A fascinating article in the Economist about why we still use paper and why we clutter our desks.
The paperless office(Link requires subscription, unfortunately)
About Chiat/Day a company that tried to eliminate paper:
There was nowhere to keep any paper; indeed, nobody was supposed to keep paper.
Chiat/Day’s employees behaved like any group of refugees torn from familiar surroundings. They tried to rebuild their world. One woman bought a child’s red wagon, put her paper files in it and trailed it around the corridors after her. Most people recreated their desks in the boots of their cars, where they stored their files and notebooks, dashing in and out of the building to the parking lot during meetings. Groups of workers took permanent control of meeting rooms and a shanty-town of desks grew up. The company was eventually bought by a traditionalist rival and normal life resumed.
Why do we still need paper?
They liked paper because they could spread it around; because they could annotate colleagues’ work without interfering with the text, as they would if they annotated electronically; and because paper interfered less with communication during a meeting than screens would.
And why don’t we file things instead of spreading things around?
Knowledge workers use information to change themselves. So, for instance, knowledge workers take notes not in order to store information, but because the process of note-taking helps them to learn. Once taken, notes are rarely reviewed. …
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.
Hmm… May be I should tell my mother this. She keeps telling me not to clutter my table at home.
the assumption that filers can find stuff more quickly is wrong. Filers, they say, ?are less likely to access a given piece of data, and more likely to acquire extraneous data…In moderation, piling has the benefits of providing somewhat ready access to materials as well as reminding about tasks currently in progress.? Filers have two problems finding stuff: they tend to file too much, because they have put so much effort into building a filing system, and they often find it hard to remember how they categorised things.
