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Good ideas lost in emails and instant messages

August 23rd, 2007 by Rich Zygler
tags: Ideas, Knowledge Management |

I don’t like to email anymore. Especially at work. I have some issues with instant messaging too.

Ideas get lost. So do instructions and documentation. Sure, you can make a nice document and put it out there on your internal corporate network, but no one will ever look at it. Do you have a way to search thru the contents of it? No? I didn’t think so. Me neither.

I’m thinking of blogging everything. Blogging everything I want/need to remember. Maybe I’ll make a blog inside work for documenting work procedures and ideas. And set other people up the same way. And I’ll keep blogging stuff here obviously that’s good for public consumption.

But then there’s the IMs to contend with.

After losing a job surprisingly a few years ago, I’ve worked pretty hard to develop and nurture a network of people in my field that I can turn to and who can turn to me. This is mostly done via quick IMs. So on any given day there’s a good amount of knowledge transfer back and forth in instant messaging. I view this as a kind of professional development. As long as it doesn’t interfere with my daily responsibilities, it’s fine. I’ve learned a lot from people this way and hopefully they’ve learned from me too.

So how do I search thru all those great tidbits, links, theories, etc. that I’ve given and received via IM? I’m thinking of chucking those into a database or text indexer and making those searchable via web too. I’m just not sure of the best way to go about that yet.  More to come.

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