On untidy-deskers, pilers, and the challenge of filing
[9 February 2021 :: #KWoC.5.005]
Hugh Kenner was a Canadian literary scholar with a popular column in Byte magazine. One of his most enduring popular pieces is about the difficulties of maintaining office order. He divides the world into two types of people: clean-desk people ("You know them, you may even be one -- whose working space always looks scrubbed for surgery. They make a virtue of handling no paper twice") and the untidy-deskers. Kenner puts himself squarely into the second category and is happy to do so:
"But there are also souls like mine, content amid what clean-deskdom calls unholy clutter. Cleaning up the room I'm sitting in at this moment, to the extent of meeting clean-desk standards, would take a week. The few times I have tried it, useful things have invariably disappeared forever: things I routinely laid hands on without fail, back when they were integrated with the mess I fondly manipulate. I am, to put it mildly, an untidy-desker."
Many of us are in the same camp. Fortunately, it has some illustrious members. Ben Franklin, for example, wrote about important virtues, the third of which -- order -- he was never able to attain. By all accounts, his office was a complete mess. There can be a kind of power in messiness. Harford (2017) writes extensively on the topic, reminding us that we evolved as hunter-gatherers who relied on our spatial ability to navigate the world around us.
Our brain is built for the messiness of the natural world. Untidy-desking worked for Franklin. And Jenner. But they both lamented the state of their desks. We're no different if we look at the popularity of self-help books about getting organized. We aspire to the Zen-like environments we see on Homes and Gardens Television and follow the teachings of Marie Kondo, while recognizing that we might be happier with our pile of paper. Still, we think that maybe just a bit more diligence in managing our paper will make us happier and more productive.
Ofer and Whittaker (2016) review the literature on managing that paper. Like Jenner, they divide the world into two types of people: pilers and filers. Both strategies have their advantages. Pilers tend to make greater use of their collections and do a better job of managing those collections. The approach does not, however, scale well. As the size and the age of the collection increases, piling becomes less effective, eventually reaching a terminal state we could call hoarding. Filing works but it has disadvantages. There is a tendency towards premature filing, where people whisk away documents before understanding where they could or should live to be most useful. Jenner's hypothetical clean-desker reenacts this situation: "Do something with it right now. Don't dither. 'In doubt? Throw it out.'"
The fatal flaw of filing, however, is that filing systems become increasingly complicated and arcane, with certain categories becoming over-stuffed while others are under-subscribed. The challenge is that a filing system isn't built for who we are today but for our future-selves who will ultimately need the information. Ofer and Whittaker:
"Choosing appropriate folder organization and labels therefore requires people to predict exactly how they will be thinking about particular information at the time that they need to retrieve it."
Knowing yourself, particularly your future-self, is never easy.
How did we get here?
Filing is hard but we're drawn to that appealing mirage of the perfectly organized filing cabinet. It seems that it is something that we should be able to do. Filing is, however, both an art and a science that developed over centuries. It's no wonder that most of us suck at it.
Filing systems emerged alongside the historical explosion of paper and information that was also having an impact on scholars. The early modern world of business and public administration ran on personal letters, gradually giving way to standard genres of communication like memos, reports, and invoices. For most of history, the management of this flood of documents was quite ad hoc. The manila vertical files that now represent bureaucracy are a relatively new technology. Along with the index card, they were some of our earliest information technologies.
Neither Bob Cratchit nor Bartleby the Scrivener had anything so remarkable as a filing cabinet. They relied on bundles of letters, tied together or joined with a pin. The word "file" comes from the Latin filum, meaning string or thread (Robertson 2019). These bundles were packed into boxes. For current letters or frequently used letters, they relied on desks with specific pigeonholes.
Vertical filing is a product of the late 19th c. and the rapid innovation of office management practices. Vertical index card files were popularized in the 1870s for libraries by proponents like Melvil Dewey and Charles Ammi Cutter. Dewey's Library Bureau expanded into the business market in the 1890s, showing the world its first vertical filing cabinet for paper at the 1893 Chicago's World Fair. It won a gold medal. Organizations adopted vertical filing in the early 1900s. Yates (1982) tells us that Scoville Manufacturing adopted vertical filing in 1914 and that the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company moved to a bleeding-edge decimal-based vertical filing system in 1902 (courtesy of Melvil Dewey). Elihu Root subsequently became US Secretary of State in 1905 and reformed its approach to paperwork, introducing decimal filing there in 1910.
This era also gave us the material culture of filing along with its supporting infrastructure. Folders made from manila hemp (abaca fiber) soon emerged, offering an ideal tradeoff between durability and cost. Germany introduced standard paper sizes in the 1920s. This consistency hastened the popularity and effectiveness of filing. Celluloid tabs on folders also emerged in the 1920s. They were tough and didn't absorb moisture or dirt from frequent use.
