Pile, Don't File I live and die by piles of paper. Right now my desk is hidden under a highway project and a shopping center. Until I read this article I didn't know that it was actually an intuitive, efficient and simple filing system implemented unconsciously and perfectly in sync with my way of approaching problems.
(Found in Arts & Letters Daily)
In Praise of Clutter
People spread stuff over their desks not because they are too lazy to file it, but because the paper serves as a physical representation of what is going on in their heads??a temporary holding pattern for ideas and inputs which they cannot yet categorise or even decide how they might use?, as Ms Kidd puts it. The clutter cannot be filed because it has not been categorised. By the time the worker's ideas have taken form, and the clutter could be categorised, it has served its purpose and can therefore be binned. Filing it is a waste of time.
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When filers receive paperwork, they put it away. When pilers get it, they leave it on the desk?not randomly, but in concentric circles. There is a ?hot? area, of stuff that the worker is dealing with right now. There is a ?warm? area, of stuff that needs to be got through in the next few days: it may be there, in part, as a prompt. And there is a ?cold? area, at the edges of the desk, of stuff which could just as well be in an archive (or, often, the bin).
According to Mr Whittaker and Ms Hirschberg, the assumption that filers can find stuff more quickly is wrong. Filers, they say, ?are less likely to access a given piece of data, and more likely to acquire extraneous data...In moderation, piling has the benefits of providing somewhat ready access to materials as well as reminding about tasks currently in progress.? Filers have two problems finding stuff: they tend to file too much, because they have put so much effort into building a filing system, and they often find it hard to remember how they categorised things.
I suspect that my co-workers, mostly clean desk types, are annoyed by by my slovenly habits, and especially by the occasional stack of documents that creep onto the floor surrounding my desk. But now I can claim that it is a filing system backed by scientific research and endorsed by the well-regarded Economist.
No, I don't think they are going to buy it either.
9:44:22 PM 
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