The COTA Department

Our company bought us a fancy training about organizing email by Mike Song, with a bonus section on file organization. I learned COTA, which is a way of organizing your files that uses four top-level folders: Clients, Output, Teams, and Admin. Here’s a review of the book, The Hamster Revolution, that outlines the system, if you want a bit more info on the system. If you are put off by taking productivity tips from a book that features a talking hamster, I recommend the white papers or the trainings, instead.

During most of the presentation, I was noticing that the guidelines for making something easy to find on my PC are the same as the guidelines making things easy for customers to find in a help system or on a site. Don’t bury it in too many clicks–don’t make the folder structure too deep, but don’t overwhelm with a vast surface array of folders or books. Have one place to go for your files/information. Organize by function. Have meaningful labels. Have a universal standard.

Is this not part of content strategy for a company? The company’s stuff should be easy for employees to find, and it should be efficient to create. One person creating it one time, everyone finding it in the same place, verifying that one has the right version without checking in eight other places. And, maybe this shouldn’t be each employee’s daily responsibility, this attention to info efficiency. Wouldn’t it save time if someone with training in this strategy showed them how to do it, management enforced the standards, and it became a habit? Like time-sheeting tasks or using file naming conventions. It takes an investment to make this happen, it seems to me. It takes personnel with training in information strategy.

At this training, I learned that email is probably the thing I’ll do most in my career, as far as sheer volume (except tweeting?), so I’ll probably want to master it. I’ve read and partly implemented Getting Things Done, so I was comparing Mike’s system to that, and he did outline some pitfalls of GTD without naming names. I have to say, I never did set aside the recommended two days to fully implement GTD, though I have still seen a ton of benefit, but implementing COTA with my existing files is going to take about two hours. I have two hours. I never seem to have two days.

Mike also led us (quickly, not tortuously) through a bunch of Outlook tips. This is a bigger deal than it maybe seems, because it’s the details that can keep me from sticking with an organizational trick. For example, of course a document that I receive as an email attachment shouldn’t live on my tasklist AND in an email folder AND in My Documents. But prior to this training, I thought I couldn’t drag-and-drop an email to my tasklist and retain the attachment. Low and behold, I can right-click and drag, and the options are available for retaining attachments. I know–yawn. But when I find these gems, I’m happy, because it’s the details that make or break a productivity trick for me.

“I already almost have my files that way, and I still can’t find things,” a co-worker told me. I think “almost” can be quite a big difference from all the way. Having some rules for overlap, versus making up a new rule each time you file something, for example.

It’s time consuming for each worker to be sitting at their desk carefully considering each thing they file, and often reaching different conclusions. Having put so much time and money into getting us this training, I hope we are going to implement some of these ideas on team servers, and not just use them alone in our padded cubicles.

Education is a Strange Deliverable

I have been taking online classes this semester; Trigonometry, Intro to Web Page Creation, and Java I. All three have been a challenge, but that’s what one expects from college courses. What I didn’t expect is that my experience with the online course format would suck so much joy out of the whole thing. It has taken me until now—three quarters of the way through the semester—to let go of the grade and just be happy learning whatever I can.

This is the first time I’ve taken online courses, and it turns out that studying all the material at home by myself can be done, but it’s not the most efficient. I finally went out and hooked up with some tutors (mathletic friends and, once, the school tutoring lab). For me, an hour studying with a tutor is worth five hours of studying by myself. But the tutoring is a limited resource, and I still have to get through the remainder of the semester mainly on my own. I doubt I’ll choose online courses again. There is almost no scenario I can think of that would make it worth the tremendous effort it requires from me.

