How and why do organize our daily lives, our collections, our schedules.
Is there a central theme we follow that links all of our organizational habits, do we follow some grander classification system that has been set up by scholars and prophetic minds or are we all idiosyncratic. Databases have structural organizational systems, libraries too, and certainly archives. Ones that may be programmed, but it all started from someone’s mind. All major systems were invented by somebody, and that somebody usually invented the system on their own.
Should we alphabetize them? Should we color code them? What about organizing by subject or genre? or by release date?
All of these basic systems make sense hypothetically, but we must first orient our minds to what we are organizing. As we discussed earlier, color coding books usually wont be of any strategic help. Just as genre sorting wouldn’t make total sense when organizing clothes. So what connections do we make when setting out the order of things? In order to be most effective you must know, and fully understand the environment of the things which we organize. To bring ‘order’ we must have order in our minds. I couldn’t aptly sort a yarn collection by any more than basic instinct. I don’t know the functionality of different needles or thread widths. I could sort by color I suppose, but that may not be most effective way when needing to find a particular thread strength. We follow what others may have set up for us, but we all have our own internal ways of knowing what works best for us. So to me it is incredible that there have become wildly accepted systems of organization that sprung from a single mind. A system efficient and elemental enough to work for years and years, despite all of the individual differences an organizer may have.