storage
While reading Adrian Bateman, I was reminded of the uncanny surge in the topics of filing and personal information management in various techie blogs (you know who you are). They all credit David Allen, which is great, and his blog is one of the first ones I turn to hoping he's made a post every day.
I'm a little confused though. What is so great about filing? We're all aware of the value of digital information versus analog. Why put ourselves on a paper diet, and a MB diet (for outlook, for example) when the real problem is a) digitization in the first place, and b) metadata once it's in the digital state.
Essentially I don't see the whole thing working long term until we have places that will do scanning en masse, replacing a filing cabinet with a few DVDs, AND that information is searchable, AND we can easily change metadata once they're digitized, including both our archives and our outlook e-mail. What I'm saying is that the garbage can is a kludge set up because we don't have good enough digitization and metadata tools.