Getting the record in - and managed - through Getting Things Done (GTD)

Getting Things Done (GTD), developed by David Allen, is a personal management system designed to clear your mind, focus on what is most important, and get things done. My big aha moment was Allen's approach to the masses of information we receive in a day. Much of it is FYI or for reading/reference later. It is important to separate this stuff from actionable items. And Allen has a great method of organizing and managing those actionable items.




What if you were to adopt GTD; what would be the impact on your records system? First of all, the great majority of incoming information won't hit the records system at all. All that great reading/reference will be organized in a personal management system and disposed of if not referenced regularly. This leaves the smaller volume of actionable items to be managed and controlled. All of a sudden, records become manageable again, in this ballooning information age.

Allen provides only sketchy suggestions on how to organize records. He does suggest a Dumpster Day to purge unneeded stuff (p. 102). As long as he is referring to the reference collections, my Records and Information (RIM) hackles aren't raised. What warms my cockles is his description of an organized office, which those of us in the industry will quickly recognize, "I especially noice this when I walk around organizations where in-baskets are either nonexistent, or overflowing and obviously long unprocessed. These cultures usually suffer from serious 'interruptitis' because they can't trust putting communications in to the system. Wher cultures do have solid systems, down through the level of paper, the clarity is palpable. It's hardly even a counscious concern, and everyone's attention is more focused" (p. 234).

The principles outlined in GTD highlight the criticality of personal management in the successful implementation of any records system. If a corporation structures iteslf well and promotes a culture of personal organization, their information systems will serve them well and serve them long.

Decline of Paper and the Records Manager

I've been thinking how technological advances such as photography, the internal combustion engine, television, and portable electronic devices such as the iPad and MP3 forced radical change to affected  sectors (artists, draft horses, radio and paper publishing).

The sectors mentioned above have faced massive change. They had to adjust their purpose in order to survive. Radio lives alongside it's more technologically advanced cousins, carving out a niche for itself. We still see draft horses...much reduced in population...in parades. An "artist" today is another beast entirely; giving over reality to the camera and redefining itself. We will see a radical change to the print industry in my lifetime, thanks to the new portable devices. But books will remain as an ornament, a novelty. Newspapers will shrink; expanded content will have to be referenced online.

So what does this mean for the profession of Records Management? Are the skills honed for paper transferrable to the information world? Are we true Information Managers, ready to tackle a virtual world of information? I worry that there is so much focus in my industry on security and protection; cautionary tales about the new technologies. We must not forget that our primary task is to help our business find what they need, when they need it. Can we blame business if they question our value when there is no apparent intervention of the Records Manager to access their information? Could we marginalize our own profession by presenting ourselves as a barrier rather than a support to daily business?

The skills I see as being replaced or made obsolete by the new technologies include packaging by file, indexing and classification, and sorting. Perhaps I will expand on these later.

The skills the information world will continue to demand include disposition (regular disposals to extend the life of our assets, remove clutter, and reduce risk). An emerging support is to assist users in effective self indexing and searching. We will be needed during the transition to the "paperless" office, to help businesses define their information assets.

The lesson from radical change is that we must be flexible as a profession, take note of emerging needs, and be prepared to redefine ourselves to the new world.

Emprisoning Words - Metadata. Webmaster.

Meta kind of sounds like mega; like big. Or many. Marry it with data and you have a supersyllable tongue twister. I swear some use it just to test the word out in conversation. I swear people's eyes go big as soon as they hear it, as if they had just spotted the sabre toothed tiger crouched on the ledge above. "Yes, but what about the metadata?" asks the square-glassed geek in the corner. The crowd is hushed in to submission.

But what is metadata really, and why do we attach so much significance to it?

Metadata are all the little invisible bits of information that is stored about a record that you don't see. For instance, in this blog you normally don't see the html hash that tells one computer to another how to read what I've written. Also in the background is who wrote it (well, my sign-on ID), and when.

I'm saying, it's no big deal. Records people get excited about it because in the replacing of one media to another (paper to electronic), metadata allows us the certainty that the electronically generated information has as much reality as a printed piece of paper. "This is what happened on this day." We have put the information in context of time and place. Some metadata features allows us the freedom to replace paper.

Other metadata elements have the potential to let us do new things with information; sorting and sifting it in new ways. Consider google earth, and the potential to tag photographs (metadata) with where they were taken.

What I resent is that metadata is used as a show-stopper rather than an introduction to freedom. People don't understand it, so they avoid it. Paper persists.

I'm running out of time so I'll discuss why I see "webmaster" as an emprisoning word later. I've borrowed the geeky text from Jamtronic and the map from Flash Artist.

Paper Pushing

• A typical employee produces one pound of paper every three days. A tree is sacrificed every 4.5 years for that employee.


• The average employee spends more than three hours a day processing information. Half of that time is spent searching for it.


• Records staff specialize in organizing information, managing it, moving it, and search and retrieval expertise when needed.