I often find myself spending a lot of my time organising, or atleast trying to get myself organised. I have just finished a very busy few months with several projects on the go at once and I have been left with several very full email project mailboxes. Trying to keep track of who needs to communicate with who is a challenge, but as with all things, the ability to multitask grows with practice.

I have read many books on personal development and the idea that effective people are very good at managing time. I agree, to an extent, but there also has to be a sense of urgency in our life otherwise everything becomes 'mechanical'. I try to avoid plotting every 15 minutes of my day, mainly because my day quickly evolves. You cannot always say how long it will take to fix an issue. At the heart of this efficiency is communication, good communication and email is our modern core.

Email can quickly run off if you are not careful and it is a great feeling to archive some of the content, a 'digital spring clean' so to speak. There are many online tools for time and project management with some great features and workflows to make this even easier. Sharepoint can help in taming an otherwise disjointed office by centralisation and alerting, but those alerts tend to slowly fill up an email system if not respected.

Google push that you should archive rather than delete with the proviso that they have the space to cope and then ofcourse there is the compliancy requirements for storing certain types of data. We must be filling up harddrives all over the place.

As I start to tie up the work completed throughout the year I can now start to see what is needed and ask some basic questions about the content I have gathered, where it needs to be archived it is coming out of the main system, however I will be deleting as much as I can!

Harddrives everywhere with sectors of unread, unreferred data everywhere..Rejoice!