In the book, Myth of the Paperless Office, it comes to light that files generally have three life stages, which the authors term “hot, warm, and cold.” This is a pretty useful concept, and it’s worth exploring a bit.
Hot Files
These are the files that you are using right now. They’re actively supporting work you are involved in… for a client, for your own immediate use, whatever. This is generally the stuff in (or, often, on top of) the piles on our desks, in front of the monitor, next to the chair, in the printer tray. It’s the email you printed out to mark up and review before you meet with the client, it’s the folder with all the drafts of that trifold brochure, and the notes on what your client wanted changed. This is the stuff that’s being actively used to support your memory and attention span; without it, you can’t do your work.
As the authors note in MOTPO, even in the most successful paperless offices, paper can often be the best artifact used for hot files. Its affordances as a technology simply make it that way: it can be marked up collaboratively; it can be spread out and read through with another person; it’s modeless; and it offers immediate, gratifying input and manipulation. This isn’t to say that nothing will ever replace it. Just that nothing has. Yet.
Warm Files
Warm files are the things that aren’t right on the table now, but you’re likely to want access to. Maybe it’s a file on a client that you often do business with, but don’t have anything active with at the moment. Maybe it’s reference material you use a lot, like a Pantone book, or a set of stock photos, or human factors guidelines, but you just don’t have anything going at the moment that needs just that file.
This is stuff that you want put away, but you want to have quick access to, because it can become a “hot file” at any moment. Maybe you keep the paper file, maybe you keep it as a file on the computer to be printed when you want it later, maybe it’s external digital media like a CD-ROM you want to stow away. After a while, this stuff gets referred to less and less often, and it “cools” to become…
Cold Files
This stuff is not referred to anymore, but you generally have to keep it, for tax purposes, for your portfolio, for archival reasons, or because you’re an obsessive, squirrely packrat. Keeping this stuff in paper is quite often an expensive mess, especially if you’re a large business. In MOTPO, the authors note that this is the primary candidate for conversion of paper records to a digital CMS.
Enter Noguchi
So what does this have to do with the Noguchi filing system?
I commented below that the Noguchi filing system seems to act like a fishtank bubble pump, or a rototiller, for your commonly used files. Since your commonly-used files are pulled out of the stack and reinserted on the left, less-commonly used files get shifted to the right. Periodically, you’re supposed to run through the whole stack and trash any files you no longer need. The combination of purging and shifting provides you with a set of files, on the far right, that you can consider “dead.”
So it’s easy to think of your Noguchi Filing System as a kind of “cooling rack” for your commonly-accessed stuff. Hot files will inevitably live on the left. Warm files will live somewhere in the middle. And, at the end of their life cycle, you get the cold files on the far right, which you can then take and file in a box, or digitize, or stow in a binder of CD-ROM’s, as appropriate.
In any case, it should do a decent job of keeping the space in front of your monitor a bit clearer, and that should help keep the distractions down. At least, one would hope. As I’m in the middle of moving my office, I don’t know myself. :)
Also, I’m curious: has anyone encountered problems with the Noguchi Filing System? What I’m wondering is, are there issues with legibility? Naming of the files considered harmful? Out-of-sight out-of-mind syndrome? I’m truly curious. Drop me a line.