Building on Glen's blog posting brings to mind the phrase "Cluttered Desk, Cluttered Mind". Then what does an empty desk mean?Steve Ciarcia of Circuit Cellar Magazine wrote an editorial on how there is a theory that there is a distinction between 'imaginative knowledge', as used by a design engineer, and 'clerical knowledge', as used by a billing clerk. Their filing methods and how they generate clutter are directly associated with how they think.
"Clerical people print information to execute a company function. Imaginative people print information to increase knowledge. The paper they generate helps them learn rather than simply being a means of data storage. An engineer will often print out and write comments on a datasheet simply because the process of note taking helps him learn. Like most notes, however, once they have served their purpose, they are rarely retrieved again from the pile.
Imaginative people spread stuff all over the place as a physical representation of how they think, not because they are too inept to file it. In essence, the piles are temporary holding places for hot ideas and inputs that we either haven?t categorized yet or haven?t figured out how we?ll use yet. Without categorization, there is no way to file them. And by the time we do categorize them, often the goal for which we collected the pile in the first place has been achieved, so we can throw that whole pile in the wastebasket anyway.
Of course, this clutter-then-toss-it behavior pattern is very disconcerting to the clerical knowledge thinker. It?s basically filers verses pilers. A filer gathers information and puts it away. A piler gathers information and puts it in various piles from the center of work focus outward. There are the in-process hot piles for immediate attention, the various warm piles for projects that are on the list or might be in short duration, and the cold piles for things that are done and should be archived or filed (wastebasket)."
Am I a Piler or a Filer? What are you?