I haven’t investigated Personal Task Management in this blog, mainly because, being retired, I don’t have anything like the number or intensity of tasks as I had at work; so I don’t have the raw material to undertake an investigation of the subject. However, in starting to write about Liz Davenport’s book ‘Order From Chaos’, I realised that this is also an opportunity to document some of my own experiences and thoughts on the topic so I’ll weave them into the rest of this write-up.

Davenport’s book, subtitled ‘A 6 Step Plan for Organising Yourself, Your Office, and Your Life’, is certainly worth reading by anyone who has a real desire to organise their work. I say ‘real desire’ because, as the subtitle suggests, there are no half measures here. For Davenport’s approach to work, it’s necessary to plan and manage all one’s work through a Filofax-type loose-leaf notebook which she refers to as the Air Traffic Controller. In a preparatory phase, the desktop and office surfaces  are cleared, unnecessary paperwork and materials are discarded, and the filing system is reorganised.  This lays the groundwork for setting up a schedule for all existing tasks – both short and long term – in Air Traffic Control. Then, guidance is provided for how to manage all incoming information and communications – either to deal with them immediately or to schedule a task and file the paperwork. Finally, there are descriptions of how to plan and end a working day. It all makes sense and is described clearly. However, this is super-efficiency at work, and will probably require a considerable amount of discipline to achieve. I know I’ve met many people who are just not that way inclined.

The book was written in 2001 at a time when PCs and laptops had just become prevalent in offices, but email volumes were substantially lower than today and mobile phones had not yet become widespread. Consequently the book talks mainly about paper, though the pros and cons of electronic organisers are discussed (Davenport says she does not recommend the electronic systems  yet as, at that time, paper was still quicker, simpler and more reliable). [I subsequently emailed Liz Davenport and asked if this was still her view and her reply was, “Sadly, paper is still faster and simpler.  Most folks keep their appointments on their phones now but the whole “​TO DO LIST/NOTES” aspect ​is still best served with a paper system because 99% of folks won’t take the time to put tasks and notes in their phone so it goes back to piles, post-it-notes and remembering and we know how effective that method is!”]

There are small sections advising on how to deal with email and which suggest setting up your computer filing system to mirror your paper filing system. It would be interesting to know if the rise in mobile phone usage, email volumes and the emergence of social media, have affected Davenport’s views [In response to my email asking this question, Liz Davenport replied “Not really because the basic 6 steps still apply, there’s just a higher amount of stuff in each step.  Doesn’t mean there are more hours in a day. LOL!”]

The core of the book’s approach is Task Management – how to identify, agree to, schedule, and record tasks. Everything else in the book is designed to help you manage tasks and get tasks done.  For many people, this comes down to having a To Do list (I used to create one every working day before I retired) ; but this goes way beyond that. The book instructs that all incoming communications and requests for action should be dealt with there and then or scheduled for some later date. It also advises on how to say No when new tasks are offered (even suggesting that if the boss wants you to do something that you haven’t got capacity for, you should ask which of the other things in your clearly documented schedule should be given lower priority). Rescheduling is permitted, but, if a task has been rescheduled 5 times, it is unlikely to ever get done so just cross it off the list. Based on this complete list of scheduled tasks, a plan for the day’s activities based on all scheduled appointments and prioritised tasks, should be drawn up before doing anything else; and the full schedule and associated notes should be written down in the Air Traffic Controller which should be fully visible on the desk at all times. Interestingly, I did experiment myself with  keeping my To Dos in an electronic system for a while, but in the end I went back to the paper-based list which I kept on the desk in front of me – it was just more visible and more flexible to change and add to.

