Too Much Information

Because we didn’t have quorum on Tuesday, there were no meetings scheduled. Oddly enough, days like these tend to be some of my most productive, more so recently with the nature of many of our meetings. They are productive in that I am given the opportunity to assault the mountain of emails, phone calls, and more importantly, paperwork which piles up when we don’t attend them. My office right now would rival a CPA’s or tax attorney’s.
I’ve tried to develop a system to keep everything from piling up. Phone calls are the easiest to deal with, provided whoever has put in the call isn’t making some unreasonable request, which happens a lot. Most of the time though whatever it is can be referred to the appropriate employee or manager.
Emails tend to be different. Being on Council seems to automatically place your email address on a number of lists, even more so as you become involved with committees and outside boards. A number of managers and employees, especially our lawyers, in order to be effective and also cover their behinds, communicate with Council by email, often even seeking direction by asking for responses. It doesn’t always work, but at least it creates a written record documenting that they tried.
Most important of all, we get numerous emails from Tribal members, some asking basic information questions, others grilling us on stuff that gets a little more complex. I try to flag those emails that require a lengthy response. In total, I personally receive between 30-60 emails in a day. If I go for a few weeks without cleaning out my inbox, I can amass more than a 1000 emails, many of which I like to keep. So I’ve got like 30 different email folders where I relegate old emails, to be dusted off for some obscure future use. I must spend at least an hour a month organizing my emails.
The emails and phone calls though hardly compare with the paperwork. The amount of government, tribal, and personal entities with which the Tribe has contact is staggering, and we are cc’d on a lot of the correspondence that goes to Legal, Natural Resources, Culture, and the various branches of CTGR. Some days we get more than 100 pages of faxes, letters, memorandums, and notifications.
Realistically, to actually read each and every piece of paper that arrives in our mailbox is probably impossible. So you learn to mine, to sort through the numerous reports, memos, etc. to make a personal choice as to what is worth keeping or what goes to the shredder, to keep tabs on some letters because depending on the issue, it is just a chapter in some ongoing saga.
I keep most of my paperwork, for a few months, maybe even a year at least. Others think I’m crazy, but I still like having documentation and records. A county official informed me last week that 80% of papers that get filed away are never fully used again. I don’t know about the accuracy of that, but in my case it doesn’t seem out of the question. That still won’t stop me from keeping paperwork. I like having a clear written record of events, regardless of how much time and space it takes to store them. As a wannabe historian, I like having those records. My own personal hunch is that history, not just in Grand Ronde, but in many other places, has often suffered from faulty record-keeping, if not loss of records altogether.
That didn’t stop me from making heavy use of the shredder on Tuesday. I made such heavy use that the shredder blocked up and even started to emit a burning smell. Dakota Whitecloud and I had to jam our fingers up underneath the blades to scrape out the shredded pulp. All in all I filled two medium-sized garbage bags with what I’d shredded on Tuesday, and that is not counting the non-sensitive material that was just tossed into the recycling bags. If I were to measure the amount of paperwork in my office by stacked inches, I would have at least ten feet. I can’t imagine the trees that die to produce our paperwork.
My filing cabinets are still heavy with paper. Maybe some of it will be useful down the road, while a lot it will be that 80%. My mailbox will still be full tomorrow, no doubt, with some reports, packets and who knows what else.
I’ll continue to keep a lot of it, occasionally feeding the shredder. That’s just me.