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The Noguchi Filing System

by William Lise
(Created February 14, 1998)

A book I read recently (野口悠紀雄 『｢超｣整理法』中央公論社 1993) has prompted me to try a rather unconventional filing system, the system proposed and used by Noguchi Yukio, an economist and writer of bestselling books about such things. Implementation of the system requires the user to discard many conventional notions about how to store paper documents.

The basic elements of the system are as follows.

• All the user need prepare is a collection of A4-sized envelopes and some means for marking the outside of the envelope. If some color coding (optional) is to be done, this can be done with marker pens.

• All documents, regardless of their class, level of importance, or perceived chance of being required at a later date are stored in A4-sized envelopes, which have the flaps cut off, as shown below.

  

  By "all documents," Noguchi means just that. He puts all categories of documents, including things like membership lists and his passport in envelopes.

• The title and date of the document are marked on the side of the envelope, as shown, and the envelopes are stored vertically on a bookshelf.

• Absolutely no "classification" of documents is attempted. The color coding is optional, and used only to shorten the amount of time to find a document.

• New documents (envelopes) are added at the left end of the "envelope buffer," and whenever a document is used (i.e., the envelope removed from the shelf), it is returned to the left end of the bookshelf. The result of this system is that the most recent (and frequently) used documents migrate to the left, while documents that are not used often or not used at all migrate to the right. After the system has been in use for a while, the shelf starts to look like the following.

  

  In the above "frequency-of-use sorting" of files, some of the files on the right side will be classified as "holy files (神様ファイル)," to be retained indefinitely. These, however, are removed from the shelf and stored in boxes. If a "holy file" is in use, it is part of the working file group at the left. Thus, holy files are really dead files, but ones which the user cannot part with. The solution is to get them out of sight into a box someone. In essence, this system works on the principle that categorized files are dead files, and that categorizing files should only be done when they are to be put in your file graveyard.

This system relies on Noguchi's idea that it is more likely that the user will know or remember about when a document was created, than he/she will be able to remember where it has been stored in a conventional system.

Noguchi comments that a conventional classify-and-file system has the following problems.

• The user must make a decision at the beginning as to the classification of a document, something that is sometimes not possible.

• Some documents might fall into two or more categories, and the user could forget where the document was filed.

• Since unused documents are filed in the same "pockets" with documents that are frequently or have been recently used, the task of discarding unused documents requires the user to go through all files.

When the shelf space allotted to envelopes fills up and more space is needed, the user discards documents that are judged as being "unnecessary." Discarding of documents can be done at other times as well. Commenting on human nature, Noguchi recommends setting aside a special time for discarding documents, and cites some of the excuses people make for not getting to this job at the appointed time. The judgment of which documents to discard or put into "permanent storage" is facilitated by the fact that the shelf represents a gradient in frequency of use, running from just-used documents (left end) to hardly ever or never-used documents (right end).

I have just started using this system. I currently have just about 150 envelopes on my "filing shelf," and already I can see the "order" growing--with recently used documents on the left and dead or soon-to-die documents on the right. I will report more about this system at a later date.

More specifically, I use it to "file" the following types of documents.

• Japanese manuscripts received from clients
• Manuals for equipment and software I have purchased
• Invoices and notices of bank account debiting for utilities
• Catalogs of products I am thinking of purchasing
• Lists of prospective customers
• Receipts for expenses (classified by month, rather than by type of expense)
• Foreign and domestic envelopes, from which I might take the affixed stamps
• Sets of business cards received on particular interpreting assignments (even one week deposition interpreting assignment often yield 10-20 business cards, some from future prospects)

All of these are arranged on the shelf as Noguchi recommends, by placing new envelopes on the left, and by always returning envelopes that I have just accessed to the left end of the shelf. The result is that the envelopes that are old and not often used get shifted to the right, from which they can be removed and disposed or filed away in permanent storage (having much poorer accessibility).

For your reading pleasure, here are the two other books written by Noguchi thus far on the subject of personal office organization.

野口悠紀雄『続｢超｣整理法・時間編』中央公論社 1995

Mostly time management. Should be interesting to translators who don't work on a salary basis.

野口悠紀雄『｢超｣整理法３』中央公論社 1999

Deals with the often difficult problem of how to discard things from your collection of files.

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Last uploaded: October 06, 2005   URL: www.lise.jp/honyaku/noguchi.html
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