Amy Allcock

I just came across this interesting quote while reading an article on knowledge work. The quote is from The Social Life of Paper by Malcolm Gladwell (published in the New Yorker):

“But why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking. The psychologist Alison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively, argues that “knowledge workers” use the physical space of the desktop to hold “ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use.” The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven’t yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. Kidd writes that many of the people she talked to use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to “recover a complex set of threads without difficulty and delay” when they come in on a Monday morning, or after their work has been interrupted by a phone call. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains.”

As I take a look at my work area - both my physical and virtual desktop - I realize that it does in a sense represent my current state of mind at work. Spread out are the files and papers that are on my mind both at the conscious and unconscious level - the things that need to get done and things I’m not sure how to do yet. The charts on the wall and the files on my desktop are there not because I need them right away, but because looking at them every day and having them in my peripheral view helps the ideas percolate and eventually come into focus.

Originally published June 10, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.