being horizontal

John Perry has a fancy web site!

I am not left-handed, but I have another less well-known situational handicap. I am a horizontal organizer in a world set up for vertical organizers.

The main mark of a vertical organizer is the ability to make use of filing cabinets. These people use filing cabinets to store materials in that they intend to use just an hour or a day or a week later. When they need that stuff again, they reach into the filing cabinet, pull out the folder and resume working on it.

It probably seems pretty silly to the vertical organized reader for me to be going on and on about how filing cabinets are used, but I think the horizontal organizers may never have actually realized how the other half lives and may find this account completely incredible, so let me go on for a minute.

Yesterday I was working on a letter to the Palo Alto Medical Clinic explaining why my bill is screwed up and I don't owe them as much money as they think I do. It's pretty complicated stuff, and I didn't finish by the time I had to leave. A vertical organizer would have scooped this stuff up, and put it in a file to retrieve later. Had I done this, there would be a bare spot on my desk. These bare spots are the mark of vertical organizers. They are a dead give away.

Now of course that is not what I did at all. I left the letter on the desk, with the materials spread out. Actually, it is not exactly on the desk, because some other ongoing projects were already be spread there; the letter and supporting documents are on top of half-graded papers, half-written lectures, half-read brochures and the like.

The fact is, I am a horizontal organizer. I like all the things I am working on spread out on a surface in front of me, where they can beckon me to continue working on them. When I put something in a file, I never see it again. The problem isn't that I can't find it (although that has happened), but that I don't look. I am constitutionally incapable of opening a filing cabinet and fishing out a half-finished project to resume working on it. I do use filing cabinets. They are for a) storing finished things that one plans never to look at again and b) putting things that one would feel bad about throwing away but has no intention of reading.

A Plea for the Horizontally Organized
Be sure to check out the designer credit in the lower left hand corner.

I am a horizontal type, too, the only difference between me and John Perry being: I am not organized. I'm just horizontal. My stuff is, I mean.