Search is the way to organize. We don’t organize the web. We search. The web is organic. Every day, it continues to grow. The job of Google is to index the web and present it in an organized fashion when you are ready to find something. This is necessary since the information overload of the web requires effective filtering.
Search In Your Content
You can’t control the amount of information as you once did coming into your life. The inputs are large. Email, appointments, content, and documents are continually growing. You want to keep this information because it constitutes your ongoing knowledge base.
Thus, the power of Google search is strategic for managing a large amount of information. You are not spending useless cycles organizing. Organization happens when it matters – when you are looking for something.
The beauty of Google Apps is the core structure centered around search, Google’s primary technology. This affords you the opportunity to be more productive on the front end of your knowledge work. Instead of intaking information and organizing, you can intake and save it without thought. When you want to find it, search enables you to access what you need just in time.
Breaking From The Old
I grew up, like you did, in the old economy. We used things like Microsoft Outlook and a filing system. Use things enough and they become a comfort zone. We don’t realize we are driving in the slow lane after a while. We are thinking relative, not absolute.
What is absolute is that those that could care less about how things used to be done, pass everyone by in productivity, collaboration and execution. They are on a system which is intuitive and maps to the realities of the fast-paced information world we live in. New players use Google Apps. They don’t inquire or set up old software systems which slow them down.
Old players stay with what is comfortable until competition or crisis exposes them. The irony is that old players search every day when they want something. This may not be an obvious transferrable opportunity to their work.
If you want to go faster, break from the old. Adopt the tools for how to handle information today quickly. Google Apps is built for speed because it is predicated on search. Search matters when you are looking for things in real-time. This underlying technology completely changes the game for an organization committed to productivity increases.
How have you found filing to be beneficial today compared to before? Does search make sense for your workflow?
