Ask E.T.: Thinking and Paper: "I like to think that I have - over the years - devised a personal operational work system that combines the benefits of both chaos and organisation. It is completely paper-based, although I have had a computer on my desk since 1982.

It is actually a fully-specified system but I won't go into all the details, just the core bit. Everything coming in is printed or noted on paper. That paper is then slipped into one of say a dozen clear plastic folders which are kept in a tray (sometimes two or three) called Work in Progress. One of those files may otherwise be in a tray called Current Task. Paper from the folder in Current Task (but only that folder) can be scattered all over the desk in whatever order or chaos best serves to carry out the task in hand. If the task is interrupted for more than a phonecall then all the paper goes back in the folder, the folder goes back in Work in Progress - and another folder becomes Current Task. As the folders fill up they are culled: in effect I use a kanban system to restrict their size. Since paper is filed in the plastic covers loose in the order in which is was last looked at, it is an easy matter to take out the bottom half of each file, flip through it for anything archival (not much, usually - that's what we have computers for) and drop it in a Xerox box under the desk. Anything not looked at for a month in the box gets dumped.

The beauty of the system is that everything scattered on the desk is current (so no hunting around for things that might be missing) and the fact that once a week I can skim-read every piece of paper in the files (1000 to 2000 pieces say) in about thirty minutes and pick up dependencies, connections, forgettings, omissions whilst the file is held in my short-term memory for that half-hour.

Impossible to do on computer.

-- Martin Ternouth (email), June 13, 2002 "