How to get organized when you are not organized?
Everyone wants to be more efficient and less untidy, but very few people accept to change the way they work to do so.
The wishful thinking of productivity
Being more productive is an obsession for many people in the world. There are lots of books about improving one’s productivity, all trying to make it look like they are the unique recipe to improve it. However, it takes a lot of work and discipline to be more productive, for a simple reason: It’s hard to change your habits.
Productivity at work is linked to the organization of time and information.
Again, there is plenty of literature about time and information management. The suggested pathway is almost always the same: readers need to change their habits and implement new ones. Authors provide checklists and examples of how life will be better after following them. By the end, the readers are frustrated because after reading the book and trying to implement some tips in their own life, nothing changes.
It doesn’t work because people don’t want to change their habits — they want to improve their productivity with the least effort possible. That’s pretty normal when you’re looking for the most efficient solution. What’s more, the solution is not the same for everyone. Each person needs to understand what matters for them and implement what they need to get more efficient.
“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom,” said Aristotle.
For example, the habits of a PhD. applicant are very different from those that are useful to a sales representative. A PhD. applicant is precisely a knowledge worker. They need to read a lot of stuff, store it, and organize it to produce papers. Organizing information is something highly useful for them, which is why they need to find a way to not to be overwhelmed by the hundreds of PDF files and articles they will have to read. Some of those knowledge workers are very organized from the beginning, but in reality, they’re in the minority.
The vast majority of knowledge workers don’t want to spend time organizing their knowledge. They just want to store it and find it when they need it. Knowball was built for them.
Don’t try to change people, just build what they need
A lot of apps promise to improve the life of their users but then ask them to change their habits first. “If you learn to organize folders perfectly, you’ll be so much better to find anything on your computer.” Some consultants provide courses to become a master in knowledge management, for example with Evernote. One of the most famous ones helps their clients to build such a knowledge organization system:
Complex! And terrifying for people like Arthur and I. Implementing something like that takes a lot of effort. Users have to learn a new way of working and genuinely change their habits. If some people in the world are willing to make such an effort, the vast majority don’t want to. They prefer to search the same things on Google again and again rather than building a system. That is why the fundamental concept of knowball is derived from a simple idea: every bit of knowledge is easier to find with a search engine.
At knowball we believe that users want to find what they are looking for in a few seconds. So we built a system that helps them find what they put in our app without any effort. For example, if you want to store the bitcoin manifesto on your knowball space, you can capture it with a click from the bitcoin website using the knowball Chrome plugin. The PDF file is added in a note, and the content is indexed in your knowball search engine. So if you want to find it back it a few weeks later, you just type what you remember and find the manifesto in a second. For instance, if I want to read the bitcoin manifesto and I type the keywords: “Satoshi Nakamoto”, the manifesto appears.
Almost every internet user is on a search engine every day to browse information on the web, so putting all the material they want into a search engine looks familiar. Moreover, it gives them a reliable way to find information without any added effort.
knowball, the best way to store hundreds of scientific articles
One of our favourite users utilizes the product to store and manage scientific articles. These are mainly papers about medical science. They come from the internet or his computer and are stored as PDF files. Those articles run dozens of pages about really accurate topics. For a long time, he just saved the PDF files into a computer folder. He had more than a hundred files in his folder and didn’t take the time to organize them. So when he needed a reference from one of those papers, he had to use his own computer, browse the folder until he found the right paper, open it and search for the correct information. It was a time-consuming process.
Now he stores all the PDF files directly into knowball. It is relevant for him because when he studies a scientific paper he almost never reads it entirely, he just focuses his attention on a few key points. So when he wants to refer back to it, he uses the key points he remembers to find it again. For instance, if he wants to find the files about something as specific as “enzyne carnitine acyl transferase II” , he can type those words into the knowball search engine and find the right files in a second:
For him, knowball provides real flexibility in knowledge management. First, because he doesn’t have to manage the knowledge, and second because every word from any PDF file is indexed in his knowball search engine. That’s huge for him because no matter what he remembers from an article he read, he can find it again in a second.
He said to us: “It’s like my own version of Google except there are no cat videos or conspiracy theorists on it”. :p
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