The Discipline of Organizing: Core Concepts Edition, 3rd Edition

7.5. Classification by Activity Structure

Institutional classification systems are often strongly hierarchical and taxonomic because their many users come to them for diverse purposes, making a context-free or semantic organization the most appropriate. However, in narrow domains that offer a more limited variety of uses it can be much more effective to classify resources according to the tasks or activities they support. A task or activity-based classification system is called a taskonomy, a term invented by anthropologists Janet Dougherty and Charles Keller after their ethnographic study of how blacksmiths organized their tools. Instead of keeping things together according to their semantic relationships in what Donald Norman called “hardware store organization,” the blacksmiths arranged tools in locations where they were used— “fire tools,” “stump tools,” “drill press rack tools,” and so on.

Personal organizing systems are often taskonomic. Think about the way you cook when you are following a recipe. Do you first retrieve all the ingredients from their storage places, and arrange them in activity-based groups in the preparation area?

Looking at the relationship between tasks and tools in this way can help a cook determine the best way to organize tools in a kitchen. Cutting items would necessarily be kept together near a prep area; having to run across the kitchen to another area where a poultry knife is kept with, say, chicken broth would be detrimental to the cook’s workflow. ...