I just watched Johnny Goldstein’s movie about implementing the Noguchi Filing System, something I’ve planned to implement myself in the next week or so.
The movie’s pretty straightforward, and Johnny’s mostly got it right (I think… most of the information about the NFS is in Japanese, after all), but I do have a couple of comments for Johnny:
I wonder how well the place where you write the name and description of the envelope will work for you; Noguchi wrote down the edge like you did, but the guy’s japanese, and their writing system works better that way. It seems like you’re compensating by putting the envelopes in sideways, instead of face-up, and it seems like your stuff will fall out more easily if you do that.¬†
One thing about “holy files” (the files on the right): they’re the files that you don’t use, but also that you can’t just throw away. You’re supposed to weed out trash files every few weeks or so, just go through them and throw out anything that you’re never going to need again. That’s what eventually creates the “holy files” at the far right.
I think you misunderstood what happens after the “holy files” get put away. The idea for the NFS is that while you’re still accessing your files, there’s no good reason to file them under subject, because you’re more likely to remember when you last used them than their location in a taxonomy.
But then when you take the “holy files” and put them away, you file them by category. You don’t want to have to search all your boxes for your passport, or to have your tax records distributed across seven boxes.
In my view, the NFS acts like a purification system for your conventional files, kind of like those bubbling things that go in fish tanks. In the end, the stuff that sinks to the bottom (or to the right, if you want to be literal) is the stuff that’s worth bothering with organizing by topic.
And that’s all I got on that subject.