A time for organizing; a time for leaving stuff all over your desk

Having a filing cabinet with lots of file folders is a fine idea. I have three two-drawer filling cabinets at work and I have tons of file folders in them. I make at least one folder for each project I work on and then add one for each part of the project. I'm usually pretty diligent about organizing my files and I take a lot of time organizing the papers and notes I put in the folders. But there are times when filing things backfires.

On Friday, three days ago, I was looking for some notes I'd made on a recent project. It was part of a larger, older project and should have had it's own folder that would be placed near the folder for the large project. To make it more complicated, this part of the larger project was postponed because the equipment wouldn't be ready by the time the large project would be finished and the software released. So, the large project was finished and released and the small part of it was postponed and my memory of it began to fade (about two seconds after I last put something in its folder).

Now, of course, we're working on the next version of our software and it has its own Big Project folder. The postponed project will now be part of the new big project and I need to refresh my memory of how far we'd gotten, what problems remained and what needed to be finished. But I couldn't find the folder! My first thought was that the notes might have been put in the old Big Project folder but I searched that and couldn't find them. I looked again for a folder with the name of the missing project and couldn't find it. I looked thought every cabinet two or three times. Noluck.

Finally, I bit the bullet and started a search of every file folder in all three file cabinets. It took a few hours. And, as an aside, you ought to know that I am easily distracted. I came across things that I'd completely forgotten about but got interested in again. Besides that, I found some items that had been filed incorrectly. So, in a sense, I was doing three things at once -  I'm looking for a lost project folder, I'm reading old information that I'd forgotten about (and wondering how I did that work so poorly) and I'm filing things correctly that I would probably be looking for in the weeks to come.

After hours of searching and dropping papers on the floor and sliding on papers that were already on the floor I found what I was looking for. I had put it in the wrong folder! And there's the one, big problem with filing things:

If you put something in the wrong folder, you have no idea where it is!

I don't know what I was thinking when I put my notes in the wrong folder. I may have been reaching for the phone or answering a question or even just thinking about what my wife would be cooking for dinner that night. I just made a mistake that had cost me three or four hours of time. Usually, filing my notes and organizing things is a good idea. But this time, I would have been better just leaving it on my desk to be buried by other things.