Digging

For those of us not utterly organized. .  .

We’ve all seen the ads.  A perfectly connected and organized person has all the information in the world at his or her fingertips.  With a touch or a word any information, anywhere, instantly appears.  Technology has made your life seamless and effortless.

Of course, like all ads, this is not true.  It’s trying to sell you something by a bit of misrepresentation.  Microsoft or Google or whoever wants you to connect everything you do through their system, contending that it will make your life effortless.  You won’t even have to remember any passwords!  (The main motivation for them is not the fee they charge, but the vast amounts of your information they harvest, much more valuable for being complete.)  Well, it might simplify things somewhat for you; but only if you are far more organized than most people we know.  For to retrieve a document or whatever, you need to know where it is, or how to find it; and more importantly, that it exists.

The software-writers themselves are in part to blame for our disorganization.  Each update does at least some things in a different way.  One, for instance, changed our file display so that the files were listed in reverse order of use, the most recently read one at the top.  This made sense to some people.  But we don’t often work on reverse chronological order, and an extended period of clicking options did not restore what we were used to.  And no, we do not want AI help to decide what files to highlight in light blue.  So many features of software exist solely to show off the programmers’ skill.

So take it as given (which is true for all of us here) that there are things we need to find or get back to, but we’re not totally organized.  We might have put things in categories that made sense once, but don’t any more, and we’ve forgotten the earlier system.  Or the software has shifted how things are organized.  Or the filename doesn’t match our memory of its contents.  Or we’ve quite forgotten that the project even existed.  How do we avoid wholesale loss of the past?

By digging, by going back into the archives to see what’s there.  We have to set aside time for this, because there’s no telling in advance how long it will take.  The first step is email inboxes.  There are messages that come in that do not require immediate action, but might need attention later; they tend to drift down out of sight, under the strata of newer things.  At intervals we go back and delete or act on them

Then there’s the stroll through directories and files, especially those we’ve not looked at for a while.  Top to bottom: what’s there?  We’ve definitely found useful things under obscure labels, including files we had been sort of looking for since, well, who knows when.  We have not yet implemented a program of deleting now-useless things, but no doubt we should.

Finally, there’s the offline material.  We have piles of paper notes and folders; we realize this makes us highly unusual these days.  A recent dig through one of these turned up notes on the first volume of The Spectator, a list of Euripides’ plays, reviews of a number of interesting books, and records of some forgotten ideas.  We had been aware that most of these existed, but didn’t know where.  For those of you who don’t live on paper as much as we do, we suggest doing something similar with the storage rooms in your home.

If you’re perfectly organized, of course, there’s no need to look through the archives.  We aren’t, so we do.