Organization
Cost vs Benefit
Once upon a time prosperous households had servants who did all the work of maintaining a family. They cooked and dusted and hauled water and nannied the kids. Work takes organization and in big households the head of the organization of servants was a butler.
My mother was very organized. She worked a full time job. Did housekeeping and cooked 3 meals a day for Dad and 2 kids. She even found time to iron the sheets and towels. Being organized was a survival skill.
I can remember when 'bachelor' had 'pads'. These were apartments that were very tastefully decorated with the intent of impressing women.
My life took a different path. I never did find pleasure in keeping my room neat. I did it under duress from Mom - she had quite enough to do already. But I never did catch the neatness bug.
That didn't mean that I was disorganized. In fact, I knew where everything was. But I learned an interesting thing - if I let the room get too messy then Mom would come in and straighten it up which would bust my own organization and I'd lose things for weeks after that. I learned to keep things hidden.
There is a benefit to being organized but there is also a cost. Lots of important things, like workplaces or sports teams cannot be done without a lot of organization. Organization enables people to work together without getting in each other's way. Organization let's tasks be split up among many people. But the cost is that it takes a lot of time just to maintain the organization that wasn't available for production. This was a cost that you couldn't duck.
Once I worked in pre-press in printshops. That is, I made the printing plates that were used on presses. The shop had thousands of plates all ready and I was adding many a day to the collection. Those plates were all carefully numbered and filed. We had a system of dockets - ie envelopes that would carry information about the job from department to department. I estimate that more than 25% of my time was spent working with the filing system and dockets.
For many years in my life I've had the good fortune to live in the country and then in the woods. A bunch of us were living in a farmhouse owned by Cowboy Ken. One day Ken came in for coffee and said that he needed to take over the house as his residence but he had a small slice of property just across the road that we were welcome to use rent free for as long as we wanted.
I took Ken up on his offer. At first I just had a plastic tarp strung from trees over a mattress by my campfire as I built a little hut. That was a high point.
One thing I liked was that I spent very little time keeping things organized though I was actually very organized. I had my shelter and a place to chop wood and a place down the path to park. Later I added places to handle wood heater logs and a place to split them and places associated with building my hut. The organization cost was probably less than zero. Things just self-organized. And if crumbs from supper fell to the ground they would just become part of the ground.
In my present space I can't just let crumbs fall to the floor so to speak so I spend a fair amount of effort keeping the place clean but hardly any keeping it neat,
These days my biggest organizing problem is my computer filing system. I could say that I made it so complicated that a hacker couldn't use it. But truth is - it's a mess. I spend little effort on organizing files and 'search' is very important.
The organizing principle I use is what I call the 'desk top pile'. Imagine a busy researcher reading many articles and writing letters to colleagues and publications. They don't have much time to spend organizing all that stuff. Each document is just put onto a pile on the desk. The documents that are most important get retrieved and replaced on the pile most often. Those documents are always front and center and easy to find.
Eventually the desktop pile gets so big that documents fall off into a garbage can and get removed.
I forget who first articulated the desk top pile idea but I've seen many active desktops and they often show that idea in use.
I wonder if that idea could work as an organizing principle for large organizations?
What do you think?
I open the floor
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.