Why I Have a Messy Life
From Replacing Paper at How to Save the World: "Gladwell believes that messy desks and offices are simply exploiting paper's ability to facilitate personal, flexible organizing of information, each document "a contextual clue to an unresolved idea" and that filing cabinets (which have a lot in common with PC content management systems) offer no such flexibility and are merely "final resting places for documents that are unlikely thereafter ever to see the light of day again". I think most of us would agree that 'finding stuff' in cabinets and hard drives is a frustrating, inefficient, unintuitive, and often futile process. We might even agree with Gladwell that the stuff we keep on paper is not knowledge itself but rather 'support for the knowledge that resides in people's heads'."



