So you want to organize your professional content! Congratulations!

Working as a knowledge manager, I often find that companies, teams, and individuals get very excited about the concept of knowledge organization/knowledge management/content management, whatever you want to call it. The idea of neat, tidy rows of information that are easily accessed is one that we all seem to want to strive for, even if we’re not entirely sure why we’re doing it. Information is a messy beast, and the ways in which individuals access and retain it are myriad, but there’s something about putting content into neatly-arranged piles that is satisfying, and indeed can lead to a more productive, more profitable, and easier-to-navigate workplace.

However, remembering that you can only organize the things you have can be a struggle. Quite often, when I’m starting to assess the plans of a department or organization (or even an individual’s filing system), a great deal of what I call “aspirational organization” starts to take effect.

Let’s step back from the world of digital information and bring this into the world of tangible objects. Have you ever been to a Container Store? They’re almost magical places. Neatly-arranged boxes and bins and baskets, all coordinated by size and function, line the shelves of this retail establishment. As you walk the aisles, you can feel a sense of calm approaching, as you realize that if you just bought enough containers and arranged them in just the right way, you’d never lose anything, and your house would always look tidy. So you pile up your cart with boxes and baskets and jars, and when you get home, you realize that you now have several hundred dollars’ worth of empty vessels without anything, really, to put in them.

Or maybe that’s just me.

At any rate, this is quite often the case with content organization in professional settings. When we talk about organizing our content, we often talk about the shiny rows of color-coordinating containers we’d like to build in order to place…something. Or we have a terrific organizational system for things we don’t yet own or haven’t built.

The first thing I always ask about in a knowledge audit (a session in which I learn what information you have, what information you use, and how you generally access it as an organization) is what material you currently have and are using. Pretty much anything else isn’t all that important unless you have people working at creating it right now, or a budget for people to create that information/content.

Building systems or buying software to organize material you currently have and currently use is smart. Building systems or buying software to organize material you think you might create or use at some point in the future can be an exercise in futility, can be very expensive, and can disrupt your organization far more than a messy system of content storage that nobody likes, but everybody knows how to use.

So before you start building a new system or establishing a content management budget, ask yourself if you are finding places for the materials that help you work, or if you’re being distracted by the shiny rows of boxes in Aisle 2.