If you're like me, you probably have a messy desk.

My desk piles up with papers that I expect to need again soon. There are tasks that I have started but not finished. There are also documents that I let stew on my desk because I want them to nag at my brain; I sense there's some important idea or insight lying in wait, but I haven't yet had the "Aha!" moment of how the information fits into everything else I am thinking about.

But according to Dr. David Kirsh, messy desks are really all about The Intelligent Use of Space.

Kirsh wrote a great paper of the same name where he discusses ways that people use physical space to simplify their tasks, as well as to facilitate opportunistic new uses for materials and tools. He calls the early stages of a project "the discovery phase."  He writes that:

In the discovery phase one wants to note as many possible extensions and variations to one's ideas as possible... Facilitating opportunism is to find a way of leaving equipment, intermediate products, and task detritus around the workplace.

In short, Kirsh concludes:

The most intelligent use of space is to try out conjectures... in the hope of triggering an association.

That's right, the detritus upon my messy desk really just represents my super intelligent use of space.

At least I hope that is the case. Or maybe it's just a mess. But I know once I clean up and put stuff in folders, I might as well dump it in the trash. The odds I ever touch any of those documents again-- or of getting to the root of that nagging feeling that the documents had important insights that I should learn from-- drops dramatically.

I like to think of InkSeine as the digital equivalent of my messy desk, a place for me to gather together the detritus of electronic work. But to make that useful, I need a really quick and easy way to get stuff into my notes in the first place.

With the advances that have been made in search technology, searches have become a big part of how I work. With standard search tools, I type in a query, my results are returned, and the query is forever gone. If I want to go back later and see how and where I found something, or to revisit the results to see if there is any new information, I am out of luck. It's just like those documents that I've filed way, never to be seen again.

And I don't just mean searching the web.

I have thousands of documents on my computer. I have over 18,000 emails in my inbox. I am totally dependent on search to put my hands on the information I need quickly. Doubly so on my Tablet PC, where tapping and double-tapping through folders can feel like trying to catch a fruit fly with a pair of chopsticks.

InkSeine offers the ultimate search scratchpad. Even on my desktop Wacom Cintiq display tablet, where I always have a keyboard ready to go, I rarely type in a query any more. A search in InkSeine is triggered directly from my notes, and it persists after I am done with it. I can remove it if I don't want it any more. But by default it gets created as its own object next to the ink that I use to start my query, and it gets saved in context with my notes.

It is extremely valuable to me to have all my searches persisted in this way. I'll keep all my searches with my notes about a project. Here's an example where I searched for the names of some people who have recently sent me some especially helpful feedback on InkSeine. I needed to collect all those together to make sure that our release plan would address as many of the issues as possible.

When I return to this page, I can just stroke down on any one of those search icons to see all the recent correspondence from that person. For example, Rob has kindly sent me some additional comments. I will go back to this note and use this search to see all his recent emails to me so I can add the remaining issues to my release plan. 

Anyway, I hope that all your InkSeine notes turn out to be messy ones, because I firmly believe that is the most intelligent use of (electronic) space.

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