Right then ... let's get started. Just open that file. Oh! It's not there. I must have moved it. Where did I put it? What did I call it again? Oh, yes, it will be in that folder. Now, where's that folder gone? I'll go into this. Oh no! That's the one I just opened. Close that. I might have called it that, so I'll do a search. Come on ... hurry up ... No, I mustn't have called it that.

You can find a lot of 'time to search' data out there on the interweb, and most of it is pretty startling - if not always comparable. Some frequently referenced studies report that it takes about eight attempts for us to find the right document or information. And we spend a whopping 1.8 hours a day searching for the correct information. But there are much higher estimates as well.Whatever the numbers, I'm pretty sure you've had this experience, it's wasted quite a bit of your time and caused you quite a lot of frustration.

But it's more than just trying to find documents. It's navigating and accessing different information systems.

Where did that message about the project come from? John sent it, but was it by email? Did he SMS me? Or was it on our chat group or through our online system?

Finding stuff drives me crazy. So, while I am not (yet) perfectly under control, I have managed to do a few things to keep my work and life stuff sorted.

I've got a good filing structure going. I've sorted things into categories that make sense to me. I give everything a useful and specific name with a date and version if it needs it. I am getting much better at using tags. I know some people who forget all about the sorting and descriptions and put their effort into exceptionally good tagging - but that's not something you can do everywhere.

This problem and its answers are not new to us. Yet this daily distraction continues to frustrate us.

Even with the best systems in place, the most important thing we can do is often the hardest when we are really busy - and who isn't? It's taking that extra minute to think about making this whole thing easier for tomorrow you when today you has a million things going on at once.

In 1978, the sociologist Elise Boulding wrote that society is suffering from “temporal exhaustion".

"If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future.” (1)

Things haven't changed. The impacts from our bias for the present compounds in many ways, big and small, working against our best interest. We are distracted from the benefits of accounting for the future by the needs of right now.

What is one small way you can factor into your work what tomorrow you (or someone else) might need and make your life easier, less frustrating and actually save yourself time in the long run?

Richard Fisher, 2019, The perils of short-termism. BBC

The distraction dilemma: Short-term thinking and long-term pain.