Lexington, KY - Do you always keep your e-mail inbox empty? Are your computer files all sorted into carefully named folders? Do you receive your financial statements electronically?
While these may appear to be good ways to organize your e-life, Douglas Merrill, former chief information officer of Google, doesn't do any of them. In his new book, Getting Organized in the Google Era, co-authored with James Martin, he insists there are much better ways to organize, ways that are more attuned to our current world and work realities.
As CIO at Google, Merrill was tasked to help the company "organize the world's information." What he soon discovered is that most people are overwhelmed by information every day, with the result that "our stress levels go supernova on us."
Technology should and can make our lives easier, and Merrill offers 21 principles of organization for doing just that. Some of the solutions he suggests have little to do with data management or making to-do lists. Before we can become more organized, he suggests, we must overcome the limitations of the physical brain, our societal systems and the constraints we place on ourselves. Each of us must create our own system that will make us more organized, less stressed and ultimately, more successful.
We first need to recognize that the brain is limited in its organizational abilities. Short-term memory is capable of holding only between five and nine items at once. The brain is also not good at making decisions. Social constraints, including the nine-to-five workday that evolved from the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, have limited positive application today.
In fact, nine-to-five routines tend to make workers less focused and productive, Merrill says. Globalization of world economies and technology have made this routine obsolete for many types of workers, and adhering to it often means workers are forced to put in even longer hours and become more stressed. (As an aside, Merrill also suggests most kids no longer need summer vacations to help work in the fields, a holdover idea that grew from when the United States was primarily an agrarian society.)
Knowledge is no longer power, Merrill says. Instead, the sharing of knowledge is power. Technology enables us to overcome the limitations forced on us by our brains and societal restraints, but we must question the old structures and change them over time, if not immediately.
We each have our own personal constraints to organize around. The best means of doing this is to start with carefully mapped-out goals, the author says. When you have specific goals, you are able to decipher what information you need and what you don't. Your goals become the determining factors for what information you need.
With the historical and theoretical background laid, Merrill turns to putting his ideas to work in achieving the type of new organizing needed for today. The organization process focuses equally on managing information and stress. Organizing isn't the same for everyone, even though there may be some fundamental guidelines.
Merrill takes the reader through a speed course on new organization, from cloud computing to mastering the art of the search. His explanation of "the cloud" should be read by everyone not familiar with this huge range of services being delivered over the Internet. His chapter "Day-Timer or Digital?" includes an intriguing argument about when to go paperless.
Merrill comes to the topic of organization with a unique set of credentials in addition to his role at the search giant Google. He holds a doctorate from Princeton in cognitive science, the study of learning and problem solving. He is also dyslexic.
His learning disorder allowed him a unique opportunity to get around limitations while also reducing his stress about learning. His findings are uniquely detailed and personal. From the opening pages of the book, the reader learns how the author's childhood experiences with a learning disorder influenced the ideas he developed. In an intensely personal retelling, Merrill shares how the organizational issues surrounding the treatment and death of his girlfriend from cancer influenced his thinking.
Each of us experiences a personal (usually highly stressful) journey in our quest to organize. This continues through our lives, as Merrill shares in telling his own story. Ultimately, he says, the point of organizing your life is to free you up to experience your life. Having shared his story, Merrill has given us tools not only to get organized, but also to be better for it.