At high school I had a biology teacher called David Pitcher who earned my respect for two reasons beyond being an inspiring teacher who was concerned with his pupils’ welfare: he was the only teacher ever to send me to the back of the class, and on one of our annual charity fund-raising days he promised to shave off his trademark goatee if we could raise X amount of money (I forget how much) – but to shave off only half of his goatee if we could raise 2X. Naturally, we raised 2X.
He once revealed his filing system to me, and further to some earlier posts, I’m beginning to think I might adopt it. He advocated the Volcano model of filing. In this system, one throws one’s papers onto a big messy pile on the desk. Anything that is important will be retrieved often, and then thrown back on the top of the pile, where it will slide like lava down the outside of the volcano-shaped pile and come to rest at the rim. In this way, all the important papers are collected around the rim of the volcano, whereas anything trivial is buried deep within. Periodically, one can go through the entire pile, discarding any now-defunct papers and perhaps turning up something useful which had lain dormant. The Volcano system has the added advantage for incurably lazy people like me that you don’t have to bother sorting and labelling things.
I move to a new office (and university and country) in a couple of months, so I aim to give it a go. If anyone else uses this system, or thinks it might work, please let me know.
Comment posted by Phil Wilson (from vox)
Further to this, the admirable David Deutsch managed to create the entirely new field of quantum computation and continue to publish on its profound implications for multiverses, philosophy, and the foundations of mathematics while working in a veritable pigsty. In fact, he attributes his creativity to his untidiness.
Filed under: creativity | Tagged: creativity, filing, goatee, volcano
This seems to be a wonderful system. There are a few such systems cited in A Perfect Mess: The hidden benefits of disorder by Abrahamson and Freedman. One system (if I recall correctly) is a simple pile of folders but laid on its side and placed on shelves. The most important are to the left. I am a bit fuzzy on the details, but I think it is Japanese.
Thanks for your comment, Christopher. Since starting in the Land of the Long White Cloud I have in fact reverted to my perverted former self and been implementing a GTD-ish system, even going so far as using MonkeyGTD, which is actually quite brilliant. Such a system certainly reduces the mental pressure one feels when jugglling a lot of projects, but I’m beginning to think that one of the problems with getting everything out of one’s head and on to paper is that everything is, well, out of one’s head, so that even the unconscious undermind cannot, or does not, work on it. A problem, methinks, when projects need creativity (and which projects do not?).
When I lived and worked in the Land of the Rising Sun I saw the important-folders-on-the-left system in action, and it works, at least for within the Japanese workplace. Looking back, I still feel the frustration I felt at the time for the overwork, pressure, inefficiency, and stress of the Japanese office, but it had Slow and mindfull practices at its heart.
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