# Deferred classification Deferred classification means capturing information now and deciding what it is and where it goes later. You put things down without a title or a category, and you classify them in a separate step. The idea comes from [[Thomas Malone]]'s 1983 study of how people organize their desks. He found two ways of organizing: **files** (titled and logically ordered) and **piles** (untitled, arranged by location). Classifying is cognitively hard: you have to decide what something is, which category fits and what to call it. So people avoid the decision and let things pile up. One of his interviewees said that leaving things out on the desk meant "I defer for now having to decide". Malone's recommendation for computer systems was to support that behavior instead of fighting it: let users defer classification, the way they already did on their desks. ## Why it works - **Capture gets cheaper.** If every capture requires a decision about where it goes, you capture less, or you classify badly because you're in a hurry - **You classify better later.** At capture time, you don't know yet how you'll use the information. Classifying it immediately is premature: you guess the category before you have the facts. A few days later, you know what matters and how it connects to the rest ## The risk Deferred must NOT mean never. Malone himself warned that electronic piles without automatic classification and reminding could produce "computerized desks that are just as messy as some of their wooden counterparts". A pile that never gets processed is just hoarding, and you end up with the [[Collector's fallacy|collector's fallacy]]: lots of captured stuff, no usable knowledge. Deferred classification only works if the "later" step is scheduled and actually happens. ## How I apply it in my PKM system My daily notes are the pile. I capture ideas, links, quotes and thoughts there without deciding where they belong. Then my own [[Knowledge Ingestion Process]] is the deferred classification step: periodically, I go through those captures, decide what's worth keeping, turn it into proper notes with good titles, types and links, and drop the rest. Malone recommended deferring classification; the ingestion process is my way of making sure the deferred step actually happens. ## References - Malone, T. W. (1983). How do people organize their desks? Implications for the design of office information systems. *ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems*, 1(1), 99-112. https://doi.org/10.1145/357423.357430 (full text: https://simson.net/ref/1983/Malone_Desks.pdf) ## Related - [[Thomas Malone]] - [[Personal Information Management (PIM)]] - [[Collector's fallacy]] - [[Knowledge Ingestion Process]] - [[Fleeting notes]] - [[Information hoarding]] - [[The Complete Guide to Obsidian Search - Find Any Note When You Need It (Article)]] - [[Why You Can't Find Your Notes - The Science of Re-finding Information (Article)]]