Organizing data

There is data everywhere today...more obvious and more hitting than before with the world wide web and smart phones. I remember when I used to be a unix and C programmer in early nineties we used to use unix programs like chat and email. Our only interaction with computers were to write some C code. None of my relatives, parents or most of my friends were even remotely using a PC. Mobiles were non-existent.

Now, people download smartphone apps to organize their to-do-list, their contacts and even their jewellery collection. Organizing things is not something new to humans. The entropy increases with time. Organizing is a discipline. A free will hates discipline. I organize my things in my house only when it is absolutely needed. When I file my tax returns I run around for the proofs and letters and documents and so on. During the year when a tax related paper is received, I dump it in a bin. And when the bin overflows I put it in a file meant for income tax.  Often  I dont have a file for a specific category. When I have my stock report from my broker, I dont have a file for stocks, so I file it in something called personal finance. My home loan repayment certificate, I put it in home related file. Then often I correlate my tax return to the home loan across these files. Linking pieces of information in physical form is not that easy. I had done the right thing to keep these things separate. But I do need to have some kind of linking between them to relate them so that when I file tax returns, I get to know I also need to accomodate my home loan. But the home related file contains several other information like home maintenance expenses and so on.
Being self-employed is even more complex where you need to track all your expenses methodically to apportion them between business and personal for claiming tax exemption.
Running a small business may be even more complex when you have several interfaces with external vendors and partners and so on
Running a enterprise...?

And leaving all these serious data behind, what about my blogs? what about the terms I searched for , the documents I read and the books I have? What about the emails I sent and received? What about the facebook likes and linkedin updates I did? What about the spreadsheets I have in Google docs or the slides in Slideshare? What about all the photos I took that are lying on my laptop and phones?

Should we even bother about organizing all of these data? Yes for several reasons.

• Imagine you are at a store and you need a copy of your passport to buy something..
• You need to know the how much you spent this month on fuel
• You need to find out if you already have the book titled 'Organizing data for dummies' before you make another purchase
• You need to know the total money you made on consulting for some one
• Or even the home address of your friend you plan to visit

Fundamentally, in today's world computers have taken over and increasingly becoming so. And they all keep and process information. Wherever you go, some form of data is needed to input into these machines and software to get more information or to do more stuff. That's broadly a case why it is important to think about organizing your data.

Also, if you need to share some information, you need to be able to find it.

Plus add to this, the amount of information assets that are increasing with you by day. The internet pages you read, the e-books, the photos, movies, audio and so on.

You cannot hold your brain in sanity going forward with the sort of information explosion that is round the corner.