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Information Management Challenge

Your challenge, should you choose, is to improve the way you work with information. We have provided some ideas below for your Information Management Challenge. We ask you to undertake a personal or a team improvement and tell us about your challenge experience. Use this list or read about other's stories as a starting point to find some action that you will undertake.

And we want to hear about your challenge experience so submit a story and share your experiences with others.

Ideas for the Information Management Challenge

Here is a list of ideas for your IM Challenge. The ideas are not presented with a lot of detail as to how-to do something. Where possible the ideas are linked to supporting resources. More information management resources will be developed in the months to come and this list will be updated with new ideas and links to those resources.

Email Ideas

General

  1. Change the inbox information displayed in your email application. Customise the columns and the order of the columns to suit you.
  2. Set email server to deliver your email every 45 minutes instead of 10 minutes. Take control of your time - don't allow yourself to be continually interrupted or distracted by incoming mail. (For Mozilla Thunderbird - Menu: Tools > Account settings… > Server Settings > Check for new messages every 45 minutes)
  3. Register your interest in the new and improved ‘Managing your emails’ course offered by Staff Development Unit.

Create

  1. Write useful subject lines that contain keywords that give the recipient useful information about what the email is about and why they received it. (This will help them to process their incoming emails.)

Organise

  1. Make the folder structure in your email the same or similar to the folder structure for your efiles (on your personal or shared drive).
  2. Automatically filter Global emails into a folder called 'Global Emails' using the filters feature in Thunderbird.Review the folder once a day/twice a week and read the global emails in a batch.
  3. Organise/re-organise your email folder structure so that you have at least three folders that will help you when deciding what incoming emails to keep or delete. ‘Personal’, ‘Monash’, and a folder with the name of your unit or workgroup, e.g.‘Caulfield Services Team’.
    For the second level folders:
    a) in the Personal folder, you can add whatever folders you desire
    b) in your workgroup folder, make folders that match your shared drive
    c) in the Monash folder, use the LOCATE values to name your folders (this folder is for official business records)
  4. Follow 2 minute rule when processing incoming emails, i.e. can you do/delegate/dispose/defer an email within 2 minutes, if so, then do so. (This idea comes from applying David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done ’ (GTD) method to email.)
  5. Tag incoming emails by importance by using the Labels feature in Thunderbird

Retain or dispose

  1. Make an appointment with yourself for 15 minutes every Friday to do deletion of sent/received emails you don't need to keep.
  2. Look in Sent folder, sort emails by recipient, delete all the emails that were personal and do not need to be kept.
  3. Pick a month, i.e. September 2005. Find all emails sent and received in September 2005. Review and decide which ones can be deleted. Aim to cull 5-10% of old emails.
  4. Make a 'Temp' folder for likely deletions. Put emails in this folder that you don’t feel confident to delete right away, but can be deleted within 30 days. (You can choose when to clean out this folder. Target this folder if you need more email quota!)
  5. Set Trash folder to empty every time you exit email. (For Mozilla Thunderbird - Menu: Tools > Account settings… > Server Settings > Empty Trash on Exit)

Use

  1. Learn how and where to search for an email using a search box or the View feature. (A Mozilla Thunderbird technique.)

eFile Ideas

General

  1. Make a macro to put the filename and date last saved in the footer of existing MS Word documents.
  2. Make a 'Template' folder on the shared drive for your group. Get everybody's MS Word to point to that folder. (Menu: Tools > Options > File Locations > Workgroup Templates)
  3. Attend a MS Word course offered by Staff Development Unit to learn useful techniques (like those described here) for MS Word.  

Create

  1. Adjust the MS Word 'Normal' template to put document information (i.e. filename, date created, page numbers, etc) in the footer of new documents.
  2. Use a standard naming convention for all your files.
  3. Visit stationery templates web site (from central marketing - Advancement Division), decide what templates you and your group can use.
  4. Add versioning to your files.

Maintain

  1. Put filename and date in all MS Word/MS Excel files (i.e. in the footer or on title pages).

Organise

  1. Register your interest in attending a new workshop that will help you to design an appropriate folder structure for organising your emails, e-files or paper files.

Retain or Dispose

  1. Review network drives (i.e. u:\ and v:\). Are there any files that can be moved to CD/DVD for archiving? Do so! Label the CD and put your group's CD/DVD in an agreed and known place. Tell your colleagues.
  2. Organise a team delete/archive session to review and dispose of files on shared drives.
  3. Review c:\ drive. Move any files that belong to your workgroup (i.e. not personal) to a shared area on the network.

NB: Dispose does not mean delete.  Dispose means to archive or file away somewhere else!

Use

  1. Make and Save shortcuts on your Desktop to folders or files that you commonly access. (Hint: Highlight a file or folder, right-mouse click and choose ‘Send to' > Desktop (create shortcut))
  2. Make a drive which maps to a folder that your workgroup regularly uses. You can then use the drive reference to quickly navigate to a folder when looking for a file or even when saving a file. In MS Explorer – Menu: Tools > Map Network Drive… > pick a drive reference that hasn’t been used, then browse to your target folder.

Workflow Ideas

General

  1. Make appointments with yourself to do tasks that require more than 15 minutes. Put these appointments in the calendar application. This ensures you have set aside some time, serves as a reminder and also lets others know that you have committed that time to some activity.

Organise

  1. Rather than have a single 'In Tray', make a 'Collect' tray and a 'To-Do' tray. Only put things you for which you have determined the next action in the To-Do tray – work from this tray. Put things that you need to think about or decide what action is required in the Collect tray. Review Collect tray twice a week and determine the next action to take, then put items in the To-Do tray.

If you have some ideas that we could add to this list send them to us.

Remember to add your experiences to the Information Management Challenge stories and share what you have learnt.