On My Soapbox from Michael Wallis | March 2025
Michael Wallis is the Student Learning Consultant for The Washington Center. His collaborative services are available to faculty who wish to improve the equity and student learning focus of their curricula.
One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is how to organize information. My brain is not exactly the most efficient tool at my disposal for keeping hold of new learning, nor does it find much effect in establishing robust routines. One of the great quests of my recent life has been to discover the boon of a simple strategy that reflects my brain’s natural desire to call up bits of information from a wide array of categories, without hunting through a hundred folders and sub-folders in order to find the specific notes I took, only to ultimately realize that I never made the note in the first place because I didn’t feel like doing all that work to put it where it belonged… yikes.
My work and school life are all about improving the standards of learning and teaching. So what beef do those files have with each other that they need to be restrained from ever meeting? Life doesn’t deserve to be compartmentalized like that. How revolutionary would it be if we allowed ourselves to connect our life experiences to one another, rather than perform the personal/professional severance that says what we love and what we do shouldn’t have anything to do with each other?
At the same time, I’d like to balance that drive towards intellectual primordial soup with an equal desire for a true everything-in-its-proper-place organization. It’s a great idea to keep all of your laundry in the same pile (so convenient!) until you realize that you ran out of underwear yesterday and now you’re late for work and pantless. Not only do I need to know where everything is, but I need to be able to see it with first-order retrievability. If I’m looking for shirts, I want to open one drawer that makes all of my shirts visible immediately. If I’m looking for something green, I want to be able to open a drawer with all of my green clothes– including any green shirts from that other drawer!
Ok, enough with the laundry metaphor.
Here’s the rub. I don’t know how to have it both ways yet. I’ve found workarounds with quick-access links and tab grouping; I’ve combined my weekly to-do’s with my weekly notetaking; I’ve done all kinds of work to supplement the natural process of schematic equilibration that Vygotsky and his cohort loved to whisper about.
Luckily, Ol’ Lev taught me one lesson that I haven’t misplaced yet: when the work is too difficult to progress alone, it’s time to reach out to a more capable peer for help. So hear my plea, dear reader– How the hell do you organize your mind? Please respond to the survey link below if you have a program or strategy that really works. I know I’d love to learn about it, and I’m sure I speak for many others.
Next month, I’ll keep you posted on what I find out.
