Information- Processing, Organization and Retrieval
What do you store and how do you store it so later you can retrieve it ?
What am I sharing ? #
I have a problem with finding the right information from the raw data I receive, organizing that information and also being able to retrieve the information in an optimal manner.
Let me give you an example to clarify a bit more.
Example Scenario: Daily Standup #
Scenario: I have a standup meeting with my team almost every day. These standups are either async or face-to-face. I play the role of “team lead”/ “coach” in this team.
The raw data: The updates that my teammates share with me.
The challenge: What should I be taking away from my conversation with the team, how should I organize it, and also, how do I retrieve it and use it later.
In the case of a standup, you might say that all of the information I need comes naturally from the format that a standup is arranged. You’re right. a typical standup consists of 3 prompts asked from each individual:
- What were you working on?
- What are you planning on working on?
- Do you have anything blocking your progress?
These are straightforward. But the data shared can be redundant, not for me, or it might more processing. I need to find the answer for this question for myself: When I know the answers to the these prompts, from each individual developer, how will it help me in the role that I’m playing for the current project and also, future projects I have?
The “future project” part is something very important for me: I don’t want to forget the important learning points that I gather from my conversations with my team members and also, I need to identify action items for progressing the current project as well.
The daily standup can be considered as the more simpler meeting I have with my colleagues. Technical discussions, code reviews, sprint reviews, sprint planning, researching code repositories, reading articles and other events and “rituals” all are inputs in my system and I need to make sense of them and use it for not only projects but also for my own professional development.
Given the confusion I’m facing, I have found opinions and ideas from knowledge workers and productivity experts that are very useful and in order to articulate my thoughts and whatever I have learned, I have decided to write some articles. I hope these can benefit whoever is lost in the age of information overload like me and wants to make sense of the world around. I want to make it obvious that I won’t writing from scratch and I’ll be compiling knowledge from other brilliant minds in order to reach a conclusion or process for myself.
Another Example: Strategies for Organization #
There was a video posted by [[Nicole van der Hoeven]] recently on the topic of information management. She was sharing a information organization strategy called “LATCH” and how she uses concepts such as metadata, tags, links and folders in Obsidian to implement this strategy. “LATCH” stands for Location, Alphabet, Time, Category and Hierarchy. This strategy was introduced in the book “Information Anxiety” and you can see an article about it here.
[[Nick Milo]], in his November 9th 2022 newsletter, also discussed how the above strategy is redundant and he proposed a new strategy called “STIR”: Strategy, Time, Importance, Relatedness. Nick gives an example of how to organize a spatula in the kitchen:
What about the spatula in the kitchen? Where would you map that onto STIR? Time seems less needed than Space and Relatedness. You need to know where it is. If you’re good, you’ve placed it next to the stove, with other spatula’s and things you’ll need next to the stove. And if you have to flip eggs in a hurry, that spatula’s Importance grows in a hurry! But after breakfast, the spatula’s relative Importance drops.
Then Nick mentions the following:
This is a reminder that knowledge is fluid. Don’t try to overstructure your knowledge with so much metadata and formatting that things grind to a halt. Things like “Importance” are fluid, and spending all my time adjusting an Importance score to thousands of notes is a form of insanity I choose to avoid.
This last point, knowledge is fluid is very important. If something is so fluid, how do we organize it now so we can retrieve the knowledge later?
After we’ve processed our raw data, and we’ve managed to extract information or knowledge out of it, we need to organize it in a way that we are able to retrieve it for future use. The fluid nature of knowledge leads to instances that make it difficult to identify how the data should be organized:
- Should we organize via a set number of folders and Hierarchy (like [[Tiago Forte]]’s P.A.R.A. or [[Nick Milo]]’s ACCESS)?
- Should we be flat and just use tags? Should our tags be limited (resembling folders), multi-dimensional? In any of the above methods, how do we make sure that our note goes to the “right” place? an by “right” we mean in a way that we can retrieve it without guessing.
Series Writing Direction #
I’m planning on writing a series of articles on the topics of information processing, information organization and information retrieval. These articles are inspired by the work of smart people and building on their shoulders.
The main 3 articles will be:
- [[Information & Its Processing]]
- [[Information & Its Organization]]
- [[Information & Its Retrieval]]
Hopefully, I’ve shared something useful with you in this article and made you think or maybe, realize that you’re in a better place than me.
Siavash