A key element of Davenport’s approach is to eliminate clutter and piles, and generally get paperwork under control. She recommends getting rid of 95% of old files as most will never be looked at again. My own experience concurs with this – though, as ever, there is always the conundrum of which 5% you are going to need later. Davenport’s answer is that you can get hold of most documents again if you really need them, and that this hindrance is minor compared to the benefits of being paper-light. For filing cabinets, the book recommends avoiding a straight A-Z system, and instead suggests allocating a major topic to each drawer, dividing each major topic into sub-categories, and finally filing chronologically inside the sub-categories with the latest at the front (the rationale for this is that if you look for something in a file the chances are it will be something you filed recently). Each file drawer should have at least two inches of play in it so when you want to file something, you can easily open the file with two fingers and drop in whatever you need to file. When drawers  get too full, cull them to make an extra few inches space. I’d be interested in knowing how this approach works in today’s environment when most documents are electronic, and computer folders can expand almost indefinitely because so much storage is available on the modern PC or laptop. Is it worth doing a cull or do you just let the  files accumulate indefinitely? I guess that, providing the file titles start with the date (in yyyy-mm-dd format) and include a short description, there’s really no downside. [in reply to this question, Liz Davenport said “I recommend occasionally culling entire folders and putting them in archive but, you’re right, with all that space, what the heck.​”].

Unfortunately, however, there is a disconnect with email being in a different system. Most documents will come in by email so there is a question of whether to file them in the email system or take the trouble to detach them into the computer’s folder system. It would be interesting to know if Davenport has adapted her approach to deal with these contemporary circumstances [Her reply to this question was “I recommend a “Pending” folder in email.  If there is something you need to take action on, write it down in your plann​er system first, of course, but then just drag the email to the pending folder so you don’t have to waste time searching for it.  I also recommend a different code.  Instead of the P with a circle around it for the paper pending, maybe a P with a square to denote the electronic pending.”]​

Another mechanism advocated in the book to support day-to-day activities is trays (or, presumably, other containers such as folders or boxes) to contain the following collections of documents: a Desktop File for tasks you are currently working on or repetitive tasks performed daily, and to include a Pending File; an Inbox (to be emptied at least once a day); a To Read Tray (which should be purged when it gets full); a To File Tray (to be emptied when its full or when you go to the filing cabinet to look for something).  Other trays can be added for particular specialist activities (such as ‘Things to go to Accounting’).  Again it would be interesting to know what form Davenport recommends that these mechanisms should take in today’s environment [“Davenport’s response  to this question was, “The stacking tray system is still important because we still have paper, unfortunately.  With email, new mail is “IN” and needs to be gone through each day.  Do not have an electronic “TO READ” because you will not look in it any more than you ever look in the paper version.  As to “TO FILE” if an email needs to be go in a specific file, create an email folder for that project/client and move it to there.”]

A significant point made in the book is that you have one life so you should have one Air Traffic Control book for BOTH your business and your personal life. I certainly concur with this, and have done so ever since working with a prototype electronic diary in the 1980s (see ‘Towards the Electronic Pocket Diary’, Design Studies, Vol 5 No 2, pp 98-105, April 1984). This was a word-processed document on double sided A4 paper which was folded first in half and then in three, and carried around in a pocket in my wallet. It included line items for all my activities – work and domestic; a To Do list sandwiched between the previous few days activities and the upcoming activities stretching out as far as necessary; and a whole  series of other information including names and addresses, facts & figures, books, records, papers to write, etc.. I found that this document had to contain everything relating to both my business and my home life to be viable and useful.

Interestingly, Davenport notes that it is useful to be able to store old copies of the Air Traffic Control book in order to have a clear record to supply to the tax authorities if they audit her. I absolutely agree that it is useful to have old copies – though my experience has been that I use them to find out what I was doing or to find out other information from that time. I maintained my wallet diary from 1981 to 1993 (when I started using a Psion organiser and subsequently the Lotus Notes calendar). Before that period I have some, but not all, of my old pocket diaries. Since 1993 I have no records at all. Therefore I know from bitter experience that my word-processed diaries from 1981 – 1993 are outstandingly complete and useful compared to the rest of the material I have – or don’t have.

The book as a whole certainly puts forward a comprehensive approach to managing ones activities – though I did wonder If those who use it while working full time jobs, do continue to use it in their retirement. I can imagine that they might do so because it’s a just a habit they get into. I wonder also if it  becomes more of an unbreakable habit depending on whether they are using a paper Air Traffic Control book or an electronic one. [Liz Davenport’s reply to this question was “That depends on the complexity of your life, but I recommend continuing to use a system but perhaps go to a week at a glance version, if that is enough.” she also added “The Order From Chaos system is easily scalable to fit your life, whether working or retired.”].

