Now I will give you some links

[flexagon]

Sick Systems (or, How to Keep Someone With You Forever)

Minimalists Don't Organize (from a min blog that features adorable cartoon bunnies)

I think the premises of both these are true. As long as I'm in here editing to make the links work, I'll note the second one is not the only one on that topic.

Organizing is only necessary when you have too many things to easily find what you’re looking for. Think about it: when we organize a collection of [items], it’s because when they’re not organized, we can’t find the [items] we want. But if we had, say, five [of that kind of thing], we wouldn’t need to organize.

Leo was talking about books, which is a hot-button category for most. His point holds, though. I can't think of a time I've needed/wanted to organize a collection of less than a dozen items, unless I am going OCD on a dish of M&Ms because I want to push small things around with my finger.

Comments

[heisenbug]

Acrojamrolled!

[flexagon]

Doh.

[islenskr.livejournal.com]

Yup, both of those links go to an acro page. :)

[flexagon]

Oopsie. Fixed. :)

[perfectbound.livejournal.com]

Organizing is only necessary when you have too many things to easily find what you’re looking for.

This is interesting in light of something I just learned at an indexing conference: that back-of-the-book indexes are seen as a necessity almost solely in English-language publishing. Indexes organize information when there's too much of it to find what you're looking for easily -- but (I'm told) in French academia, the expectation is that you're gonna read the whole book: you don't get to have just one piece of information without any context. So the premise of organizing being necessary at all is...I'm not sure what, but it sure isn't cross-cultural.

[flexagon]

Wow, that's fascinating. My very American response would be: if I don't know if a book covers my area of interest, how do I know that I should read the whole thing in the first place? Maybe the perspective is that my area of interest shouldn't be so narrow. o_O