Academics who study workplace behavior sometimes make the distinction between “filers” and “pilers”—people who establish a formal organizational structure for their paper documents, versus people who let piles of paperwork accumulate on and around their desks. A few years ago, two researchers at AT&T Labs, Steve Whittaker and Julia Hirschberg, studied how a group of office workers dealt with their paperwork. Who hoarded the most paper? Who used their archives more actively? When an office relocation forced everyone to reduce the size of their archives, who coped best?
