How we can change as ‘paperwork’ has changed.
A new book has an interesting take on how culture and business has changed as paperwork and filing has changed.
The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork by Ben Kafka is about bureaucracy and paperwork, something rarely considered by historians.
These days ‘paperwork’ has changed even though the terminology hasn’t. Airline pilots talk about waiting for ‘paperwork’ before departing when it’s all done electronically.
In our view the big change in recent decades has been the easy searching of computer files, something that many people have yet to fully utilize.
We often see people moving files and emails between folders on their computer. While some of that is useful, a lot of it is unnecessary work. Filing computer documents doesn’t have to be like working with a filing cabinet.
Documents and emails are indexed by Windows or Macintosh computers automatically. You can search for them by file name or words in the content. There’s no need to put a document in a certain place/folder when it can be retrieved in seconds.
Windows has a search box in Explorer while Outlook has a search line above each view. Making use of them will speed up your life and work immensely and twice over. Firstly you don’t waste time with unnecessary ‘filing’ and you still find what you need quickly.
Only one problem with The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork and you might think it’s deliberate irony by the publishers. There’s no ebook edition!
See Also
- Organizing Outlook 2010 Email – now available
- After the iFilter pack – re-index or not?
- Hidden information in Microsoft documents
- 12 Step program for email junkies
- Desktop Searching – Part 3
- Desktop Searching – Part 2
- Desktop Searching – Part 1