There is certainly a question mark in my mind as to whether the whole approach still works in today’s environment of mobile phones and all-pervasive email; however, to the best of my knowledge, I don’t believe a revised and updated version of this specific book has been published (though Davenport did publish a shorter, 104 page e-book in 2011 called ‘Order From Chaos for Students’ which I haven’t read). There are however, a large number of hints and tips which are valid regardless of how digitised we become. I’ll end this review with some of the one’s I liked best:

• If you go along with unwanted interruptions you are encouraging bad behaviour in others.
• If you want to concentrate, eliminate all distractions. Lock your office door or go somewhere else.
• Do one task at a time. Make sure only the things you need for that task are on your desk. Work it until you complete it.
• Stations represent frequently repeated tasks requiring specific tools; a station includes ALL the tools needed to complete the task. A station can be a desk drawer or a box or a table top.
• Crumpled up paper takes up much more space in the trash can than flat uncrumpled paper does.
• Don’t bother shredding. It is time-consuming and if ‘they’ want to get you, they don’t need to go through your trash to do it.
• To persuade people to be organised, they must perceive that life is easier when you are organised than when you are disorganised.
• Don’t ask ‘how should I file this?’, but rather ‘how will I use it?’ For example, don’t file bills by the organisation concerned but by month. Even better just put paid bills in a box with the latest one on top.
• Tasks that will take longer than one hour should be scheduled as Appointments.
• Consider putting at least one thing on your list every day that is a step toward a larger longer-term goal.
• Achieve closure at the end of the day by always spending 5 minutes reviewing your Air Traffic Controller to see what you’ve achieved. Mark every item with either a tick for done, an arrow for rescheduled, and an X for no longer an issue. At the end of your 5 minute review, draw a big line across the whole of the day to give yourself closure and permission to stop thinking work.

Marie Kondo’s book ‘The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying’ is definitely worth a read, especially for those with a general interest in the topic of introducing some order into a pile of chaotic objects, and also for those who have even a vague feeling that they would like to live in a tidier home. Her experience and passion for the subject jumps out from just about every page with an almost religious fervour. However, I’m happy to say that, towards the end of the book, she says quite unequivocally “tidying is not actually necessary”,  “You won’t die if your house isn’t tidy”, and “tidying is not the purpose of life”; hence, for those with a desire to give it a go, she espouses doing a complete assessment of every item you possess as quickly as possible to get it over with. Having done so, she believes you will have a changed mindset, and that you will naturally continue to keep things in order.

While there are many points in the book that are of great relevance to the investigations in this blog, there are two major differences; the book makes hardly any reference to digitising things, whilst harnessing the power of digitisation is a key thrust of these investigations; and the book is focused on tidying ALL of a person’s possessions in their home (or their place of work), whilst this blog is looking at particular subsets of a person’s possessions. Having said that, the approach, rationale, and impacts that are described can all contribute to the understanding that I am trying to explore in these pages.

Kondo’s approach is pretty straightforward. Take a category of your belongings; assemble EVERY item in that category from EVERY part of your house, into a big pile; take each item, hold it in your hand, and decide if it gives you a spark of joy – If it does, keep it, and if it doesn’t, discard it; assign a specific space to store everything you keep; when you store  things, make them as visible as possible, and avoid piling things one on top of the other. This process is intended to be a one-off, all inclusive, exercise to be done on every possession you have.  In Kondo’s experience it usually takes about half a year.

The two key questions, of course, are what constitutes a spark of joy, and is having a spark of joy for an individual item the only criteria one should have. Take books. I love books and enjoy having them around me. Some of the individual books I have are less meaningful to me than others; but I’d keep them for the sake of having books on bookshelves around the house. Kondo doesn’t seem to recognise this. In the several examples she quotes about books, the outcome always seems to be the disposal of tens if not hundreds of books. To be fair, she does make it clear that the decision about what to keep has to be made by the individual concerned. I guess she would just advise that, in the absence of a spark of joy, you should be clear about why you are keeping something.

