The Mess That Isn't One
For most of my life I've described my own organizational skills the same way, apologetically. I'd call them a nightmare. I'd say I work in a round robin, jumping from one piece of a project to another whenever I hit friction, following whatever sparks interest at the moment, circling back later to pull it all together. I'd say my filing, physical and digital both, is a disaster I've never solved in decades of trying. And I'd say all of this like it was a flaw I'd learned to work around rather than fix.
I want to lay out what I've come to understand about that pattern, not because I think I've cracked it, but because I suspect a lot of people with ADHD brains, or brains wired something like mine, have lived the same confusion without ever having language for it. If any of this lands for you the way it's landed for me, that's the whole point of writing it down.
Two different systems, and only one of them was ever broken
Here's the thing I got wrong for years: I treated "how I organize" and "how I produce" as the same problem. They aren't. They're two entirely separate systems, and only one of them was ever actually failing.
The producing side, the actual work of writing, filmmaking, tech writing, whatever the project, has never been the problem. I've moved through projects fast, one foot in front of the other, doing whatever seemed most productive or most interesting at the time, switching to something else the moment I hit an impediment, working multiple fronts until they converged into something finished. From the inside, that always felt chaotic. No plan, no sequence, no visible structure. But the results were consistently strong, often produced faster than people working a more linear, methodical way.
The storage side, archiving material, categorizing information, filing papers, remembering where things went, is the part that never worked. Every system I tried to build for it eventually became confusing and then just fell apart.
For years I conflated the two. I assumed the chaos in my process was the same chaos causing my filing problems. It isn't. The production chaos was never actually chaos. It only looked that way because the thinking happening underneath it was invisible, including to me, while I was in the middle of it.
What the production side actually is
I spent years as a technical writer, and I had a habit that, in hindsight, tells you everything about what was really happening. When someone requested a document, I didn't write one version. I wrote three: what they explicitly asked for, what I thought they actually needed in order to use it well, and what I suspected they didn't yet know they'd need. Every time. Across companies, across states, across managers who had never met each other and had no shared context for what I was doing.
They almost always chose the version that matched their original request. That was their call to make, and I was never bothered by it. It usually worked fine for them. Sometimes it didn't, and I could see that clearly when it happened, quietly, without saying anything.
What made this strange to the people I worked for wasn't the three versions. It was the process that got me there. I'd take notes in a meeting, write a first draft, and hand it over, and it would come back looking, to them, like I'd missed the point entirely. "How are you so off track here?" Then a second draft, closer. Then a third, final draft, the one they'd originally asked for, landing with a precision that visibly surprised them. One manager once asked me directly how I'd gotten to something so right, so fast, when my first draft had been so wrong.
The first draft wasn't wrong. It was me mapping the terrain before committing to a path through it, walking the version they hadn't asked for and the version they didn't know they needed, in parallel, before converging on the one they'd requested. What looked like being off track was actually the width of the search happening before the narrowing. The confusion those managers felt, more than once, in more than one company, wasn't about my competence. It was a mismatch between how they'd been trained to expect a draft to evolve (straight line, incremental correction toward a fixed target) and how I actually worked (wide first, multiple models held at once, fast convergence once the terrain was known).
There's a real term for this, sometimes called divergent-then-convergent processing: generating broadly, including deliberately exploring paths that won't be the final answer, before narrowing to the target. Most people are taught to go straight at a request. That method skips the information that, for me, is exactly what makes the final answer precise. Going wide first isn't a detour. It's how the correct answer gets found.
What the storage side actually is
Now the part that never worked, and still doesn't.
When I try to build a category system, physical filing, digital folders, doesn't matter, the categories I settle on make sense to me in the moment I create them. Weeks or months later, they don't hold. A document that felt like it belonged in one category when I filed it looks like it belongs somewhere else entirely by the time I go looking for it, because what I was thinking about, what mattered to me, has shifted. The framework itself doesn't stay fixed long enough to function as a framework.
This has a name too. Organizational psychology sometimes calls it schema instability: the categorization system depends on holding a consistent framework in mind and applying it the same way every time, and that consistency is exactly what doesn't hold. It's not that I lack a system. It's that my systems don't stay still.
It compounds. When I update my understanding of something, new information, a new angle, the framework changes in my head, but nothing marks what changed or when. The things I filed under the old logic just sit there, unlabeled as to which version of my thinking put them there. Later I'm trying to read my own filed material using a decoder that's already been quietly replaced. That's retroactive interference layered onto schema drift with no version history. The mess isn't that I forget where things are. It's that I forget which rules were in effect when I put them there.
A pile of unfied papers builds because filing requires a decision I've never been able to make reliably. Scanning becomes its own time sink for the same reason: it still requires deciding where something belongs, so it just becomes a digital pile instead of a physical one. The frustration isn't laziness. It's hitting the same broken step every time, no matter what medium I try it in.
Why this matters, if you recognize it
The reason I'm writing this down isn't to complain, and it isn't to make a case for my own process, though I'll admit some pride crept in while thinking through the tech writing years. It's because I think a lot of people with minds like mine have spent decades doing exactly what I did: treating the disorganization as the whole story, and missing that the "chaos" driving their actual work might be a completely different, and completely functional, system.
If you produce well but can't explain how, if your first attempts look wrong to other people right up until they suddenly aren't, if your filing has never once made sense to you a year after you built it, it might be worth separating those two threads the way I eventually did. One of them might not need fixing at all. The other one might never fully resolve, and that's worth knowing too, so you stop treating it as a moral failure and start treating it as a known cost of how you think.
I still don't have a solution for the filing cabinet. I'm not sure I ever will. But I finally understand what it is, and what it isn't, and that on its own has been worth the years it took to work out.
No comments:
Post a Comment