To most of us, it may seem obvious that piling is
dysfunctional while filing is the act of a serious
professional. Yet when researchers from the office
design company Herman Miller looked at high-performing
office workers, they found that they tended to be
pilers. They let documents accumulate on their desks,
used their physical presence as a reminder to do work,
and relied on subtle cues — physical alignment, dog-
ears, or a stray Post-it note — to orient themselves.
Filing requires cognitive effort. How do I categorise this email (tags, in Gmail, were wonderful for solving this)? How do I file this contact (circles, another good idea)? Metadata is more practical, ultimately, than creating a hierarchical category system that is simultaneously too precise and not precise enough. Simple categories like "work", "home", "school" can work to effectively divide my content. But what happens when work is paying for school? I need a letter from the school to send to HR for reimbursement (that email gets tagged as: reimbursement, school, work, tuition; a search in any of the related folders will find it).Removing the cognitive load of precise classification, using the physical space for physical items or multi-dimensional tag system for digital items, allows you to focus on the work itself and not on the items that make up the work.
If you really need a filing system, hire a librarian.