Information Management is the New Time Management

I was reading Meghan O’Gieblyn’s Dear Cloud Support column in the May/June Wired magazine where she made the point that today we are drowning in content. I can relate as I struggle to keep up with my own field. This is a problem for me as a researcher, a teacher, and a textbook author. Keeping on top of the tsunami of academic papers that are produced at an increasing pace has become extremely difficult. Add to it the nonacademic literature that also has value, and it has become impossible. We all need to develop strategies for dealing with all this content as information management is the new time management.

Professional Skills We All Need

Professional skills, sometimes called “soft skills” go beyond the technical aspects that we must master for our particular fields. Accountants need to understand balance sheets, engineers need to know calculus, and physicians must be on top of drug reactions. But having all the technical knowledge and skill does not make you effective. You must know how to utilize those technical skills in the world. These extra skills include communication with others, teamwork, and time management. It has become increasingly recognized that such skills should be incorporated into the training of professionals in business, engineering, medicine and other fields. At my university, this is the case as “soft skill” training is part of many majors.

Information Overload

When I was a student, my field of industrial organizational (IO) psychology had a handful of academic journals. You could keep up with the field just by paying attention to the top two–Journal of Applied Psychology (JAP) and Personnel Psychology. Over the years more and more journals came online, and today there are dozens devoted to IO psychology, and hundreds that publish papers on IO topics. For the first decade or more of my career, I would scan the tables of contents of JAP and other top journals each month to keep up with what was going on. I no longer do that because it is an impossible task. I have had to switch my approach to allow for the information avalanche that had buried us all.

Information Management is the New Time Management

Time management is about developing skills and strategies to make the most efficient use of your time. For people with many demands at work and at home, this is a survival necessity. But as information has increased, so has the amount of time we need to keep up. How much time do you spend each day just dealing with email? What about texts? What about other information that you need to pay attention to? Managing the flow of information is a vital part of time management. As with time management, you need to figure out strategies that work best for you and your situation.

I have found that it is best to adopt a just-in-time approach to dealing with information. The key is knowing what information exists and where to find it. This means getting up to speed on search tools that can find the information you need with various search engines and databases. For academic searches a free tool is Google Scholar. For those with access to university libraries, a world of more complex tools opens up, such as EBSCO and Clarivate’s Web of Science. Some strategies I use:

• Accept your cognitive limitations. Memory is like a bucket with a hole in it. Just because you read it, doesn’t mean you will remember it. I learned that lesson early in my career when I realized I could retain only a fraction of what I read. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t bother reading. It just means that our minds are not like computers where everything we put in storage stays there. It is better to focus on being aware of the big picture–what are the major concepts in your field. What are the most important current issues? What is the state of knowledge about the issues you deal with? And most importantly–what information exists and where can you find it. My information management strategy is focused on the limits of retention, as often the more we try to cram into our heads, the less we recall later. This also holds for teaching and overdoing the amount of content we cram into courses. As one of our students noted, students are not information dumpsters and neither are we.
• Focus on topics not the entire field. My field is immense. Keeping up with everything is impossible. I have shifted my approach from scanning journal tables of contents to doing searches on particular topics when I need them. Recently I have been working on leadership interventions, so I conducted a search on that topic last month. I downloaded a few dozen sources that I placed in a folder, and I downloaded the citations into my citation manager, Endnote. I haven’t bothered to read the papers yet as I don’t need the information now. Instead, the next time I write a paper on the topic, I have the information at my fingertips and can go through the papers to find the information I need.
• Take time to organize your information. It is important to organize the storage of your information in a logical way that makes sense to you. I have thousands of pdfs of articles that I put in folders by topic. For new projects, I will create folders for pdfs of articles and folders for other information for that project. It is a constant battle to keep things organized so I can find what I need when I need it. Keep in mind that the goal is just-in-time. Knowing how to find what you need when you need it.

All this is to say that you need to invest a small amount of time into creating effective information handing strategies that will save you massive amounts of time later. Effective information management will make you more efficient and effective as you won’t have to spend unnecessary time searching. Information management is the new time management because as the volume of information has gone up, so has the time it takes to deal with it.

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