Quite by chance I came across an interesting video called Situating Personal Information Management (PIM) Practices within an Organization , read the document (the creators of PIM approached this problem thoroughly - research, tests, theories, it seems to me, some even defended Ph.D. and doctoral on this topic ) and it turned out that those guidelines for organizing the storage of information and quick access to it, which are set out in the articles, I have been successfully using for a long time in my daily work. And they appeared to me, as you understand, not from a good life.
It so happened that while working as a PM, the number of projects I did not fall below 5 and consistently kept in the range of 5 -10. The projects were for the most part small, somewhere 3-5 months long and 2-4 developers (well, plus network administrators, testers in the project team). But when production support and maintenance were added to this wealth and the number of important letters exceeded 50-70 per day, I had to think about the effective structured storage of project information, its retrieval, reminders of planned events. Further description of what and how it happened ...1. Hierarchical repository, which is created immediately - even before the availability of information, which then will need to be saved. I have it looks like this on the disk:
<First Name \ Last Name \ Nickname>
| __ <Company>
| __ <Projects>
| __ <Active>
| | __ <Project 1>
| | __ <Documentation>
| | __ <Specification>
| | __ <Any other project-specific folders>
| __ <Completed>
| __ <Canceled>
<Documentation> - project documentation (project plan, project schedule, requirements, HLD, test plan, operation manual etc.)
<Specification> - external documentation (not created within the project - specifications, etc.)
As soon as the project was completed, it was transferred entirely to <Completed> or <Canceled>.
The same structure was created in MS Outlook 2007, where all correspondence about project activities was kept.
For naming files, I think it will be possible to use ideas from the
Method of organizing project directories and files.2. Dynamic folders. In MS Outlook, it is possible to set Search Folders, which filter the entire message flow based on specified criteria.
a) A special case of using this functionality - Follow up folder. In MS Outlook 2007 it is possible to create follow up for an arbitrary date and group them in View by date. Thus, I began each working day with viewing assignments for today, then processed input messages, arranged them for follow up dates in the future, immediately forgetting about them :) And a new day from a clean slate, usually containing 10-20 assignments :)
b) If the message structure is well defined (for example, defect \ suggestion \ inquiry messages with specified text Priority or Area, then using Rules you can configure the installation of Categories (Area) or Color (Priority). And then use Search Search to find, group, sort messages.
')
PS Try not to leave unread letters at the end of the working day. “If you do not control the
thing , then the
thing controls you! The third option is not given! ”Words for substitution instead of the word
thing - letters, project, life :)