September 19, 2014
Dear Everyone:
The cobbler’s children go barefoot.
For those who are not sure what a “cobbler” is, it’s a man who mends
shoes. The implication is
that the cobbler is so busy mending other people’s shoes that he doesn’t
have time to fix the shoes for his own kids.
As an allegory, it refers to people who know a lot about something,
records management, for instance, who don’t actually use that knowledge
for their own benefit.
A few weeks ago, I had a possible plumbing problem.
This meant I might need to call a plumber.
Because I have something known as a “home warranty service”,
instead of calling a plumber, I would contact the home warranty company
and they would assign a plumber to take care of the problem.
It would only cost me the “co-payment”, which is about $65.
However, in order to do this, I would first need to know the contract
number that the home warranty service uses to identify clients.
And where was the contract?
Somewhere in the eight-inch stack of paperwork waiting To Be Filed, of
course.
A few weeks into this year I did all the 2014 filing and “rotated the
files”, creating a nice, empty file box for 2015.
I was very proud of myself as this is a chore that usually goes
undone until at least February.
This time I was way ahead of the game.
However. Every time I paid a
bill… Every time something,
like the home warranty contract, arrived that needed to be filed…
I put everything in a specific place, a desk tray to be exact,
known as “To Be Filed”.
Every week, every month, the pile of paperwork grew.
Every once in a while I would tell myself that I really should get
around to filing all that stuff.
Every time, something with a “higher priority” bumped it down on
the list. And the stack
grew.
In fact, it’s still growing.
I’ll let you in on a secret that many records managers have learned over
the centuries: The Secret to
Filing is Retrieval.
I even wrote a “Case History” on this subject for my local
ARMA
Chapter’s Newsletter, back when we had newsletters.
If you never need to find anything, a big, messy, falling-over-itself
stack is as good a place to store records as any.
Conversely, the best filing system in the world won’t do anybody
any good if they can’t find what they’re looking for.
I found the contract. I
would have found it a lot faster if I’d filed it “properly” like a good,
little records manager should.
Would the amount of time I spent looking for the contract have
been more than the time it will take to get all that filing done?
Doesn’t matter if there’s a good movie on TV while I do the
filing.
In the meantime, my ARMA chapter has decided that, after 17+ years, it’s
high time we looked at our Chapter Records and decided what needs to be
kept, and where; and what can be discarded (disposition, one of the
eight
Generally Accepted Recordkeeping Principles—aka “GARP”.)
We scheduled a special Board meeting just for the
Retention Review.
But then… Somebody
couldn’t make it. Somebody
else had a “higher priority”, and the meeting got bumped to later.
And bumped again.
Finally, as the newly-inaugurated Chapter President, I proposed that the
Secretary and I take a “first pass” over the whole thing and report back
to the Board. Everyone
agreed that this sounded like a good idea.
(Yes, that’s the same Chapter President who swore that she
wouldn’t take on everything herself,
yada, yada, yada.)
Today was the Secretary’s “Friday Off”, so we met here to look at the
box of Chapter Records accumulated since 1997.
We pretty much polished it off in about an hour.
There’s still a USB “flash” drive that this Secretary inherited from
whoever had the job before her.
It contains a lot of electronic documents that may-or-may-not be
actual Chapter Records. I
made a copy which I will inventory before next week’s Board Meeting.
Sometimes doing it yourself is just plain easier.
In the meantime, the pile of “To Be Filed” is still sitting in the back
bedroom. I’m placing it on
my “official” To Do List, which is basically just a visual reminder of
things that need to be done where, no doubt, it will move from one day
to the next until I finally get it cleared off the List.
As for the plumbing problem that started this whole thing, it
magically cleared itself up before I ever notified the home warranty
service that I might need to use the service.
Sometimes, if you ignore a problem hard enough, it really does go away
by itself.
Love, as always,
Pete
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