Wednesday, November 29, 2017

The Great Post-it Tab Hack

https://youtu.be/VvdlAU2OaDQ

I am writing a book.

The subject is ultra-dry, and potentially crushingly boring.

It's about document management. More specifically document management for governance professionals.

I am working hard to inject as much wit and humour as possible as I plod along. With a little luck, my students and readers will come to share my passion for organizing the heck out of a potential maelstrom of information.

The book is to support a records management course I'll be teaching as part of the Governance Professionals of Canada professional education certification program.

Governance is a fascinating field because you work at the highest level of the organization you serve. The nature of the beast is that you find yourself responsible for a broad range of activities spanning the gamut from running the Board of Directors, to corporate and securities law compliance, ethics monitoring training and compliance, and a bunch of other stuff, as well as the mundane range of responsibilities that come with management responsibility including staffing, budgeting and the rest.

The result is that in no time you find yourself surrounded by records: minute books, corporate files, insider reporting files, mergers and acquisitions files, stock exchange compliance files, and the list goes on, and on, and on.

The key to taming the beast is to develop strong records management skills.

More or less in that vein, a trivial little skill I taught myself is to make quick-and-dirty custom-printed tabs to label files and books.

When a file becomes thick with documents, and grows into one volume after another, being able to find the four or five key documents in a hurry is a real blessing. The same goes for the key sections of the numerous weighty books sitting on the shelf. Thick heavy books like "everything you need to know about UK corporations law but were afraid to ask" (a thousand-plus page tome, and not its real name).  You get the picture.

In the context of working on the book, studying for Bar exams to come in March (yes, life is like a huge game of snakes and ladders after all), and organizing my home office, I remembered my little Post-it notes hack.

It occurred to me that some of you might benefit from this little trick as well.

Hopefully I managed to convey the gist of this trick in the video.

The music for this episode is Santorini 2 by Vibe Mountain made available courtesy of the YouTube Audio Library

2 comments:

Conchscooter said...

Makes me wish I were a Canadian so I could learn professional govern...what is it? Is it in metric too?

David Masse said...

Too funny Michael.

Governance may only be fascinating to the practitioners I'm afraid.

The copyright in all text and photographs, except as noted, belongs to David Masse.