XplanaZine

I don’t know how I ended up with so much crap.

Really, I don’t know how it happened. I mean, as a kid I never had any problem throwing things away and as an adult I’ve continued the habit. I leave the paperbacks I buy in the airport on the plane after I read them, I tossed my high school yearbooks years ago, and most of my absolutely necessary belongings could fit into a couple of suitcases. My wife calls me “Pup Tent Man.”

When it comes to getting rid of e-mail, I’m exemplary. I never go to bed if there are items in my inbox–I archive and delete old e-mail like a madman. And yet, when my wife and I began our transition from the comfortable space of a two-story house in Oklahoma to a small apartment in Boston, we found ourselves sorting through what seemed like mountains of crap. I mean, where could it all have come from?

There were pictures and old t-shirts and books and more books and then some clothes I didn’t even know I had. I swear I don’t remember buying or stealing half of this stuff. For all my efforts, I have to admit that I am plagued by having a bunch a crap that poses as valuable possessions and seems to follow me around everywhere I go.

And if having all of this crap wasn’t bad enough, I have to find places to put it and then I have to remember where it all is. I mean, we can all agree that it doesn’t do much good to have stuff if we can’t find it.

Now the obvious solution would be to come up with a good personal organization system, even coordinate something with my wife, and then organize and store all of our stuff accordingly. The problem is that I’m lazy. Well, I’m also busy as all get out but, to be honest, I’m lazy.

And so I suffer with having a bunch of disorganized crap.

The reality is, I suspect, that I’m not all that different from everyone else. My human experience has been that most of us are crap collectors. And I also know a lot of people, like me, who are too lazy to organize their crap. They don’t have the time or energy to do it. What they, what we want and need is for someone to provide a system for our crap and to organize it accordingly. Heck, I’d gladly let someone else organize my crap, even if their system isn’t exactly what I would come up with on my own.

Maybe that’s why I’m such an advocate of taxonomies and controlled vocabularies when it comes to information chaos. You see, my information world is full of even more crap than my apartment. And I don’t have the energy to organize that stuff either. I’m a huge supporter of folksonomies and letting the participating community create a bottom-up tagging system for stuff. But, as much as I hate to admit it, I’m too lazy or harried to participate. For me, the only option is to use an “off-the-shelf” organization solution. I need someone else’s best guess for cataloguing my crap.

My experience is also that my personal entropy is particularly reflective of large companies with large amounts of homogeneous content (educational publishers, for example). These companies’ very success is dependent on the effective management of their crap. Their employees, however, are caught up in the bureaucracy of the corporation and are way to frustrated or harried to be able to create their own taxonomy or participate in the creation of folksonomies.

The solution? Get help. Use an off-the-shelf organization system in the form of taxonomies or controlled vocabularies, tweak them a bit, and then keep going. If necessary, you can even get someone else to put everything in order according to that system.

Sure, you can keep on planning to get organized and come up with the perfect system, but all that will get you is more crap and disorganization. You can also just throw your hands up and just let search engines troll through your stuff and give you an illusion of organization. But that is putting complete faith in another system over which you have no control and whose algorithms you can not modify.

The perfect solution, coming in the future, is to create a solution that combines search engines, folksonomies, and taxonomies/ontologies and to organize and retrieve all information and content. Unfortunately, I’m ready to do something besides work now– maybe take my next nap — so I’ll put that ideal solution off until another day.

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