In Which I Tidy Up a Bit.

This weekend I've been obsessed with organization. This is not at all normal for me. By nature I'm a piler, not a filer. If only I had these fits of orderliness more regularly, my life would be... well, much more orderly.

This particular fit began yesterday, when I discovered the Noguchi filing system (thanks to Sanguinity). It seems to have been designed expressly for pilers, by encouraging organization without classification. Though it can't replace all my files, it immediately looked like a better option than my current system (which involves periodically sweeping everything off the kitchen table into a box, which is subsequently ignored). So I spent a couple hours today snipping the tops off 9x12 envelopes and stuffing things into them. There are still several piles/boxes left to deal with, but you know what they say about journeys of a thousand miles.

The other thing I've started organizing is my links, or "bookmarks," or "favorites," or whatever you want to call them. I've never really made use of that feature in any browser, because it was limited to a single computer, and, well, I'm not. Instead, I would e-mail them to myself, or to someone else. Finding the link again usually wasn't too difficult... so long as I actually remembered I had it.

Turns out there is a better system, and it's been around for quite a while. You've probably already heard of it; in fact, you may even already use it (I know Allan does!). del.icio.us is, much like the Noguchi system, brilliant in its simplicity. When you see a web page you want to bookmark, you just click a button and del.icio.us remembers it for you. You can also annotate and tag the link for easy reference. Nice, huh? But it gets better. You can send links to other users. You can see how many other people have bookmarked a given page, and how they tagged and annotated it. You can look at what links are popular today, and what's been most recently bookmarked. You can use it to set up a wishlist (one that isn't limited to Amazon!). The list goes on. If you haven't tried it yet, you really should.

I've decided not to post my del.icio.us page to this blog, because it will eventually paint a more detailed portrait of myself than I'm prepared to share with the world at large. No, I'm not hiding anything sensational; I'm just weird like that. However, I'm more than happy to share with anyone who knows me in real life, so if you're curious, drop me a line and I'll send you the URL.

What makes both of these organizing tools so appealing to me is their flexibility. A fixed system of files (whether paper or virtual) requires constant revision in order to keep up with the flow of incoming information -- particularly for anyone whose interests are continually evolving. But the Noguchi system, by avoiding classification altogether, allows for a purely intuitive means of storage and retrieval. And the tags used in del.icio.us (and gmail, and flickr, and an increasing number of web-based resources) provide a highly flexible system of classification that doesn't limit an item to a single primary descriptor. Someday we'll be able to organize files on our hard drives this way! There's an exciting thought.