I don’t think I came across an explicit answer in Kondo’s book to the question ‘why bother to keep your house tidy?’. However, it contains a number of assertions which collectively suggest it’s a good thing to do. The simplest assertion is that one of the reasons why clutter eats away at us is because we have to search for something just to find out if it’s even there; so if we have a tidy house we can find things easily and quickly and feel more content. Another is that we keep things because either we become too attached to the past or that we have a fear of the unknown  future. Kondo believes both things hold people back in their lives – being too attached to the past means that we can’t move on; and having a fear for the unknown future signals our reluctance to try out new things. However, Kondo’s overall rationale is even more complex than that. She believes that we fail to get to grips with clutter as an instinctive reflex to avoid thinking about the other issues in our lives. By discarding the things that are not truly precious to us, we are better able to see what is important to us; we are able to address the issues that are troubling us; and we can become more content with our lives.

Are any of these valid points? And if so, are they good and sufficient reasons for being tidy? To take each one in turn: a lot of clutter undoubtedly makes it more difficult to find things in most cases. However,  there is anecdotal evidence that some untidy people can still find the things they need by having a clear memory of where they place things.  In general, though, it seems reasonable to assume that being tidier can help many people find the things they need more quickly.

The notion that being untidy may be constraining people from moving on or from being able to try out new things, I feel is a more tenuous point: I think I have known many untidy people for whom these assertions are totally untrue. The best that can be said is that it may be constraining some people. As to whether a thorough tidy can help those people – well, according to Kondo’s experience with what sounds like an extensive client list, it seems that this is probably true.

Kondo’s final, rather bold, assertion that a thorough tidy can help us address issues that are troubling us and change our lives, is one that I have no way of assessing. Again, we have to rely on Kondo’s own experience with her clients – apparently, she has observed this occur many times, so we can only assume that, for some people who try out her approach, this is a possible outcome. Even if it’s only a possibility, for those who are seeking to address such issues, it may be a good reason to try out Kondo’s approach.

Now, turning to the impact that Kondo’s approach has on people, the most tangible and immediate impact seems to be the disposal of numerous bags of possessions. The numbers quoted are rather large:

• ‘I threw out 30 bags of rubbish in one month’
• ‘After three months of this strategy I had managed to dispose of 10 bags of rubbish’;
• ‘The minimum amount of paper waste that my clients dispose of is two 45 litre bin bags – the maximum so far is 15 bags‘
• ‘[one client] had no qualms about discarding and at our first lesson she got rid of 200 books and 32 bags of items.’
• ‘The record number of bin bags filled to date was by a couple who threw out 200 bags worth of rubbish plus more than 10 items that were too large to put into bags.’
• ‘The average amount thrown out by a single person is easily 20-30 45 litre bin bags and for a family of three its closer to 70 bags.’

These are big numbers and I found myself wondering a) if they are all shopaholics in Japan (where Kondo is based), and b) if they weren’t filling the bags to their capacity. But, anyway, it’s clear that disposing of such large amounts of stuff would probably make a very tangible difference in an average house.

Other impacts that Kondo cites are largely to do the mindset of the individual. She claims that ‘Tidying dramatically changes one’s life. This is true for everyone, 100 per cent.’ Particular changes she describes include the following:

• One of the magical effects of tidying is confidence in your decision-making capacity. Tidying means taking each item in your hand, asking yourself if it sparks joy, and deciding on this basis whether or not to keep it.  By repeating this process hundreds and thousands of times, we naturally hone our decision-making skills.
• Because [my clients] have continued to identify and discard things that they don’t need, they no longer abdicate responsibility for decision-making to other people. When a problem arises, they don’t look for some external cause or person to blame.
• Putting your house in order will help you find the mission that speaks to your heart. Life truly begins after you have put your house in order. “When I put my house in order I discovered what I really wanted to do.” These are words I hear frequently from my clients.
• Through tidying, people come to know contentment. After tidying, my clients tell me that their worldly desires have decreased.

These are dramatic changes – but then the process that Kondo guides her clients through is also quite dramatic so perhaps it’s not unreasonable to expect some significant impacts on people’s lives.

So far I’ve really only spoken about the book’s general approach and impacts. However, it also provides a wealth of detailed and very useful guidance on how to deal with specific types of objects and on setting up different types of storage.  There is too much material to discuss here, but I’ll finish this summary with just a couple of quotes which I particularly liked:

• A common mistake people make is to decide where to store things on the basis of where it’s easiest to take them out. This approach is a fatal trap. Clutter is caused by a failure to return things to where they belong. Therefore, storage should reduce the effort needed to put things away, not the effort needed to get them out.
• Mysterious [electrical] cords will always remain just that – mysterious.

