I’ve always been messy. Maybe messy isn’t the right work; I’ve always been a “piler.” I build stacks of things and then refer back to my stacks over and over.
Let me tell you, it doesn’t do much for the way your office and desk look at any given time. Piles of paper, stacks of un-read books and magazines…it’s a controlled chaos to be sure, but it’s still chaos!
I’ve always been good at starting a filing system, getting a few piles filed and then I slack off and don’t stay on top of things. New items go in my inbox, then into the inbox pile when the inbox is full and finally they migrate their way to the side of back of my desk where they will stay until dire need compels me to dig them out or throw them away. I’ve never been able to keep disciplined with my filing.
So imagine my surprise when I found a random web link for the Pile Cabinet. A filing system for “pilers.”
The referring link to the site had a minor warning that you had to wade through some rather sensational self-promotion about the system. So I went and checked it out and sure enough, there was a lot of “rah-rah” about the Pile Cabinet system. However I was intrigued enough to give it a try.
The basic premise is very simple; some people are filers and some are pilers. If you file you are probably into order and organization, instead of knowing where a piece of paper might be, you will file it so you can go straight to it. If you’re a piler you are more spatial, remembering which general pile holds the needed paper.
I am definitely a piler. I have been all my life - I was born a piler and I think I’ll die one. Since filing wasn’t working out so great for me I had to try something to get my desk under control.
The Pile Cabinet system is this: Get a box that will hold letter size paper, label each piece of paper with a unique serial number and log that somewhere searchable. Then stick the paper in the pile and forget about it. You have your searchable log with keywords to find the exact item you need, and then you just locate the piece of paper with the matching serial number.
If you’re a filer your skin is probably crawling right now (mom, are you out there?). Instead of dividing things up into organized and logical piles, you’re putting them all into one big meta-pile! The bigger the better! That doesn’t make any sense to a filer, but if you’re like me you probably had a light bulb switch on. It makes a lot of sense to consolidate your piles and then have a log to know exactly what’s in them! Eureka!
The author of the system - Blair Hornbuckle - claims you can add an item in 30 seconds and find an item in half that time. After using the system at work and at home for a few days now I can state that you can indeed add an item in about 30 seconds. I’ve not yet had to search for an item, but I imagine it would take between 15 seconds and 30 seconds.
In fact, if this whole idea piling makes sense to you then you should know this; it’s ridiculously easy to add items. As fast as you can type up a few key words and write the serial number on the document you can have it “piled” away. I spent 45 minutes at work tagging documents and piling them in my box. In that time my pile grew to 4″ high and my desk went from brimming with lose papers to looking almost respectable.
I still have some things to get piled, but with a minimal time investment I tamed months of papers that were just sitting around. As a benefit I also was able to purge about 30% of the items which had grown moot since I first received them.
I estimate it will take another 45 minutes to get my desk completely clear. Right now I don’t know how long it will take on a daily or weekly basis as paper crosses my desk, but it has to be better than my previous pile-it-on-my-desk-and-deal-with-it-someday system.
For all you pilers out there you should check this out. If not Blair’s system, check out The Paper Tiger. If you have piles of “stuff” cluttering your work space you may be very glad you looked into this!
