The end of the year is approaching.
In your Teachme Biz environment, have you accumulated too many manuals, left old manuals as they are, or has your folder structure become disorganized?
As part of your year-end cleaning, how about decluttering your manuals so that you can start the new year with a fresh approach to your work?
In this article, we'll introduce methods to take inventory of your manuals and determine which ones are unnecessary.
Assess the current situation (As-Is) and determine what to keep or discard
First, like cleaning your desk or cabinet, take everything out and determine what to keep and what to discard.
You can export the entire manual list from Teachme Biz as a CSV file. If you want to clean up specific areas, exporting by folder is convenient.
There are various methods to determine what to keep or discard, but here I'll share the recommended method that we practice within our company.
1. Apply filters
Open the exported CSV file and apply filters in Excel.
2. Exclude unpublished manuals from decluttering
The "publish_status" field shows "whether a manual is published or not," so filter to show only those marked as "published".
Now your decluttering targets are narrowed down to currently published manuals.
3. Set decluttering criteria based on viewing frequency
"Whether a manual has been viewed within a certain period" is an important aspect when decluttering.
The following fields indicate recent view counts:
- views_within_a_year: Number of views within a year
- views_within_6_months: Number of views within 6 months
- views_within_3_months: Number of views within 3 months
- views_within_a_month: Number of views within a month
- views_within_a_week: Number of views within a week
For example:
- Determine that manuals not viewed even once within a year will probably never be viewed again
- Determine that manuals viewed less than 10 times within 3 months had low demand
Set rough criteria that suit your organization's environment.
4. Check each manual that meets the decluttering criteria and decide what to do with them
Check the manual contents by opening them from the "url" field. After confirming, add a column in Excel to note what to do with them (archive, move to different folder, update content, etc.).
5. For manuals you've decided to archive, double-check their usage status
Check the detailed usage status of individual manuals by following this guide:
View manual views report using report function (Web Browser)
The key point is to check whether manuals targeted for archiving or deletion are linked from somewhere else. If there are referring manuals, also check if they are outdated and make modifications such as removing links.
If there are no referring manuals, you can go ahead and archive them!
It's like the saying that if you haven't worn a piece of clothing for more than a year, you probably won't wear it again.
Please refer to these manuals for moving folders or archiving:
Working in a clean environment
In this article, we introduced features that can be used for decluttering manuals.
Just as it feels good to work in a clean room, having a well-organized Teachme Biz environment reduces issues like "following outdated procedures from old manuals" or "not knowing where to find manuals." This increases work efficiency, so please give it a try!