The term Order From Chaos is widely used in many different contexts. A quick search on Google reveals that it appears in areas as diverse as Heavy Metal music, foreign policy, and science. I remember coining my own use of the term in the late 1980s when, standing in the shower in Stoke Mandeville, I faced the fact that I would never be able to employ the acronym IFC (Interplanetary Freight Corporation), but realised that, with a small change of letter, I would have a name, OFC, which reflected a real interest of mine which I could explore, develop, and exploit.

While I haven’t come across any other people investigating this exact same meaning of the term, there are, nevertheless, some who are doing things that are closely related. Two in particular seem to be highly relevant and have books which are easily acquired and consumed: Marie Kondo (The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying: a Simple Effective Way to Banish Clutter Forever), and Liz Davenport (Order From Chaos: a Six Step Plan for Organising Yourself, Your Office, and Your Life).  I’ve decided that I need to read these books before I set about drawing some general conclusions from the work recorded in this blog. My musings on their contents will appear in the next couple of posts.

When I first started thinking seriously about these OFC ideas back in 2004, I set about trying to turn an intuitive art into a clear repeatable process. I produced three documents  of which only the White Paper has appeared in this blog. The other two are essentially draft documents which have not been properly tested and refined; however, I’ve decided to include them here as they do at least provide an indication of the sort of detailed activities that OFC entails. They are a Service List and a Process List. Both incorporate the notion of charging for the service – though that is by-the-way; I no longer have any ambitions to create a business, though I would dearly like to be able to try out my ideas on some real world collections of objects which belong to someone else and with which I am not already familiar. The OFC exercises documented within this blog have been informative but are almost certainly not sufficient to be able to define a fully generalisable process.

I have applied OFC techniques to one set of material that was not my own: it consisted of 6 large egg boxes containing the stamp collection of an old friend’s mother who had died. My friend is not a stamp collector and was having trouble disposing of the collection. I am a stamp collector so I was excited by the prospect of both exploring the collection and having the opportunity to apply some  OFC techniques. In my first encounter with the material I took about three hours to go through it all, divide it up into the major categories, and get an overall picture of what it consisted of. I agreed with my friend that I would sell the material through Ebay, so subsequently sorted it into sub-categories that I thought would interest potential buyers. I ended up with approximately 37 Lots which I proceeded to sell on Ebay over a 3 week period. For each Lot I took photographs and wrote a description for it’s Ebay entry; and I managed what I was doing in a Word document which contained the following information for each Lot:

• Ref No
• Title (for use in the Ebay entry)
• Description (for use in the Ebay entry)
• Two or three of the 12 free photos allowed by Ebay
• Weight (for use in estimating postage costs)
• Size (for use in estimating postage costs)
• Postage (type of service and cost)
• Date put into eBay
• Disposal if not sold in Ebay (which could include ‘re-list in Ebay’)
• Date auction ended
• No of bids
• Amount paid by buyer
• Paypal fee
• Ebay fee
• Packing costs (if any)
• Actual Postage Costs
• Net amount after all expenses
• Date sent
• Buyers name and address

I was able to give a copy of this document to my friend as a permanent memento of her mother’s stamp collection. This was an instructive experience, and I continue to look out for other opportunities to try out OFC techniques.

A week ago I had a taster of how to explore intuition. It wasn’t something I’d signed up for, or even expected. It was just a catch-up meeting after about 15 years with my friend Clive Holtham of City University’s Cass Business School, who had originally helped me establish my electronic document management system, and with whom I have had many thought provoking and inspiring conversations about new office technology and its uses. I figured that, after five years of doing Order From Chaos stuff, it was time for another dose of reflections, imaginations and nugget exchanges with him. I wasn’t disappointed.

We had arranged to meet outside Berkhamsted station at 09.53, and the first thing we did was have coffee in the station’s high ceilinged and rather grand, in an old style renovated with 5 video cameras focused on every doorway, sort of way. We sat down and with little ado Clive provided me with my A5 journaling notebook and my Derwent Water Brush Pen for enhancing crayon marks. He gave me a tour of the crayon pencils and water based crayon pens and the pencil case we were to share, all the while explaining how we were going to journal our Dérive (check it out in Wikipedia) through Berkhamsted and why. Interspersed, of course, with both our numerous questions, accounts of our experiences, and our descriptions of related work.

