A time-honored system is in place in the chambers of Orange County (Fla.) Circuit Judge Lisa Munyon.
She keeps paperwork she must deal with immediately in neat stacks on top of her executive-size desk.
Long-term paperwork – motions, correspondence and case files she won’t be able to attend to right away – accumulates, in due diligence, on a smaller, adjacent desk.
It’s a simple, straightforward arrangement: short-term work within reach, long-term work out of the way but not out of sight. “It’s close enough to be a reminder,” says Munyon, 43. “But my desk stays neat.”
There’s a word for how Munyon approaches her lofty judicial duties.
She’s a piler.
So says Sharon Mann, an organizational expert for Pendaflex, a manufacturer of office supplies, which recently commissioned a survey of 2,000 office workers to learn something about how various personality types keep it all together from 9 to 5.
The survey concludes that there are three basic organizational styles: pilers, filers and tossers.
Nearly half the workers surveyed were pilers, who maintain order by stacking work atop a desk or on other office furniture. Thirty-eight percent were filers, who tuck it out of sight. Fourteen percent were tossers, who are so averse to clutter of any sort that they’ll do anything to keep their desks clean.
Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages, says Mann.
Pilers tend to have desks that look chaotic, and “people who pile can get themselves in a lot of trouble” if they bury essential paperwork so deeply that they have to waste valuable time excavating it.
Filers tend to be conservative, hesitant individuals; they are so concerned about losing something valuable that they accumulate paperwork that could have been discarded. Tossers go to the other extreme, throwing away paperwork whose absence they may regret.
Mann has a particular fixation with pilers, perhaps because Pendaflex has recently launched a new line of organizational supplies specifically designed to help them maintain order among the stacks of paperwork on their desks. “The survey said 48 percent of workers are pilers, but we actually think it is higher than that,” she says.
The company’s new line includes color-coded labels and file-folders with a nappy surface – a texture meant to help prevent that disaster-zone effect of one towering paperwork pile collapsing, like some ancient ruin, into another.
Other tendencies turned up by the survey:
Most pilers say their homes are “somewhat messy” and are most likely to have post-graduate degrees.
Filers are likely to have homes that are neatly kept and tend to like soothing music such as rhythm and blues.
Tossers, though likely to have no college education, have leadership tendencies and are the most urbane of the three personality types studied in the survey.
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