I’m not totally “letting go of the grade.” I think it helps to keep in mind what score I’m aiming for, especially when I may not pass if I don’t get a high enough score, at this point. It’s good to have a number that I’m aiming for. But if I don’t hit it, that doesn’t mean I didn’t work hard, or that I’ve wasted my time, or that I’m pursuing the wrong degree. I’m not going to let my anxiety over the grade overshadow every part of my experience with the class. I’m detaching myself somewhat from the outcome and focusing on the process. Even though it takes me hours to finish half of a Trig assignment, it’s so satisfying to get those handful of right answers. I’m cramming bits of Trig into my brain, bit by bit.

This is different than what I do at work, and my work process keeps wanting to kick in—if a deliverable is at risk, evaluate and adjust one of the legs of the project. Add resources, add time, or reduce quality. The semester is a fixed length, of course, so I started cutting out more social time and rest; sometimes staying up pretty late to get to a certain point in my homework, planning my blocks of study time and how much should be completed after each session—and still not finishing everything. So I could feel better that I wasn’t slacking, but then I would wonder what was wrong with my approach that took so long. After every test and assignment, I reflect and tweak things. And I’m still turning in incomplete work.

But I’m learning so much. After pouring over chapter three of my Java book (which was after reading it once and flubbing the assignments), I had a grasp on some basic terms and methods. I could read a simple application and understand how the parts worked together. Last night I finally sat down and wrote one myself and it felt like writing a song, no joke. Loved it. I loved debugging the errors, and trying to condense things into variables. I loved answering the cheesy ASCII questions with my fake data. I love that the teacher has it set up so that you suffer if you turn in things last minute (every test has answers that you’ll want to dispute, for example). That’s just like the real workplace, in my experience.

After I turned in the application (I only finished one of the three assignments that were due on time), I indulged myself in some chat on the class discussion board, which we have to participate in for our grade. To hell with the fact that I’m probably not one of the best students. I still have something to contribute.

I’ma be a Content Strategist

Tom Johnson presented to our chapter of STC this week, and he asked me what I was going to school for. I told him I was aiming for business analyst slash content strategist. Meaning I’ll start with that trajectory and see where it takes me. We discussed the buzz around the term “content analyst”—I hadn’t heard it before a couple of months ago.

I don’t remember the exact first time I heard or read the term, but I’m sure one of the first mentions was followed by a link on twitter to a good article, and after that I just started noticing the term all over my twitter feed. Every time I find something else about it, I think, “yep, that’s what I want to do.” And here I am, now, taking classes like Trigonometry (throws salt over shoulder) to work towards a computer science degree. I’ll probably apply for a business analyst position at my company. This is actually the way most of the important things happen in my life, so I’m not particularly worried about the seemingly impulsive nature of it.

Still, the conversation resolved me to beef up my knowledge of both terms. I get in a hurry sometimes, and I want to make sure I don’t have a half-baked, artist’s rendering in my mind of what a business analyst does, or of what content strategy is. I think I do have a fairly good idea, but I want to be able to better articulate it, just because I should be able to.

Tom’s great about citing blogs and other quotes when he’s speaking on a subject. I was able to write down a ton of blogs to check out after he presented on Blogging to the STC chapter. When we were talking, I was thinking of Kristina Halvorson’s content strategy post on A List Apart, but didn’t have the details in mind. Here’s a quote from that post:

Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.

Necessarily, the content strategist must work to define not only which content will be published, but why we’re publishing it in the first place.

Otherwise, content strategy isn’t strategy at all: it’s just a glorified production line for content nobody really needs or wants. (See: your company’s CMS.)

She follows that with a specific list of items a content strategist can help a business to define, such as key themes.

Rahel Bailie started a Content Strategy SIG for STC , and I joined it. The SIG homepage displays tweets with the hashtag, #contentstrategy. That’s how I found this tweet, which led me to this definition of content strategy on knol.google.com. It’s a fairly comprehensive definition that even diagrams the process of collaborating with a content strategist.

I’m getting my first chance to test these definitions. I have been asked to help plan the site update for the Usability and User Experience SIG. The first steps are to outdated info and catalogue what’s currently on the site. If you use the site (or don’t use it) or are otherwise curious, email or leave a comment.