We started to write, or, I should say, crayon and brush and illustrate, our journals. I noted that Dérive involves Noticing, Conversation and Storytelling (using the five senses, as Clive alerted me during our walk). When I started describing my Order From Chaos activities, Clive immediately chipped in saying that we need more Chaos, not less, to get us out of conventional thinking and rote responses. A few exchanges later we agreed there is probably a compromise to be had.  Clive advised me to look out a David Snowden paper which directly addresses getting order form chaos (and includes a model) which clearly I shall be looking for very shortly in Snowden’s ‘Cognitive Edge’ website.  I used a page to write down VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) and to highlight its distinction from the conventional and craved-for utopia, SCSC (Stability, Certainty, Simplicity, Clarity).

Eventually we started our walk and found ourselves on the tow path of the Grand Union Canal. We continued to talk; we stopped, admired, examined, exclaimed, took photos (Clive takes many photos  and stores them all in dated folders) and drifted on. We came across an access cover to the fibre optic channel laid along the tow path of the industrial revolution’s super highway; and we encountered two brass rubbing plates describing Berkhamsted history with a notice advising us to visit a website (our equipment proved not to be up to brass rubbing so we resolved to obtain charcoal and sugar paper at an art shop if we could find one). We spoke to a lady about the butterflies and pleasantness of the place; we discussed architecture; we saw a very large monkey in a conservatory (almost certainly not alive); we talked about art deco on the high street; and we encountered more monkeys in an antique shop and noted a pattern. We went in to an art shop which told us that, no, they didn’t have charcoal or sugar paper (brass rubbing plaques on the canal – oh really?!) but that there was an art and craft shop further up the high street which almost certainly would have them.

For lunch, we took up the offer of doing market research on fizzy drinks and duly sampled three different versions of three different drinks (I had Cream Soda, Ginger Ale, and Fizzy Orange)and were asked to provide all sorts of complicated observations about how they looked and tasted (Clive deliberately used all his five senses) in answers involving the five possibilities very good, good, average, not so good, poor (or equivalents); and which eventually one couldn’t distinguish between and just became approximated to average so that we could get to the food part of lunch which was a chocolate bar or chewy sweets for our troubles.

We found the art and craft shop which turned out to be a veritable cornucopia of different and unusual stationery items of immense use in the pursuit of Art-Based Management Education and Order From Chaos exercises. The Assistant helped us with charcoal, and the Proprietress sorted out our paper (two particular types just to be sure) and we left satisfied that we could now rise to the challenge of canal-side rubbing. Outside the Art & Craft shop, I asked Clive if he had heard of ArtRage and he said he’d been using it for the last ten years – an excellent product. I mentioned that  my son was the owner (I should really have said joint owner  – well, joint developer, builder and owner) and we laughed, amazed at the connection.

Outside the sun continued to shine. We found another place to park the car – this time for free and by the canal. We sat on a bench to put more stuff into our journals and I watched a man on the grass, thirty feet away, tickling a swan on its side while it pecked his other arm as if licking the salt like a dog would do. It was something I had never seen or even imagined. We crayoned and discussed, and drew and brushed the water paints. We talked about Buckminster Fuller, about hexagons (so much better for fitting together than Post-Its,) and about encouraging students to first do Notetaking, then to do a quick read with Basic Reflection; and finally to undertake Deep Reflection. Clive remarked that Schools progressively remove imagination from pupils and that any that is left is surgically removed by the universities.

Eventually, we had  another stroll along the other tow path and found curious outdoor gym equipment without instruction but maybe for back stretching. Then we came across another brass plaque. Clive attacked it with gusto, trying first the thinnish paper with the charcoal (just didn’t work) then triumphing with a black crayon on the newsprint paper. With this victory documented in several photos, we found our way back to the car, drove to the station, and had an ice cream before Clive caught the 4.01 to London.  I drove home with my Journal, my Water Brush Pen, my 40 rouble Water Colour Pallet, and an A7ish booklet of the Reflective Practitioner Exhibition 2017 printed by Boots from a Snapfish account.

