“A filer is a person who organizes information using a rigid structure, and a piler is someone who maintains a mostly unstructured information organization.” [From Surviving the Information Explosion: How People Find Their Electronic Information (pdf)]
Google Docs & Spreadsheets now offer folders for those people who want to explicitly organize their online files rather than relying on search. Duncan Riley of TechCrunch calls for Gmail to include folders too. He’s a filer.
Simplified, filers rely on folders to find things they want while pilers rely on search. Actually, according to the study referenced above, people of both types often use an “orienteering” strategy to find what they need, using little bits of context and what they remember about where the desired information is to guide them step by step towards their target.
As I’ve gotten better at using search and as search has itself gotten better, I find myself relying less and less on folders or on Gmail’s labels. Filing just takes too much thought and work without a payoff later for me. Besides, it seems a holdover from our physical desktops. Maybe we won’t need folders once our computers do a better job of keeping track of what we’ve done, sorting out what’s relevant from what’s not, and paying attention to what sort of things we look for.
So I’m turning into a piler as search gets better and as I get better at using it. What about you?
I used to be a filer, but Gmail has taught me to rely much more on search to find stuff. I barely keep an address book anymore. If I need a phone number I search Gmail for an email from that person, so that I can get the phone number from their signature.
Digital: Filer (google apps excluded)
Hard Copies: I’m a Piler, wannabe filer… 20 inch stack on my desk(iler)
I am definitely a recall vs recognition when it comes to things like google vs yahoo, and that works well for email, google docs etc. But when it comes to storing a file I reference once a month or less, I need the structured logical system to come back to it much later. — sounds sorta backwards, I know… but I have a pretty good balance going on.
[...] Zelenka asks: are you a filer or a piler? As I’ve gotten better at using search and as search has itself gotten better, I find myself [...]
I also used to be a filer, but now I just pile. I never really thought about why until now. But it does make sense that better search causes less filing since filing is just a manual indexing method. Strangely I don’t pile or file browser bookmarks much anymore since Google works so well.
-James
Personally I’m a “piler” when it comes to email and documents, a “filer” when it comes to images. This is partly because out past laziness I tended to use folders for organizing image files instead of descriptive file names.
Um, both?
I’m a pile to file kinda gal, especially when it comes to real world paper. My statements and bills come in the mail and they go into a pile right by my chair, and once every month or two I file them all away in a box by month. Ditto my virtual desktop: I save stuff to my desktop left and right, and then will parse it out based on project and type once the clutter gets to be too much.
I like doing it this way because I tend to evaluate whether I need to keep something or not: chances are, it can just go in the trash. When I used a system of immediately filing items, they would sit in their little cubby and waste my space because I’d never go back and review whether I needed to keep them or not.
In the real world I am a filer but in the electronic world I am a piler. I no longer bookmark sites into categories but just bookmark (Google Bookmark) them and then use search to find then. I no longer memorize URLs for sites, I just Google and click what I recognize.
Gmail makes it easy to find that email from my mom from last month.
You can set up filters on Gmail and use them as a pseudo-directory structure. For example, label all incoming mails containing the subject line [LAA] as “laa” and then set the filter to archive those mails. Then, in your labels box, you’ll see “laa” and once clicked on you’ll see all the mails that are labeled as such. This works basically the same as directories, but is much more flexible.
I’m definitely a piler. Filing worked better for me when I used Outlook/Exchange and searches were painfully slow and awkward.
Now that I use web-based mail exclusively, I just search and archive for the most part.
I’m definitely a piler, without desktop search I would be dead.