incoming document in a large envelope. Write the envelope’s contents neatly on its edge and line them up on a bookshelf, their contents visible like the spines of books. Now the moment of genius: every time you use an envelope, place it back on the left of the shelf. Over time, recently used documents will shuffle themselves towards the left and never-used documents will accumulate on the right. Archiving is easy: every now and again, you remove the documents on the right. To find any document, simply ask yourself how recently you’ve seen it. It is a filing system that all but organises
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