Of course the above description can’t convey the richness of our conversation nor the extent of our exchange of knowledge; but I hope it paints the dreamlike context with which our minds were opened and new pathways were discovered – just as Clive intended.  Days like that don’t come around very often; so it will stick in my mind and will ooze out across my thinking for many days and weeks to come; and will almost certainly colour my thinking about this particular Order From Chaos journey.

I’ve completed my quick trawl through all the entries in this blog looking for insights about Order From Chaos. Whenever I came across some relevant text I copied it into a spreadsheet and then allocated one or more categories to it. The categories were not pre-determined – they developed as I went through and I ended up with about 20 of them. I also checked the OFC White Paper which I produced in 2004. With all this as background I set out to try and produce an updated view  of what I mean by Order from Chaos in the light of my experiences over the last five years. Here’s my first attempt:

Order From Chaos (OFC), in this context, refers to the organisation of any set of things with the assistance of digital technologies. Examples of such things include: Music Collections, Loft Contents, Family Photos, Household Files, and Letters. Such material usually (but not always) starts out being in a purely physical form. Therefore, undertaking OFC usually entails some element of Planning followed by a Conversion process. The result may be purely digital or a hybrid of both physical and digital. Either way the newly organised material can be put to use in its new form, and possibly reproduced in different forms. Any new digital components will require Back-Up and Preservation procedures to be applied.

The Planning that needs to be done usually includes the identification of the digital technologies to be used; the design of necessary digital components such as file title formats and spreadsheets; a description of the storage arrangements for both physical and digital components; and an outline of the conversion process that is to be undertaken.

Conversion involves digitising the physical components, implementing the storage arrangements, and doing anything else that is necessary to ensure that the transformed set of material can be easily and effectively used.

Back-up procedures need to be put in place to ensure that both the physical and digital components are protected from loss.

Preservation procedures need to be put in place to ensure that the digital components do not become obsolete and inaccessible, and that the physical components do not deteriorate.

These  concepts are all represented in the model below. When OFC techniques are applied to a new set of things, each of the items in the model needs to be addressed.

To test the usefulness of the model I’m going to apply it retrospectively to the OFC transformations I have reported on in this blog.

After 5 years and 20+ topics under the general heading of ‘OFC, Digitisation and their intersection’ it seems the right time to try and explore the join in a bit more detail. The various journeys reported in these pages provide a substantial pool of experiences, reflections and conclusions from which to derive a general understanding of what it means to organise and digitise, and of the impact on our lives of doing so. Hence my first step in this exploration will be to review all of the entries in this blog and to note relevant points. After that I hope I’ll be able to derive some general characteristics which I can then explore in further detail. Watch this space.

A few weeks ago a discussion with a friend prompted me to try to write down some brief practical guidance for achieving Order from Chaos. The resulting Practical approaches to Order from Chaos summarises into the following steps:

1. Be clear about what specific categories of stuff you want to deal with.
2. Figure out why you want to keep each category.
3. Take the opportunity to reassess what you really want to keep/collect going forward.
4. Decide where the best place is to store each category.
5. Be clear about the specific space you are going to use for storage.
6. Decide how you will set out, equip and organise the storage space.
7. Do a quick sort of each category into sub-categories.
8. As you do the quick sort, set aside the stuff you want to throw away or dispose of.
9. Decide exactly how you will store each sub-category.
10. Go through each sub-category in detail, organising as required.
11. Set up the storage space/containers/equipment and store the sorted sub-categories.

Should anyone try to apply these suggestions, I’d be interested to hear how you got on.

Order from Chaos on this site refers to the idea that you can combine efficient ways of sorting and organising physical things together with the power of the computer. It emanated from work I started in the 1980s on electronic filing systems (described in this 1990 paper – Ergonomic aspects of computer supported personal filing systems), and I’ve been exploring the notion ever since. In particular, I’ve done practical work on developing methods for sorting, arranging, image capture and Indexing (outlined in this 2004 white paper – OFC White Paper). I now want to investigate how other disciplines such as archaeology address these challenges; and to explore the use of RFID technology to achieve a seamless link between physical artefacts and their digital representations. If you have knowledge in either of these areas, or would like to suggest who I should speak to about either of them, please do get in touch.