Peace of Mind Organizing

Beauty vs. function

28 September 2009

I live near a heavily trafficked thoroughfare in St. Louis that has a big median down the middle. A couple of years ago, volunteers from the neighborhood decided to beautify the street by planting large decorative plants in the median. It looks lovely.

Unfortunately, it’s unsafe. I regularly turn left from that street onto another. When I’m waiting to make that turn, the large plants on the median block my view of oncoming traffic. It’s dangerous. Really dangerous. I curse it on a regular basis.

It got me to thinking about beauty versus function, something that I encounter in organizing all the time. People want their spaces to look nice. To many people, looking nice is a big part of being organized. But in their pursuit of aesthetics, people sometimes ignore functionality.

Case in point: say you have a series of pretty binders. You decide to store a certain category of papers in one of the binders which rests on a high shelf with other pretty binders. They look lovely. But in order to file into these binders (or get anything out of them), you have to reach up, remove it from the shelf, open it, find the appropriate section, open the rings, and add (or remove) the papers. (Oh and let’s not get into the hassle of either punching holes in the paper or using a sheet protector…can you tell I’m not a big fan of filing into binders?)

Because it takes so many steps to put something away in that lovely binder, stored attractively with its mates, you don’t do it. You set the papers down into a pile of papers to be filed later. Later never comes. The pile grows, starts feeling overwhelming, and you have an unsightly pile of papers. And a filing chore ahead of you that you dread.

Those binders might look pretty, but if you’re not filing into them they’re not functional.

So what would I recommend instead? For papers, an easy-to-use filing system (I love the Freedom Filer) in an accessible filing cabinet or box.

Functional doesn’t have to be ugly, by any means. But when you’re designing a storage or organizing system, I urge you to pay as much, if not more, attention to how it works as you to do how it looks. That’s a key factor in creating a successful system.

Edited to add: A couple of months after I wrote this, the city of St. Louis repainted the lane lines at this intersection so that the left turn lane is farther left than it used to be. This allows people waiting to make a left turn to see oncoming traffic. They figured out a solution to have both beauty and function at that intersection. Bravo!

Tagged with: beauty, function, organizing principles, organizing systems

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