Tools for Thought

When a general reference filing system is used methodically for any length of time, a cluttered desk is unthinkable. Neatness is simply a residual effect of organization. Without having appropriate placeholders to retrieve things on demand, neatness becomes a goal in itself.

A clean desk can be a messy desk if “clean” means submerging mess beneath a clear surface. Offices with clean desk policies frequently find that workers allow piles to metastasise into chaos throughout the day, cramming everything into drawers just before the day’s end. They begin the following day with desks that are clean by management walkaround standards, but functionally disorganized nonetheless. A placid exterior provides no mental relief.

The goal of a filing system is to keep materials that are unrelated to your current focus out of your field of attention, while making them instantly retrievable on a shift in focus. If you have two documents on your desk, one of which is unrelated to what you’re working on in that instant, the latter creates a negligible amount of cognitive dissonance.

With piles of paperwork, the distraction is magnified out of proportion, since it’s possible that something in those piles might be related, or might even be more important than what you’re currently engaged with.

Three Principles for Transforming Stuff

Much of Japan’s e-waste, like discarded printers and televisions, is dismantled at recycling sites to extract capacitors, wires and other reusable components. A common saying among the companies that perform this extraction is, “If it’s mixed, it’s garbage. If it’s separated, it’s a resource.”

Separating the actionable and nonactionable material on your desk transforms it into resource. The usual coping strategy for dealing with mixed paperwork is to ignore or disengage from it, creating a dullness that gradually seeps into all aspects of work.

Have a system explicitly for general reference. You may need separate filing cabinets for specialized purposes, like financial records or some field of study that consumes more than a few files’ worth of information. A general reference system is for everything else:

• Forms that need to be filled out when you finally get approval for a purchase order
• Printed article you don’t intend to read now, but might later
• A spec sheet you need to reference for a phone call you’ll make later that day
• Project plans
• Meeting notes
• Memos

Avoid using paperwork as action triggers. Paperwork should not be used as a reminder of what to do with it, since it varies in its level of priority and whether it’s just-in-time action support or just-in-case reference material. Distill all action reminders to list and calendar entries, otherwise you’ll feel compelled to keep support material on your desk to avoid forgetting to handle whatever it’s associated with.

Use a simple A-to-Z organization. Since retrieving files is a far more frequent activity than creating them, their organizational scheme needs to be simple, lest it fall into disuse. Whenever you need to store a piece of paper that needs to be accessed sooner or later, ask yourself, “Under what label would I think to pull this file?”, then create that label.

Everyone understands this conceptually, but few people take this to its logical conclusion in practice. Once labelling and filing are applied to any and all paperwork — not just on the desk, but anywhere in the room with resources that need to be close at hand — then a clean workspace is experienced as an organized one.

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