Noguchi filing system on index cards from hawkexpress
Photo by hawkexpress, all rights reserved.
The Flickr photostream of hawkexpress has a wonderful example of the Noguchi filing system in practice. hawk takes meticulous and beautiful handwritten notes on index cards (3x5, quadrille, someone after my own heart), and has a well developed system for using that to be productive with.
The biggest single characteristic of the Noguchi system is that it's entirely chronological; new cards in this system go to the front of the file, and old ones go to the back.
See his blog, Pile of Indexcards, for more contemplation of these techniques; the blog is in English, though almost all of the card scans are of mostly Kanji cards.
For anyone who doesn't explore hawkexpress's site, I think I should mention that his system differs in a fairly fundamental way from Noguchi's: whereas Noguchi refiles things as they are accessed, hawkexpress puts them back in their original place.
Posted by: RickL | November 25, 2006 at 07:29 PM
The Pile of Index Cards wiki - much of which is in Japanese - goes into many more detail on this; I recommend it.
http://pileofindexcards.org/wiki/index.php?title=参考資料
Posted by: Edward | June 17, 2008 at 10:51 PM