A Plea for the Horizontally Organized (1995)
www-csli.stanford.edu
www-csli.stanford.edu
When there is no more room for new stuff to be laid out (i.e., it would introduce structural unsoundness into the heaving mass that covers my desk), I sift through and make two piles: things I recognise, and things I don't.
The "things I don't recognise" are usually papers I printed and have never read (having long since abandoned whatever the project is that I printed it for), brochures and leaflets I'm handed as I walk across campus (which I deposit on my desk as soon as I reach my office), and things which are so out of date as to be irrelevant (e.g. a library notice for a book I returned months ago). All of this stuff goes into the recycling bin. The stuff I might considering looking at again forms a pile and gets pushed to one of the back corners of the desk.
Naturally, I dismantle the "keep" pile occasionally while looking for something, which redistributes things onto the desk so that they get re-considered during the next garbage collection run, so I find the pile is usually remains reasonably "fresh".
Stating it this way makes it sound like I've put a lot of thought into this, but I really haven't. It's just a natural way of working for me. My desk looks messy and disorganised, but I rarely have trouble finding things - it's either spread out on my desk, in the pile, or gone forever.
Incidentally, I followed a link to Perry's other essays, which led me here:
http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/
to which I'm compelled to respond, Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!
Retrieving anything on my desk is an exercise in archeology, this sometimes has very bad effects (electricity bills going unpaid, stuff like that).
It's weird, because on my harddrive things are about as organized as you could possibly get.
Somehow 'surfaces' seem to bring out the worst in me and things start piling up.
I find that virtual desktops work for this, though the interface matters a lot; if there's an actual miniature representation of the virtual desktops, that helps much more than having a list of them, and it took me a while to get used to Spaces (on OS X) because it doesn't have a good miniature representation, where the virtual desktop program I was using in Panther and Tiger did.
I like stuff to have it's place and to not move unless I tell it to. I found out just how much I like that when on a lark I tried playing around with xdmx and got it to include the 'guest' machine here and a mac. It was quite amazing. No more switching desktops all the time it just became more quiet.
I agree that it would be, except that the transitions are pretty smooth with the system I'm using, so there's no flash/blink effect. I haven't used xdmx.
I've played around with a tiling window manager for a few weeks and I liked it but too many applications didn't like it so now I'm back to kde.
This video shows how it works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7MHup6kXbU
I'm sure there's some VM program that works like this in the X.org world, though.
Isn't this less about being 'horizontal' or 'vertical', and more about the fact that we display information on flat areas, and about different disciplines relating to segregation of 'in-progress', 'pending', and 'archived' material?
If I have five pieces of paper relating to a task that needs to be done, but which I'm not working on right at this moment, I'll stack them up simply because that leaves more space for the task I am working on right at this moment. Now, that stack may be 'horizontal' on the desk, or it may be 'vertical' in a filing cabinet. But it's simply a space-saving measure.
His main problem seems to be that when he files pending stuff away, he forgets to look at it again. But this isn't about vertical versus horizontal thinking -- it's just about bad document management. If you just have a monolithic filing cabinet that contains both ancient archived documents, and material relating to pending tasks, then yes, you're going to get confused and forget about things. If, on the other hand, you have one file as an archive, and one file that you know is for pending material (or an in-tray; or just a special pile on your desk), then you'll remember to check it.
My guess is that the author of this wouldn't do that, unless the five pieces are all related to the same task. Instead, he'd stop working on the previous task, optionally move those papers to a free spot on his desk (but maybe still spread out as though he were working on it), and put the new papers on top of whatever's left in front of him, and work on them there. One organizational system I've seen that works well with this is the "sheet" system, where you periodically spread a sheet over your desk, first saving out anything you expect to need very quickly, and then after you haven't gone under the sheet for anything in some time, archive everything under the sheet. The "sheet" might actually be one of those plastic desk covers you can buy in an office store.
I do this on my computer, leaving dozen of windows and tabs open until I get back to them, rather than closing them and writing notes on what I need to do. It's easier to resume a task that remains in progress than to start up a task that was stopped, so we arrange to have any interrupted task continue to seem "in progress", even if we haven't worked on it for a while.
However, like other commenters, I wonder if it's less an issue of horizontal versus vertical, and more a matter of "out of sight, out of mind". If I can't physically see something, I have a very hard time remembering it's there. Thus, storage systems like drawers, filing cabinets, and to some extent cupboards are pretty ineffective for me. Shelves and table tops are much better, and see-through closed storage devices are somewhere in between.
But, in general, I despise any paper to keep track of anything.
My desk consists of laptop, 30" monitor, and a moleskine. I keep notes in Evernote, keep track of lists in Google tasks, and in general, try to digitize everything.
In a digital world, it's less relevant if you're vertical or horizontal. I keep all my thoughts a click away, which does away with the "out of sight out of mind" syndrome.
But I don't have OP's problem. Why? 2 words: wall space.
Everything is mounted on the wall somewhere. I'm a nut for those flipchart pads from Office Depot with the sticky strip on the top. I also have one wall completely covered with brown packing paper. I use lots of scotch tape and push pins. I rarely forget about anything; after all, it's all right in front of me all the time.
Artwork and window treatments, while astetically pleasing, are a total functional waste of valuable and limited wall space. I'd rather look at specs, notes, flow charts, and yes even source code mounted on my walls.
I also, as a rampant sketcher and hobbyist graphic designer, got into the habit of making anything I know will be up there for some time somewhat artistic looking. The variety of styles serves as a coding system (using obvious design strategies like big and bold for important deadlines) and make it so that if anyone asks I just say it's a sort of spontaneous work of art.
To me, file cabinets are for important documents you need to keep around and reference very infrequently (tax documents, birth certificate...etc) and not for things you'll be looking at multiple times during the week.
i always viewed finishing what i work on and putting things away as things to strive for. i've noticed improvements over the years. i've never felt like i thought differently and 'oh others don't understand.'
thinking that 'vertical' people are magically able to put work into filing cabinets rather than layer half-finished projects on their desk is like thinking that i was magically born knowing biology and history. i did well in school because i worked hard. i was encouraged along that path because i had a good memory and enjoyed reading and reasoning. maybe those same things are helping me slide on the horizontal track, whereas vertical folks quickly have oh shit moments where bills don't get paid and freak out.
Holy crap. I never realized it either, but this would explain how I never seem to mesh well with the vertical systems most administrators use.