With the new year often comes an urge to purge all my unnecessary belongings. I dream of tossing entire filing boxes of documents into the recycling bin, hauling a dozen garbage bags of clothes to Goodwill, or whittling down my possessions to a few suitcases and moving into a tiny house.
This year, I was motivated to clean out my overstuffed boxes of papers after noticing a serene little hardcover book by Japanese organization consultant Marie Kondo in my neighbourhood bookstore. Kondo has one guiding principle for dealing with papers: “throw them all away,” she writes. “My clients are stunned when I say this, but there is nothing more annoying than papers.” And no, she’s not advocating scanning reams of documents onto the computer; she means banishing them for good.
After reading her advice, I sat on the floor of my office and started going through my seemingly endless folders. Old insurance policies, handwritten notes from conferences, class handouts on journalism ethics from my graduate school program, maintenance records for the 2001 Civic that I no longer owned, historical documents accumulated as part of research for a blog post written two years ago — all went into the trash. I started to warm up to the idea of discarding paper by default, instead of hanging onto it until it “expired” at some unknown future date. What if, upon receiving a document in the mail that seemed vaguely important, I immediately threw it away? Or after publishing a story, ditching my research materials within a week instead of keeping them for future stories that I never ended up writing?
But there might be a less extreme way to reduce my paper load*. I came across a 2001 report by a pair of researchers at AT&T Labs, who studied the paper management habits of 50 employees at a research lab. As part of a move to a new office, the workers had taken stock of their paper archives and purged as much as they could bear (a process one person described as “gruesome”).
The study authors decided to compare “filers,” people who tend to organize papers into files, and “pilers,” those who prefer to let papers pile up on various horizontal surfaces in their office. “A commonly held intuition is that filing is a superior approach to paper processing, leading to smaller, better organized, and hence more accessible archives,” the researchers write. In other words, filers are thought to be better at keeping the number of papers manageable and throwing away what they don’t need.
The researchers found the opposite. Filers possessed an average of about 20 boxes’ worth of papers before the move, while pilers had only 12. And after the move, filers hung on to 16 boxes, while pilers kept only 9. This pattern seemed destined to continue at the new office, since filers tended to amass about twice as much paper per year as the pilers. And even though filers were supposedly more organized, only 7 percent of them thought that culling their archives was “easy,” compared to 43 percent of pilers.**
Why? Filers, eager to clean off their desks, might automatically store papers that are in fact useless (a disorder that the study authors dub “premature filing”). Once they’ve put the effort into organizing that paper, they’re reluctant to throw it out. Pilers, on the other hand, can gleefully toss their messy stacks without feeling guilt over time wasted on sorting. As one piler explains, “[I]t really wasn’t well-organized yet, anyway… So, it wasn’t too big a thing to stand there with a pile of papers over the trash can and ruthlessly throw them in.”
Granted, the study is more than a decade old, so people’s office habits may have changed. But the findings ring true. I’m definitely a filer, and I tend to cram papers into boxes just to get them out of the way. Maybe I should convert to piling? Or I could invent a radical new approach: tiling! I’d cover every horizontal and vertical surface in my apartment with a layer of paper. I’d absorb the information by just walking around and catching glimpses of random words out of the corner of my eye.
Or maybe I’ll just throw it all away.
* I realize I could go completely digital and read all documents on my tablet or computer instead. But I like reading on paper better. As one researcher said in a related study, “I print [papers] out to read if I want to give them any real respect.”
** If you are one of those people who can’t bear to discard papers with handwritten annotations because you fear losing the intellectual gems contained within, consider the words of one employee in the study: “I used to keep them [papers] for my valuable comments in the margins. I’ve decided none of my comments are ever valuable, when I reread them.”
Image credits
First image: Tim Masters | Shutterstock
Second image: 4Max | Shutterstock
The implied conclusion of the 2001 study is that pilers did a “better” job than filers because they ended up with fewer boxes of papers — this may be true, but I would point out that just because you end up with fewer papers doesn’t necessarily mean you end up with a better result. Maybe the pilers threw out papers that were in fact valuable, whereas filers didn’t. It would be interesting to know if you went back later and asked each group if they had thrown things out that they should have kept, what would they say?
I had a hybrid file/pile system for a while that suited my role in the project I was working on. Date stamp all documents, so you can identify when they first appeared on your desk.. File the 0.5% of papers you know you will need to refer back to (ie. contain info that is important right now) Put everything else in a pile under your desk. Every week, throw out the bottom half of the pile. I found that ‘holding’ docs for a week or so was enough time to retrieve anything that didn’t seem important the first time around.
Andrea, that’s a good point. The study authors did look at “access frequency”, or how often people actually looked at a paper from their files/piles. They found that pilers accessed about 42% of their data in the last year, and filers accessed only 31%. Whether or not that means the pilers had “better” archives, I’m not sure.
They also found that 23% of the paper that people threw out was unread, suggesting that the employees “experience problems with information overload and engage in deferred evaluation causing them to acquire large amounts of paper data that later turn out to be extraneous.” So my sense is that in general, people tend to keep too much rather than throw too much away.