# Thomas Malone **Thomas W. Malone** is the Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. Before MIT, he was a research scientist at Xerox PARC, where he worked on educational software and office information systems. His PhD is from Stanford, in cognitive and social psychology. Most people know him for his work on how organizations can use information technology. He summarized two decades of that research in *The Future of Work* (2004), and his book *Superminds* (2018) is about how people and computers can think together. See [[Collective Intelligence]]. ## How people organize their desks (1983) In the PIM world, he is best known for one paper: "How do people organize their desks?" (1983). He interviewed ten people (secretaries, research scientists, managers, a purchasing agent and a physician) for about an hour each, asking them to give him a tour of their office. The study is tiny, yet it's still cited more than 40 years later, because what he found applies to digital information too: - **Files and piles**: people organize their stuff in **files** (titled and logically ordered) and **piles** (untitled, arranged by physical location) - **Classifying is hard**: deciding what something is and where it goes takes real cognitive effort, so people leave things in piles to avoid deciding - **Finding and reminding**: organization has two jobs. Finding is about getting back to something you're looking for. Reminding is about things coming back to you without you looking for them (the pile on your desk reminds you of what you still need to do) His design recommendations for computer systems included multiple classification (the same item in several categories), automatic classification and [[Deferred classification|deferred classification]]: let people put things down now and classify them later. He also warned that electronic piles without automatic classification and reminding could lead to "computerized desks that are just as messy as some of their wooden counterparts". ## Why it matters for PKM Malone's paper is about paper desks, but it describes exactly what happens in a vault. Classifying at capture time is costly, so captures pile up. I use that instead of fighting it: my daily notes are the pile, and my own [[Knowledge Ingestion Process]] is my application of his deferred classification idea. I capture in the daily note without deciding where things go, then I process and classify those captures later, when I know what they're worth. His reminding function also explains why resurfacing features (random notes, periodic reviews, related notes) matter: some organization exists to make things come back to you. ## Recent Activity - ## Insights - Classifying is the expensive part of organizing, so people defer it - Organization serves two functions: finding and reminding ## Quotes <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/quote AND [[]] WHERE public_note = true SORT file.name ASC --> ## Books <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/book AND [[]] WHERE public_note = true SORT file.name ASC --> ## Media <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/media AND [[]] WHERE public_note = true SORT file.name ASC --> ## Appears in <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/media WHERE contains(cast, this.file.name) AND public_note = true SORT release_date DESC --> ## Related - [[Deferred classification]] - [[Personal Information Management (PIM)]] - [[William Jones]] - [[Knowledge Ingestion Process]] - [[Collective Intelligence]] - [[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)]] ## 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) - MIT Sloan faculty profile: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty/directory/thomas-w-malone - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_W._Malone