Organizing files makes you less productive

There's some counter-intuitive news coming out of the labs at IBM (IBM). Historically, it's just plain common sense that getting organized enhances productivity. That's why most of us make an effort to organize email into folders rather than leaving them willy-nilly in the inbox. And our documents folder isn't an undifferentiated collection of files, either. We keep dozens of project-centric folders into which all of our important data is arranged.

But a recent study by IBM researchers showed that users who searched for unfiled correspondence found what they were looking for faster and with fewer errors than users who set up elaborate folders. What does this tell us? Any time you spend organizing your stuff is completely wasted, because you're more efficient without expending any effort on organizing at all.

Here's the lowdown: the study determined that finding email via a straight-up search took an average of 17 seconds, while finding that same email by browsing through folders took 58 seconds. That's a significant difference. Add up all the time you spend slogging through Outlook folders every day, and it becomes apparent that being disorganized is actually a virtue.

Does this mean you should just leave all of your mail scattered in your inbox? Well, yes, it kind of does. Although you might want to clear the inbox itself and store all of your messages in another folder. If you're persuaded by IBM's conclusions, you might consider using a filtering strategy to keep your inbox clean and help find important mail.