I have a two-and-a-half-year-old son who is my pride. This little guy amazes me day after day, and I marvel as much watching him grow as he does discovering things that seem mundane to me. Take the example of brushing teeth: his skill grows with practice, but we make sure to show him the right way. Or at least what we think is right for him, in accordance with our principles, our experience, etc. Hygiene is learned, acquired from an early age—I won’t give you a lecture on the subject.

Hygiene. A set of principles, individual or collective practices aimed at maintaining health, at the normal functioning of the body

This set of principles, individual or collective practices aim to maintain one’s health, to ensure the body functions well. Don’t we say “Have good lifestyle habits” or “Have good dietary habits”? But these reflexes are acquired in private and are the invisible and implicit foundations of our human organizations. Schools, communities, associations, businesses, etc.

This brings me to Self Management. This discipline, which we associate with personal development techniques, is growing more and more today. Its goal? To allow us, through methods and routines, to properly self-manage work that is more digitized than ever.

I equate Self Management with digital hygiene. Knowing how to manage your tasks, your emails, etc. However, unlike personal hygiene, we rarely learn to manage it. Our parents weren’t there to teach us, nor was school. Over time, we conformed to what we each thought was good for us, each refining their self-management, self-organization techniques.

Self Management in business must be acquired. No one comes to tell you how to do it. You’re abandoned to a myriad of tools and tips are passed around like local customs.

But in the era of information overload and digital stress, several elements reinforce the need for awareness on the subject:

  • The constant acceleration of change: everything is always fast. Everyone must be ever more agile and absorb an increasing amount of content, tasks, and other “accountabilities.” Read and keep the following sentence well in mind and step back on this subject, you’ll be surprised by its cruel reality—”your inbox is a to-do list you don’t control.” This isn’t the subject of this post, but the topic of absorbing this velocity and permanent change also hides an inability of organizations and management methods to support this state of affairs.
  • Overloaded and unsuitable systems: Outlook is not a good Self Management software. Yet 90% of companies must function with this software alone, which has become a quasi-standard. Nevertheless, it is ineffective at two essential tasks: organizing and searching. As a result, most users spend an enormous amount of time sorting their emails, archiving them (quotas, right?) and spend even more time searching for information they thought they had at hand. Worse, Outlook isn’t the only problematic system—everything or almost everything is affected, the list is very, very… very long!
  • Users who endure everything: too many rapid changes, overloaded and unsuitable systems. In both cases, it’s the employees who suffer. This is when we remember Robert Solow’s paradox: “you can see computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics.”

As I speak to you, one rule still prevails in business: “One problem = one software.” All of this feeds the digital monster and leads to nothing. We over-deploy systems that we under-use. It’s expensive to deploy, to maintain, and to get adopted (when that actually happens).

I call for real awareness on this subject. Do more with less. Don’t listen to and blindly accept all requests from your users—it only opens the door to complete chaos. Be the guardians of the temple, stop thinking that once deployed, software is self-sufficient. Post-deployment support actions (primarily over the long term) are the most important and least common in business. Measure and listen to satisfaction over time. Start from the principle that an employee is as important as, if not more important than, a customer and opt for true digital symmetry. Dare to look at the Self Management issue—you’ll be surprised to find that by better understanding your users’ practices, you’ll learn more about your information system than all the technical material you’ve been drowning in for years.