Piles of stuff are a paradox. What appears to the uninitiated as a disorderly mess, to the creator of said pile, is the quickest way to file, categorize and find items, using the intuitive and associative powers of the mind. How can a thing be both an organizational solution and a problem?
In my younger years, my bedroom was one big pile, with pathways throughout. Clothes, papers, bills, books and other miscellanious stuff pervaded my space, but somehow, I knew where everything was. My mind could produce the general location and depth of a given item by looking at the context. Within all the chaos, there existed a material structure which related each item to another merely by the surrounding items. Finding an item was as simple as rooting around for a few seconds. Filing and categorizing was merely tossing something in the appropriate section of the pile.
When you consider the potential power of this random access organizational method, you begin to see it’s drawbacks. The quality of a given search result decreases exponentially with the amount of stuff in the pile. the number of possible piles an item could belong in, and the amount of free space you have available to do ’sorting’.
An essential part of working with piles is free space. This working area allows you to siphon off a section of the pile for reference and sorting, without disturbing the organization of the master pile. Free space also helps to counter the biggest drawback of the piles organizational method, feeling overwhelmed by stuff.
In my single pile days things slipped through the cracks. Bills went unpaid, things became lost for days, and girls never came back to my messy bedroom. I realized that for my own quality of life, the piles must have some sort of higher level of organization, categories of piles. Slowly, different areas of my room began to take form with different types of piles. One for books, one for clothes, one for bills, etc.
Now we can discuss the greater power of single-category piles, auto-arrange by date, frequency of use and priority. When you search a pile, you pull out the things you are interested in for the moment, and they end up back on the top after you’re done. Semi-permanent piles like this, usually paper, are best suited for frequently accessed information, which has a high context-content correlation.
For other high-use scenarios, piles work well in the sorting & categorization stage. Laundry piles are best sorted into areas, socks, shirts, and pants before folding and preparing the final categorization, placing the items in a dresser. This eliminates redundant trips and saves time.
In low-use scenarios, books, financial information, media, software, I’ve discovered that the frequency in which I access the material does not justify it interfering with my high-use pile search results. So these are organized in more traditional means, file wallets, bookshelves, etc. However this does not preclude utilizing a seperate pile to sift through the contents over a long period of time. For example, all my financial information is spread out on my previously clean bathroom counter right now awaiting my action.
In summary:
Piles work well for high-use situations where the material to be piled can have a content-contextual relationship in space which facilitates finding and sorting.
The most important part of working with piles is having the free space necessary to utilize your existing piles fully and create impromptu piles when the need arises.
Note: Writing this post was inspired by Organize With Chaos which had the good graces to publish my answer to a LinkedIn question from some time back. Cheers for social media!
