"Chaos
is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds."
--George Santayana
Those
stacks of paper piled up on your desk or the tasks you have to do at
work or at home need to be organized.
Ever since “the numbers” complicated life, organization has
had to follow.
Just
think of the files needed to run a business.
What if the business didn't have a well-organized filing
system? The systems used
by libraries to organize books became necessary because of the sheer
numbers of books.
What
things need our efforts to organize them? Apart from our paperwork and tasks to be done, we need to
plan the day's work schedule, an address book, the dates we mark in a
calendar, our brief cases, music collections, books, CD's, DVD's and,
for those of us who like to eat, mealtimes.
If
you fancy becoming more efficient at work, you'll find an excellent Guide
to Personal Efficiency by Steve Thomas. The guide has three basic
components that help to bring order out of chaos:
organization, planning and doing.
To
my way of thinking, all three components add up to being organized.
Organizing involves more than clearing the clutter off your
desk and keeping files. It
also includes planning or, in other words, organizing a workload by
making "To Do" lists, scheduling appointments and
maintaining a weekly planner.
Even
the doing part of becoming efficient represents a way of being
organized: deciding on the timing for your tasks, avoiding
procrastination and scheduling your activities.
With
the widespread use of computers, we find that they too require some
organization. In many
ways, computer technology has helped us to get organized.
Software has arranged the tasks it performs into certain
categories: word
processors for text, spreadsheets for number crunching, power point
for presentations and databases for data storage.
These
programs in turn have been designed to save the work done
in them into
files, and the files get kept in folders, both of which have been
neatly provided for.
Information can be arranged much like libraries do it.
Similarly,
much organizing has been done for the user of the Internet.
When searching for information, many directories, like Yahoo!
or The Open Directory have the things you can search for arranged in
categories.
The
categories in online directories are further organized into
sub-directories, making it easier to search for information by
starting from a general category and working down to more specific
topics. This is
especially useful if you're not quite sure how a topic might be
listed.
For
example, if you want to get some information about cooking pasta, you
can go to The Open Directory. There, you'll see the general category "Home", and
under that "Cooking".
Clicking
on cooking will take you to another menu with lists of many different
cooking topics, one of which is "Pasta".
Clicking on that takes you to a page with a list of 45 websites
devoted to cooking pasta. Within
minutes, you’ll be running your own Italian home kitchen!
Yahoo
has another popular directory for searching by general categories and
narrowing the search to a more specific topic.
Everything Yahoo! has
included is organized somewhere under 14 major categories.
Yahoo's
general categories include Business & Economy, Computers &
Internet, News & Media, Entertainment, Recreation & Sports,
Health, Government, Regional, Society & Culture, Education, Arts
& Humanities, Science, Social Science and Reference.
Each
of the categories has three or four subcategories under the general
directory item. But each
general category has more than that.
It's a good idea to go through these general categories to see
what sub-categories have been included under each.
For
instance, unless you had a look at the subcategories, you wouldn't
know that sites about the "Environment" were listed under
"Society and Culture".
Many people's natural inclination would be to check under
"Science".
The
Internet also poses some challenges to users to organize the sites and
information they find when surfing.
You can keep clicking on links under a topic that you're
interested in, but unless you organize the results of your searches,
you may find yourself wasting time going over the same territory more
than once.
If
you plan to use the information you find on the Web for a paper or
project, you'll also need a record of the URL (Uniform Resource
Locator), which is the address of the Web site, so that you can get
back to it easily as well as including it in any use made of the
information for others.
Many
people don’t make much use of their browser's storage capacity for
website addresses. The
Internet Explorer has "Favorites", and Netscape has
"Bookmarks". These
will hold as many website addresses as you file away in them
The
term "Favorites" may be a bit misleading.
A website doesn't have to be one of my favorites for me to
store an address there. It
simply has to be a site that I think I might want to return to some
day without having to go through a new search all over again.
Create
your Favorites collection of bookmarks as you go along, setting up a
new folder for each type file that you want to save.
In time, a single folder may become overburdened with entries
and need to be reorganized.
For
example, I have hundreds of addresses for news sites that I've
bookmarked as Favorites. Locating
a particular site would be burdensome even with the names of the sites
listed alphabetically. To
make my research easier, I've created sub folders within the News
folder.
I
have News folders divided into Establishment, Independent, Journalism,
Progressive, International, Middle East, Search Engines, Miscellaneous
and TV Networks. Each of
these has a more manageable 10 to 40 items.
If
you’re saving country websites, you can follow the same steps.
Create a folder called Country, and then within that folder
create a separate folder for each country for which you store
information.
One
nice feature is that you don’t need to create these folders in
advance. They can be
created as you go along discovering new websites that you want to
bookmark. Bookmarking
sites in your Favorites folders has another advantage:
if you want to refer someone else to the website or include the
address in a report, you’ll have the address on hand for easy
reference.
PIM's
(personal information managers) provide another handy tool
for using your computer to stay organized.
The Web has a wide choice of PIM’s from the simple to the
complex. Some are free
and others require payment after a trial period.
You’ll
find lots of freeware and shareware PIM’s at Tucows and CNET.
At Tucows
you’ll find the software rated by Tucows as well as by popularity,
along with the platforms supported (Windows 98, 2000, XP, Me, etc.).
CNet
has organizers for all sorts of things, from general to special uses,
like home and family, coins, gardens, photos, art, antiques, real
estate and more.
My
own need for a PIM is usually limited to a calendar where I can enter
my To Do tasks under a number of different categories (work, personal,
medical or recreation) by time and date, setting an alarm if wanted.
For that organizing task, I use the freeware version of Task
Plus.
For
those who want to carry their computerized information managers
wherever you go, PDA's (Personal Digital Assistants) probably provide
the best solution. If you
haven’t kept up with the latest in high tech developments, PDA’s
are small portable handheld computers that organize data, such as your
schedule, address book, appointment calendar and to-do list.
PDA's
are also designed to work with your desktop PC by connecting the two
devices with a serial cable. Your
PDA will include software that will manage tasks on your desktop PC
and synchronize tasks with your PDA.
Some of them are simply pocket electronic organizers
functioning as basic personal information managers.
Others provide the facilities for downloading email and other
information from the Internet as well as taking notes during meetings.
To
read reviews and compare prices, visit Hardware
Central where they’ve rated 185 PDA’s.
Recent
advances in processors and other electronics have given rise to
a whole new breed of connected handhelds--powerful devices that send
and receive data over wireless networks, and others that double as
cell phones. The latest, as might be expected, cost more.
That
the latest PDA’s can accomplish some of the magical feats that they
perform seems awesome. It
seems that Arthur C. Clarke (Space Odyssey 2001) was right when he
wrote, ”Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable
from magic.”
