Comments on: Open Thread: Are You a Filer or a Piler?

By: Web Worker Daily » Archive Open Thread: Do You Delete? «

Web Worker Daily » Archive Open Thread: Do You Delete? « — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 21:00:05 +0000

[...] 10th, 2008 (2:00pm) Mike Gunderloy No Comments We’ve looked at the distinction between filers and pilers in the past (as well as the one between nibblers and gulpers). But there’s another facet of [...]

By: Web Worker Daily » Archive What’s Your Email Style — Plain or Fancy? «

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 14:59:55 +0000

[...] Open Thread: Are You a Filer or a Piler? [...]

By: jessica lipnack

jessica lipnack — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 20:49:57 +0000

Great post. Apparently appeals mostly to pilers, of which I am one in both worlds.

By: jansenma

jansenma — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 02:25:08 +0000

I am absolutely a piler, I rely on search functions heavily in nearly every application I use. The exception to this seems to be when I want to browse the latest news headlines or videos. Then I like to choose a category and see what’s out there because I won’t ever be able to think of a keyword for every new concept out there.

This is a great way to identify two types of personalities and might just help bridge some gaps, keep up the great work!

Thanks, -Matt
http://metaviper.com

By: Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive Open Thread: Are You a Nibbler or a Gulper? «

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 17:31:27 +0000

[...] We’ve talked before about one of the big divisions in web workerdom, the one between pilers and filers. But how you do your work is at least as important as how you put things away when you’re [...]

By: Are You a Filer or a Piler? « -Deb- in MadCity

Are You a Filer or a Piler? « -Deb- in MadCity — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 16:01:34 +0000

[...] Web Worker Daily » Are You a Filer or a Piler? « “A filer is a person who organizes information using a rigid structure, and a piler is someone who maintains a mostly unstructured information organization.” [...]

By: Scott

Scott — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 16:17:04 +0000

I am a piler with an involuntary tendancy to file the odd thing. I use Beagle to open most stuff in my Linux desktop and stick almost everything in either Documents or Data folders. Documents are stuff I’ve done and Data is everything else. Unfortunately I can’t seem to get into the habit of completely buying into this process. I’m thinking I need a couple of other boxes to stick stuff I’m working on into, and then a way to archive completed stuff like in Gmail.

A Desktop folder called Working could perhaps serve as my filesystem equivalent to the Gmail inbox. Another one that links to my Data folder and one more that links to Documents might work like the Archive button in Gmail. Then I just need desktop tagging and I would be all set.

By: Onno

Onno — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 09:33:09 +0000

Filers are nothing but organized pilers, they just use more piles.

By: Maureen

Maureen — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 02:46:55 +0000

Tim: … I wish to no end I could get tagging on the desktop.
I’m trying out a program that some students in Austria are developing called Tag2Find http://www.tag2find.com/.
It’s early days, but it could be the killer file management app that I’ve been looking for; I do wish it had documentation though!

By: Einordner oder Anhäufer? auf maol symbolisch

Einordner oder Anhäufer? auf maol symbolisch — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 20:59:49 +0000

[...] fragt Are You a Filer or a Piler?, oder eben bist Du ein Einordner oder Anhäufer, ein Ordner oder ein Stapler? Bei mir [...]

By: Duncan

Duncan — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 02:23:55 +0000

My problem with piling is that even with strong search it’s still difficult sometimes find what you’re looking for particularly when you’ve got tens of thousands of emails (as I do in my gmail archive)…yes, in part that’s me not being able to refine what I’m looking for in a search query but at least with folders I can immediately narrow down emails to be searched…and you’d probably be not surprised to learn that I’ve got around 30 different folders in Outlook with a complete set of rules automatically dumping data in at least 10 of them. It also makes for easier reading, a bit like categories in Google Reader, it allows you to prioritize the topic area you need to deal with first.

By: Tim Peter

Tim Peter — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 23:19:07 +0000

Piler. Big time. del.icio.us is the greatest invention ever and I wish to no end I could get tagging on the desktop.

By: Leo Babauta

Leo Babauta — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 23:08:58 +0000

I just thought I’d point out that the new folders for Google Docs are really the same as the old tags, so nothing’s changed, except that you can drag and drop into the folders instead of using the drop-down tag menu. So you can still put a document in multiple folders (tags) as before.

Personally, I have completely turned into a searcher. It saves so much time — when before I’d be trying to organize my files, now I just archive and search. Labels (or tags or folders) are useful for sorting incoming emails, so that you can just look at the high-priority stuff now and the low-priority stuff later. For documents, I like to have a label (actually I use the star) for the important stuff I use on a daily or weekly basis, so I can quickly look through them. But for everything else, archive and search.

By: Jill

Jill — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 22:24:48 +0000

I’m definitely a piler, without desktop search I would be dead.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 20:21:08 +0000

I’m definitely a piler. Filing worked better for me when I used Outlook/Exchange and searches were painfully slow and awkward.

Now that I use web-based mail exclusively, I just search and archive for the most part.

By: James

James — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 17:29:13 +0000

You can set up filters on Gmail and use them as a pseudo-directory structure. For example, label all incoming mails containing the subject line [LAA] as “laa” and then set the filter to archive those mails. Then, in your labels box, you’ll see “laa” and once clicked on you’ll see all the mails that are labeled as such. This works basically the same as directories, but is much more flexible.