Kim Allen forwarded a neat article about clutter. This part made immediate sense to me:

"The relationship between workers and their clutter is similar. People spread stuff over their desks not because they are too lazy to file it, but because the paper serves as a physical representation of what is going on in their heads -- a temporary holding pattern for ideas and inputs which they cannot yet categorise or even decide how they might use", as Ms Kidd puts it. The clutter cannot be filed because it has not been categorised. By the time the worker's ideas have taken form, and the clutter could be categorised, it has served its purpose and can therefore be binned. Filing it is a waste of time.

Why people need a physical map of what is going on in their heads is not clear. Ms Kidd suggests that the brain may just need some help. She speaks of her father, who suffers from frontal-lobe dementia, which affects the ability to interpret what is going on around one. As his brain has deteriorated, "he uses the physical correlate more than ever", to the point at which his surroundings have become chaotic. So perhaps, as the tidy have always suspected, they are just smarter: they can do more stuff in their heads without outside help than the untidy can.

Filers versus pilers

Work by Steve Whittaker and Julia Hirschberg of ATT Labs-Research, however, suggests that clutter may actually be quite an efficient organising principle. In "The Character, Value and Management of Personal Paper Archives", they examine the distinction that MIT's Tom Malone draws between "filers" and "pilers". When filers receive paperwork, they put it away. When pilers get it, they leave it on the desk--not randomly, but in concentric circles. There is a "hot" area, of stuff that the worker is dealing with right now. There is a "warm" area, of stuff that needs to be got through in the next few days: it may be there, in part, as a prompt. And there is a "cold" area, at the edges of the desk, of stuff which could just as well be in an archive (or, often, the bin)."

That's me! I'm a piler. My "clutter" is fairly neat - I can't handle the spread out kind of clutter that some of my friends and co-workers do because it represents chaos inside my own head! But my piles represent those kinds of "lists" that I've got. I feel more in control, organized and prompted to do things.

But if I file things away to make my space neater? Out of sight, out of mind. It's gone from my consciousness and gone from my mental lists.

Oh, and in other utterly trivial news, I've now know I look silly in pigtails. I was playing around with my hair last week and wondered about doing pigtails or two braids ... Erk. They used to look so good when I was a kid! Not everybody grows out of them, but they looked silly on me now. Rats.

I've been looking for a hairdresser to go to on a regular basis. I don't get my hair trimmed often enough and it starts to look unhealthy. But up until now I hadn't found anybody here in town that knew how to handle my hair. I came away disappointed every time. That is, until Saturday. The funny thing is, she's originally from Houston, which is where I kept getting my hair cut (every once in a while when I go home to see family). But she's also pregnant and going to be taking the next couple of months off, so I don't know if I'll get again!

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