For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a bit of pack rat when it comes to office paperwork.  Unfortunately, I am also a compulsive neatnik, someone who absolutely can’t abide clutter but is normally too busy to maintain a conventional filing system with folders, labels, and the like.  In its place, I utilize that good old substitute, the vertical pile filing system.  Inevitably, as the number of piles increase and the available horizontal space decreases, this system reaches its natural limits.  At some point, there is no room for any more piles, no matter how neatly assembled and categorized, resulting in a filing crisis.

Now I don’t know about you, but if there is one thing I have always feared more than almost anything else, it’s a filing crisis.  Given a choice between execution at dawn and dealing with a filing crisis, I’d take execution in a heartbeat, especially if I knew it would be conducted neatly.
What, you may ask, is so unbearable about resolving a filing crisis?  Consider the very first step, the creation of the basic set of categories for organizing the materials in question.  The ideal taxonomy is so simple, so elegant, and yet so comprehensive that it will enable any rational person to instantaneously identify and retrieve the document or object being sought.  But how can we develop such a scheme without first examining the complete set of materials to be filed?  Ah, there’s the rub.  Without a proper taxonomy, there can be no files.  But a proper taxonomy can only be created after the files already exist.

Unfortunately, this is hardly the last of our Sisyphean challenges.  Suppose we are adding material to an existing file.  Now we must deal with the internal consistency issue.  If, for example, we attempt to add a set of files organized by theme or topic to a previously existing file organized by key actors, what will we do with that important new memo on productivity from the CEO?  Should it be filed under “productivity” or under “The Big Cheese”?  Perhaps we should make an extra copy and file one in each location, just to be safe.  Or perhaps we should simply throw out the existing file and start over from scratch, creating a grand, new scheme that better integrates the old and the new materials.

As you might guess, dear reader, we are only at the beginning of a long, steep, downward slope that descends inevitably into chaos, confusion, and utter despair.  But fear not, for every problem, even the dreaded filing crisis, there is a solution.  And having recently discovered the antidote to all my filing fears, I am happy to share it with you.

It’s called moving, and it works like this.  You decide to move.  The day comes when you have to pack.  You take a look at all those precious documents in all those carefully arranged piles, and you throw them out—all of them.  Then you move.  And that’s all there is to it, dear reader.  If it worked for me, it can work for you.  Promise.—IER