups on the less used platforms if they’d like to switch over so you spend less time switching between them
Turn notifications for that platform off. Group chats have the ability to smash you with notifications which constantly break your focus. Turn notifications off so you don’t constantly keep picking up your phone and breaking your concentration from what you’re doing especially if you are catching up with people socially in real life. That’s heaps more important. The notifications will still be there when you’re finished!
Social media platforms have been created to be highly addictive and their creators spend billions of dollars making them perfect to suck in more of your time and attention. Sometimes looking at some mindless content that is up your alley is a nice little mental break, but don’t let your standard reflex when you have a spare moment be to open Instagram and Facebook and get sucked into the scroll hole. Aside from influencers, most successful people spend less time on these platforms and more time nailing life. I have a quick look most days as I have some long standing group chats on instagram and I love seeing people do epic stuff or eating shit. I however have never posted a single photo or have a profile picture. People think this is weird. I feel I don’t need to broadcast my life to everyone to feel I’m having a good time. I’ll normally try and live in the moment which will automatically be shared with the people I’m doing it with or I’ll share a photo or two to a group chat. The choice is yours. This could be perceived as me:


Cuts To Success
Research notes apps, make a decision on which one you want to trial, register, and download it to all of your devices.
Create one section and call it, “Information Architecture”. Under this section write down what you think your main categories and sub sections/subcategories will be. Taking a little time now to think about it before you bash it out could save you hours of migration later. Whatever you choose, it doesn’t have to be perfect, you can evolve it over time.
Create the structure from the step above in the tool you chose.
Next time you go to a meeting or have a meaningful interaction, write down the key information and actions. Do this for the next two weeks.
At the end of the two weeks, go back to the first notes you created and see if they are useful.
Try out the search function to familiarise yourself with how it works and make sure you can find things.
Try other apps if you don’t like the one you chose or stick with it if you think it will be useful.
Review where all of your data is sitting. Is it with one provider such as Google or Apple or is it spread across a number? Is it easy to access, find, and add to? If not choose where you want it all to sit, work out how much it will cost, then make a decision.
Set up the native integration with the operating system you use so that you can use the file explorer natively to move files around. This will make things so much easier.
Set up the same or similar information architecture for folders and sub-folders you’ve used with your notes and start the painful process of moving it all there. This will take time. Trust me, it will save you time in the future. Heaps more time than what it will take to move.
If you like music and you’re not already using a music service with playlists, give them a go. If you like it pay for the premium. Life is too short to listen to shithouse ads. Buy a coffee less a week if you are that much of a tight arse. Invest in your happiness.
Do the same for step 8 with your images. If they are already with one provider and it’s working well, leave it there. If it makes sense to rationlise, rip the bandaid off and move it.
Trial the email principles above. Separate out more risky stuff and spam into an email address you don’t use much to remove as much crap out of your primary email address.
Review your social group chats. See if you can influence people to rationalise. Remove yourself from any that aren’t adding any value to you.