Reference Materials

Much of what comes across your desk and into your life in general is reference material. There’s no action required, but it’s information that you want to keep, for a variety of reasons. Your major decisions will be how much to keep, how much room to dedicate to it, what form it should be stored in, and where. Much of that will be a personal or organizational judgment call based upon legal or logistical concerns or personal preferences. The only time you should have attention on your reference material is when you need to change your system in some way because you have too much or too little information, given your needs or preferences.

The problem most people have psychologically with all their stuff is that it’s still stuff—that is, they haven’t decided what’s actionable and what’s not. Once you’ve made a clean distinction about which is which, what’s left as reference should have no pull or incompletion associated with it—it’s just your library. Your only decision then is how big a library you want. When you’ve fully implemented this action-management methodology, you can be as big a pack rat as your space (physical and digital) will allow. As I’ve increased the size of the hard disk on my computer and added an almost infinite backup capability on attached drives and in the cloud, I’ve kept that much more e-mail in my archives and that many more digital photographs. The more the merrier, as far as I’m concerned, since increasing the volume of pure reference material adds no psychological weight.