A Few Words on Filing

By age eleven, I had developed my first filing system. I had a pepto pink crate with scattered chicken scratch tabs listing: girl scouts, yearbook, cards, babysitting, first aid, house drawings. They weren't alphabetized. God, they weren't even color-coded. But they were separated, and brought order to what I must have subconsciously predicted would be disorganized years filled with disorganized people. In high school my maturity showed: tri-colors were introduced. The yearbook section got bigger, while gradually files appeared for colleges options. It was a bit depressing, yet necessary I knew. In college, I recognized that I had a bit of a gift. My senior thesis (Themes of Entrapment and Enclosure in Three Short Stories of Japanese Women Writers) was carefully compartmentalized in a gray plastic box for index cards. Each story was assigned a color, making a tight squeeze of layered post-it tabs. It might as well have been a treasure chest. Nothing could have had as much worth as a small box filled with ideas AND a system. I love a good system. Here are some questions on systems:

How do you decide what gets filed?
Why do some items immediately get filed, yet others never make their way in?
Have you ever had a file that started as a single manila and grew to an entire cabinet?
How do you know when it's time to get rid of a file?
Why are my files different from your files?
Can a file's energy be stifled if it is covered, versus open?
Are there people who don't have any files, at all?

Have you discovered that this isn't really about filing? Or is it?