The Filing Tax
Every tool that holds things asks you to classify a thought before you have finished having it. What a 2008 study of 533 information scraps found, including the half that contradicts me.
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A client once sent us access to their shared drive so we could pick up a brand refresh. Three hundred gigabytes, eleven years, four agencies before us.
The top level had nineteen folders. Six of them were called some variation of Final. There was a Brand, a Brand 2, a Brand_NEW, and a Brand (do not use) which contained the only complete logo package on the drive.
Nobody was careless here. Every one of those folders was created by a competent person acting reasonably at a moment when the future was unknown. The structure is not evidence of sloppiness. It is the accumulated residue of being asked, hundreds of times, to classify something before knowing what it would become.
Fig. 1. Photograph by MarkBuckawicki, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The tax, defined
Every tool that holds things asks you a question at the moment you save. Which folder. Which notebook. Which tags. Which project. Which board. Sometimes it asks politely, with a sensible default already selected. It still asks.
I call this the filing tax, and I have come to think it is the most underrated cost in personal software. Not because it is large. Because it is charged at precisely the worst possible moment.
Why the timing is the whole problem
You are asked to classify a thought at the exact instant you are least equipped to: before you have finished having it.
The moment of capture is, almost by definition, the moment of lowest understanding. You saw something. You do not yet know what it is for. That is why you are saving it. If you already knew what it was for you would be using it, not keeping it. Asking "which category?" at that moment is asking you to conclude before you have looked.
And the cost is not the two seconds. The cost is that a question you cannot answer well produces hesitation, and hesitation at the capture moment means you do what everyone does: you take a screenshot instead, or you message it to yourself, and the carefully chosen tool loses to the tool that asked nothing.
The tool that asks the best question loses to the tool that asks no question.
The research says this out loud, and it is from 2008
The best study I have found on this is Michael Bernstein, Max Van Kleek, David Karger and m.c. schraefel, "Information Scraps: How and Why Information Eludes our Personal Information Management Tools," ACM Transactions on Information Systems 26(4), 2008.
The method is unusually direct. Twenty-seven knowledge workers across five organisations. Five hundred and thirty-three information scraps collected and examined. Fifty-one distinct tools in active use, thirty-three digital and eighteen physical.
An information scrap is the sticky note, the back of an envelope, the email to yourself, the unnamed text file on the desktop, the photograph of a whiteboard. The paper's question is why people keep producing these when they all have sophisticated tools designed to hold exactly this material.
The answers map almost exactly onto the filing tax. People route around their own tools to keep capture cheap, to protect flow, and to avoid classifying something they have not finished thinking about.
And then the number that surprised me
Here is the finding I did not expect and have not stopped thinking about.
Of 533 scraps, collected from people who had filed them nowhere and organised them not at all, exactly one was unintelligible to its owner afterwards. The authors report good memory for the meaning of almost every scrap examined.
The entire justification for the filing tax is that without structure you will not understand your own material later. At the scale most individuals actually operate at, that justification is not supported. You will understand it.
You mostly will not find it. But finding and understanding are different problems, and the tax is levied on the wrong one.
Fig. 2. A card catalog at the Indiana State Library. Classification schemes work at institutional scale, maintained by specialists, for collections no one person created. Photograph by TBurmeister (WMF), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The half of the paper that contradicts me
I want to quote the part that cuts against my product, because leaving it out would make this an advertisement rather than an argument.
The same authors report that "few of their scraps were actually referenced regularly." Scraps tended to fall into two patterns: used actively until discarded, or archived and then never really revisited.
And their five design recommendations are specific:
Recommendation | JEFIELD | Why |
|---|---|---|
Lightweight capture | Implements | One gesture, no decision, cannot fail |
Flexible contents and representation | Implements | Any file, any type, read on its own terms |
Flexible usage and organisation | Forbids | Organisation is the tax this product exists to remove |
Visibility and reminding | Partly. Reminding forbidden | Everything is on screen on arrival, but nothing interrupts you |
Mobility and availability | Implements | One world, many surfaces, offline capable |
Table 1. The closest research to my product names five things. My product's constitution prohibits one outright and half of another.
I am not going to resolve that here, because I do not think it resolves cleanly. Both halves are true at once, and the tension is structural rather than an oversight.
The no-organisation rule is exactly why capture is cheap. That is not a coincidence, it is the mechanism. And the absence of organisation and reminding is exactly why capture-only products produce so few outcomes. Both statements are correct.
"Just add folders and reminders" is not the answer either, because every product that added them stopped being this product and became a general note tool competing with fifty others on feature count.
The condition under which I would change my mind
Written now, before I need it, because a kill condition invented afterwards is a rationalisation.
The no-organisation rule is reconsidered at exactly one trigger: when a real history has grown large enough that its absence causes a repeated, real failure. Not a hypothetical failure. Not a competitor shipping folders. Not a reviewer asking. A specific, recurring, observed inability to find something that organisation would have solved.
The Information Scraps evidence suggests that threshold is far higher than intuition says, because recall without organisation was near-perfect at the scale these people actually worked at. The organisation recommendation in that paper addresses finding among many, which is a scale problem, and a few hundred items has not reached it.
What the shared drive was actually telling us
Back to the nineteen folders and the six Finals.
The instinct on receiving a drive like that is to impose a structure. We have all done it, usually with a naming convention document that nobody reads and that is violated within a month.
What we actually did was different and simpler. We stopped trying to classify and started reading. Every file opened, contents assessed, and the real question asked of each one: is this the current truth, is this history worth keeping, or is this neither.
It took four days and it worked, and it worked because the information required had been inside the files the whole time. The folder names were eleven years of guesses about the future, made by people who could not see it. The files were facts.
That is the same principle as the paper's finding, arriving from a different direction. The material is usually intelligible. It is the classification layer that rots, because classification encodes assumptions about a future that has since happened differently.
Sources
Photograph by MarkBuckawicki, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Filing_Cabinets.jpg
Bernstein, M., Van Kleek, M., Karger, D., & schraefel, m.c. (2008). Information scraps: How and why information eludes our personal information management tools. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 26(4). DOI 10.1145/1402256.1402263
Inside a card catalog, Indiana State Library. Photograph by TBurmeister (WMF), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Inside_a_card_catalog_at_the_Indiana_State_Library_-_ask_the_librarian.jpg
Information Scraps, full text (PDF). hci.stanford.edu/publications/2008/infoscraps/TOIS-final-with-refs.pdf
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