Slicing apart schemes
Everything has a place. Someone has to choose that place. (National Library of Medicine)
When I first read David Allen’s Getting Things Done, there were a number of concepts that blew my nerdy mind.
Among them was the idea that you could create a file that contained only one item. You make a label that says, “birth certificate,” place it on a manila folder, and slide a single piece of paper inside.
Prior to this, I had tried to categorize papers. Naturally, I would struggle because not everything fits neatly into a category. Organizing things based on simply what they are as opposed to what they are like was a fresh and new approach that opened up a lot of potential for me (and made my files a lot skinnier).
I can’t be sure, but I believe that this shift in the way I file allowed me to restructure my thinking, too. Instead of trying immediately to categorize ideas, interests, inputs, and impulses, I allowed them to occupy their own spaces. This allowed me to see a particular opportunity or possibility on its own merits. As a result, I said yes to things that didn’t seem to fit who I was or where I was: starting a homeschool program, spending a month in Thailand, learning to knit, taking up tennis, moving across the country so that my husband could learn to build wooden boats, or seeing how long I could go without washing my hair. None of these things made “sense” or could be grouped easily with what had gone before.
In my work, both in education and small business consulting, I deeply enjoy slicing apart the categorization schemes that are already present in order to simplify, uncover truth, or reorganize according to new schemes. For example, many professionals can’t understand why their business isn’t growing even though they’re spending all of their time working. It is necessary, in such a case, to mentally separate service delivery from business development instead of looking at all of the activities as “work.” Stripping away everything that is related to the existing business will show that hardly any time is being spent on business development. Like two trees in a forest, they appear to be one until it is revealed that there is a spindly little thing underneath, hardly getting any light. Separating these endeavors allows them both to flourish appropriately.
Another example shows up in mathematics. Concepts are usually organized according to grade level, which is helpful for teachers who need to know what to teach each year. The concepts are then further categorized and split apart into units and lessons to make the curriculum manageable. However, these divisions are fundamentally arbitrary and can exacerbate confusion. For the student who is struggling, it is necessary to reassemble these fragments. A sixth grade student who is struggling with decimals, for instance, likely has a misunderstanding of place value. Revisiting material from first, second, and third grade, seamlessly proceeding from the earliest place value lessons to the most advanced ones, will allow the student to strengthen their understanding of place value and build upon a more solid foundation.
It’s entirely possible that an organizational scheme that makes sense to me doesn’t make sense to others. It certainly could be the case that the way I categorize things is just as arbitrary as another and isn’t helpful for anyone but me. That’s okay. My point is not that my way of sorting information and inputs is the best one. Rather, what I’m trying to say is that there are so many ways to slice and dice and rearrange the world around us; thus, if what you see is incomprehensible or inaccessible to you, you can try breaking it apart and put it back together again in a different configuration. You can question the assumptions you’ve made that link certain ideas together and see what it looks like when they are separate. If what you come up with improves your results, keep it; if not, shuffle the pieces and try again.
You can put a single piece of paper into a file. You can also question whether a given activity is strictly necessary: does B have to follow from A? You can combine two radically different elements into one piece of art. You can have breakfast foods for dinner and vice versa. You can challenge the status quo anywhere you see it. Revisiting established categories might amount to nothing, but it might also transform the way you approach the world. It’s another tool in your toolkit, perhaps to be placed in a category of its own—whatever makes sense to you.
