Bio

How many hours have I wasted over a lifetime finding and organising information so I could do something useful with it? How many non-productive hours have I spent searching for misfiled reports. How much useful and often crucial information is wasted, buried in some folder and never accessed when needed because it can’t be found.  How much information which if followed up on could be so useful and productive is buried away forgotten in some file.  How much do clunky enterprise systems, which were designed with any body in mind but the end user on the work site, contribute to these losses.  And what about information organised in hierarchies of windows folders, where documents get misfiled or over written and for which there are no search or control facilities.  Often vital information is not recorded at all because the workplace is so hectic and the reporting system so cumbersome. Difficulty in finding saved information reduces the incentive for workers to store it in the first place.  The following diagram is a mind map of the issues I faced and the consequences.

So I wanted to design something better. Something that could build on the existing document folder structures, but which would enable the kind of functionality and control so that valuable energy and time could be spent using information, as opposed to trying to manage it.  The system had to have the following features: