You hear it every time…
Well, no, you don’t. That’s because you aren’t in the habit of fetishizing index cards, notebooks, pens, envelopes, and binder clips like I am. Or if you are, you have the grace to be ashamed of it, like any normal person would. I mean, really. Who the hell spends their free time trying to figure out how to deal with the paper on their desk, I ask you?
Besides me, that is. Which brings me back to where I started…
I hear it every time. Hell, you may be asking it yourself, now. I see it in your beady little eyes. Let’s get it out and say it together, okay?
Paper? Who the hell bothers with paper these days?
I mean, it’s 2006, right? Our compensation for the lack of jet-packs and flying cars is this wonderful electronic time-wasting system we’ve built to exchange kitten pictures and, er… “male enhancement” scams. Not that the two are in any way related. We hope.
In any case, it’s all email and IM and blogging and electronic payments, right? We don’t really need to deal with something like paper anymore. Right?
Right. That’s why your desk is so clean.
Look at your desk. No stacks, no piles of stuff on it, because the information revolution has solved that problem. Nothing at all on your desk but your Treo and the keyboard and mouse, and your monitor.
Right?
Of course. Because you are a savvy member of the digerati with lightning reflexes and a scanner and a shredder, which you are unafraid to use.
But back on Earth, the rest of us find that there’s a certain amount of, well, crap that needs to be dealt with. It’s not worth scanning, but it’s not something you can just throw away. You don’t really want to file it. You need it for something, and then you’re going to toss it.
It’s all that crap on your desk. You know what I’m talking about. We all have it. And you have to do something with it, because it’s not going anywhere.
Well, okay, so that’s the subject of a self-help organizing book or something. (Or, better, an O’Reilly book: “Crap Hacks.” With a picture of a paper shredder on the front.) So what?
Well, for one, it’s rare that the stuff on your desk is isolated junk, unrelated to things that you’re trying to do in your daily life.
It’s a doodle that you really want to turn into a wireframe in Flash, or it’s some reading notes that you wanted to flesh out into a blog post. It’s the HOWTO you printed out at the office for a kind of interesting PHP hack. That is, it’s not really junk, it’s just a physical extension of some other activity. You want to put it away, but not away away, because you want to be able to grab it when the time comes to play with the PHP hack, or to make that wireframe.
You could say that this is the problem that del.icio.us is there to fix, with bookmarks; you can put the website away, with some tags, and feel safe that you can get at it later. It’s off your desktop; you can close that tab and move on. The tagging kills the cognitive cost of classification, so you don’t hesitate, you just bookmark it.
How do you get that confidence with paper?
It’s an interesting problem. Some attempts have been made to solve it, often by applying the lessons that computers have taught us about information architecture back to paper.
One popular hack in this line is the Noguchi Filing System, where you take the stuff you’re working on, standardize its size and shape, and apply reverse-chronological sorting to it. Like a blog, basically.
I’ve played with the NFS a bit, and blogged about it here and here. It’s a good partial solution, provided you’re willing to put in the work to make it work.
Another experiment is what I’ve called the Distributed Notebook. The idea here is to standardize the paper in your environment on index cards (in this case), and to collect all notes into one bucket, and then sort, tag, and display them in your living space. It’s an evolving hack, something I tried out over the course of a year.
So, there’s two interesting ways of dealing with our stuff.
There are also much older solutions to the problem, most of which we take for granted, and which might point us in interesting directions if we look back at them.
For example, standardized paper sizes and index cards are actually a recent (~100 years) innovation, and the vertical filing cabinet is even younger. It might be useful to look at the problems that led to these solutions, and the other ways that we’ve tried to solve the same problem, without success.
Finally, as computing becomes pervasive and moves off the desktop, we’re going to need ways of dealing with data mixed with physical objects. If we’re not going to be thrown into an information retrieval nightmare that makes the pre-Google days of the web look like eden, we’re going to want to look hard at the methods we choose to organize and interact with that information. Paper is a good place to start.
It’s my hope to give this space as high a signal to noise ratio as possible, so posting is likely to be infrequent, unless I really have something to say. I hope that a reader can subscribe without worrying that I’m going to deluge them with irrelevant posts.
So, anyway, one year after this space opened without fanfare, let’s see what we can figure out about what to do with the crap all over your desk and life.