Chris_Pratley's OneNote WebLog : Setting up your OneNote notebook

Chris_Pratley's OneNote WebLog : Setting up your OneNote notebook: "Another common topic related to this is the concept of 'piler' vs. 'filer'. These are two poles of note management. A 'piler' is someone who just puts everything they get into a big stack. They rely on memory of roughly how far down the stack something probably is when they go to find it. Finding things this way is not particularly efficient particularly as your stack gets big, but the upfront cost is nil which is appealing to many (including me). A 'filer' is someone who puts notes away by category until everything is in its proper place. Assigning categories to everything is a chore and hard to remember to do consistently, but it pays off when you need to find things since it is easier to pull them out of a filed set of notes. We actually did some research on this to see where the general population is on this topic. As with most things concerning personal organization, things are spread: about 15% pile, 15% file, and a whopping 70% pile first and file later when they get a chance.
We wondered if this behaviour would change if notes were electronic and things like searching were super-quick. Result: not really. Search is rarely used among our users. 85% of people put things where they would go look for them later so they don’t report any trouble finding them, and no need for search."

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