The gear for filing improved, but so did the intellectual infrastructure. The New York School of Filing was established in 1914. The Shaw-Walker Company published a magazine called System that was dedicated to paperwork and office management. Text books and manuals jumped into the market to spread the new gospel of filing. My favorites include Hudders's Indexing and Filing : A Manual of Standard Practice (1916) and Robinson's Textbook of Office Management. Both of these volumes go into excruciating detail about the practice of filing.
As a modern reader, it is very difficult to appreciate the complexities of early 20th-century filing, the number of technology providers available, and the enormous size of the overall market. Hudders provides an entire rogues' gallery of companies, each with proprietary systems and equipment. The Library Bureau is joined by lesser-known startups like Globe-Wernicke Co., Amberg File and Index Co., Browne-Morse Co., Yawman and Erbe, Macey Co., General Fireproofing Co., and Baker-Vawter Co. (among others). Hudders also goes into detail on the filing idiosyncrasies of various industries. The system he suggests for Architectural Filing, for example, seems remarkably similar to our modern MasterFormat, and includes considerations for managing drawings.
Systems of filing
For most of us, filing is a lost art. The books by Hudders and Robbins read like instruction manuals from a foreign planet. Filing has become the realm of specialists that we call records managers, many of whom have specific industry credentials that we aren't likely to explore. We just want to answer a basic question: what's the best way to file my stuff?
This question is a tough one. It was the key question that drove so much innovation in the early days of card-based information technology. The obvious answer to us is to organize things alphabetically. This approach was not, however, obvious to our ancestors since most people weren't familiar with the order of the alphabet, a challenge evident in the 17th c. manuals on compiling, maintaining, and indexing commonplace books. By nature, humans tend to order things in any way but alphabetically. To demonstrate this point, try to recite the days of the week alphabetically. It is way harder than you might imagine. [Note 1]
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There probably isn't one best filing system for an individual or an organization. As noted by Levitin (2017):
"There is no single rule for determining what the most efficient system will be for a given business. A successful system is one that requires the minimum amount of searching time, and that is transparent to anyone who walks in the room. It will be a system that can be easily described. Again, an efficient system is one in which you’ve exploited affordances by off-loading as many memory functions as possible from your brain into a well-labeled and logically organized collection of external objects."
While there isn't a best system, we can extract some best practices from existing filing systems and use whatever best practices we can.
Bottom Line: Filing is very hard. Humans prefer to use spatially-oriented organizational approaches (i.e., piling).
[CODA 2024.02.26 -- this note is just a starting point. The history of the filing cabinet is rather fascinating, as is one of its earliest manufacturers: Shaw-Walker Company. It got its start marketing business systems based on index cards, relying on traditional furniture makers to build the boxes that held those cards. It soon diversified and became incredibly prosperous as a maker of office furniture. One of the partners, A.W. Shaw, split off to create a publishing juggernaut and have a fundamental role in the creation of the Harvard Business School. It was the first Information Technology Revolution, based on analog index cards. Imagine if Larry Ellison built Oracle, then decided to launch Wired magazine, and then built up HBS! My note also fails to tell us how to manage records and documents. We'll get there. I promise.]
Related posts:
Note 1:
I first learned about the challenge of reciting the days of the week on Ep. 486 -- Alphabetical Order -- of the podcast 99% Invisible (https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/alphabetical-order/). Judith Flanders gives the challenge to the podcast host, Roman Mars; he demonstrates just how difficult it is. The episode also features a kind of appendix in which Judith Flanders delivers withering (but entertaining) criticism of Melvil Dewey and his eponymous classification system!
References
Levitin, Daniel J. The Organized Mind : Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload. New York, Dutton An Imprint Of Penguin Random House, 2017.
Harford, Tim. Messy : The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives. New York, Riverhead Books, 2017
Hudders, Eugene Russell. Indexing and Filing : A Manual of Standard Practice. New York, The Ronald Press Company, 1916, archive.org/details/cu31924014533180. Accessed 10 Feb. 2021.
Kenner, Hugh. “The Untidy Desk and the Larger Order of Things.” Mazes : Essays, Athens, University Of Georgia Press, 1995.
Ofer Bergman, and Steve Whittaker. The Science of Managing Our Digital Stuff. Cambridge, Ma, Mit Press, 2016.
Robinson, Edwin M. Textbook of Office Management. New Delhi, McGraw-Hill Book Co Inc, 1923, archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.462095. Accessed 9 Feb. 2021.
Yates, J. “From Press Book and Pigeonhole to Vertical Filing: Revolution in Storage and Access Systems for Correspondence.” Journal of Business Communication, vol. 19, no. 3, 1 July 1982, pp. 5–26, 10.1177/002194368201900301. Accessed 15 Nov. 2019.