In the new book Getting Organized in the Google Era, former Google CIO Douglas Merrill and his co-author James Martin attempt to share ideas for better organizing information, frequently incorporating technology.

In general I thought the content was decent. Most of the content was either questioning obsolete paradigms (why do we have a 9-5 workday?) or applying common principles (don’t multitask or have frequent context-switches, so check e-mail at a break rather than having it interrupt you). I appreciated the emphasis on goals. I also think it had some reasonable information on skills that aren’t commonly communicated but should be: like how to use tagging and do better searches.

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I started reading The Clutter Cure by Judi Culbertson. In her three step process of "Identify," "Assess," and "Take Action," I didn’t even finish Identify. It was easy to read and mildly humorous, but I did not find enough value in it to finish.

Culbertson’s approach did not seem useful. For example, green dots are to be put on items to give to charity rather than just putting the items in a bag. The dots just make extra work (someone will need to remove it), and going out to buy dots doesn’t work toward the goal of cutting clutter.

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