Ask HN: Universal Organizer?
As a transversal executive at a large-ish company, I take part in many different kinds of activities - taking input from and/or generating output towards many different stakeholders both internal and external, both in business-as-usual mode and as part of projects in multiple capacities (as a sponsor/owner, or an expert, or a direct contributor).
A lot of the daily work takes place over email, since it's the only really interoperable tool as soon as you work with other organizations both inside and outside the company. But of course the work doesn't entirely reside in emails: there are countless files with countless versions, etc.
Furthermore, on a meta level, all of these activities generate - as is the case everywhere - a need for follow-up / monitoring / planning: some todo or note-taking software can be used to do this.
So if you want to stay on top of things, you need to:
- replicate the organization of your emails / your files / your notes in each of the software that are used
- have the self-discipline to constantly go back and forth between the work as such (emails / files / etc) and your notes to actually to the follow-up, classify subjects as they come-in, tick-boxing things as they are done, keeping a list of things in stand-by, prepare for future priorities to take shape, etc.
You'd think 'project management tool yay!' but no: project management tools have one major drawback in that they are actually not truly compatible with the use of email, and an efficient use of them involves onboarding all stakeholders, which obviously isn't feasible in my case given the broadness of it all, and so they just add another layer of overhead. And also, we're not talking about micro-managing everything, but rather following different streams each with their own goals, internal organization, etc.
So I constantly find myself looking for solutions that really allow combining it all: one organization/hierarchy of subjects, able to encompass everything that comes in/out of my email, files I work on, notes on subjects that come up, etc.
How do you manage the overhead? Any software recommendations?
Thanks for your feedback!