I try to not do too much busy work, at my job and in life in general. The trick, as I see it, is to see everything as data, and to constantly be conscious of the way in which that data is organized. I often keep a reasonably cluttered desk in my physical workspace, however I always cluster things together such that they are indexed for easy retrieval. The method isn’t important, yet having a method most certainly is.

I really believe the future is going to be more and more about getting information organized in very particular and portable ways. Google, and increased computing power in general often makes it easy to throw caution to the wind, abandoning structure with the expectation that “technology” will solve all ills. The reality, though, is that we still have to index, catalog, and in many cases refactor our data and related systems in order to fit the needs at hand. Searching alone is not the savior, and, ultimately, it is not going to change the game.

Busy work, then, can be defined as needing to hand-sort large sets of information simply because the existing form lacks a reasonable organization. Said another way, it is much more efficient to be able to just change the names, be it piles on a desk, structures of nested folders, or deeper database systems; but it is an entirely separate problem if we cannot even see what we’re looking at without a lot of work. The more general corollary to what I’m saying is essentially that it is more important to work intelligently than to work hard. More specifically, computer systems alone are not the savior if the fundamental practice is broken from the outset.