The Kitchen Drawer

Admit it - we all have one. Mine is in the kitchen, although that isn’t where it started. It began life somewhere more sensible, in a cupboard upstairs, before gradually migrating to the kitchen because that’s where most things in our house eventually end up when nobody knows what else to do with them. It’s the drawer containing all the cables, adapters, chargers and small unidentified pieces of technology that might, under circumstances nobody can quite describe, come in useful one day. (Actually I have a much bigger box of cables and plugs under the bed but we won’t talk about that)

Opening the drawer is both a technical and an archaeological exercise. Technical because there is so much shoved in the drawer that something usually catches when I try to open it, and I have to use another kitchen implement (usually a metal spatula) to press things down sufficiently for the drawer to open freely. Archaeological because you find things that have been there longer than you care to remember, and sometimes don’t remember at all. Near the top are relatively modern things: USB cables, spare plugs and chargers that probably belong to devices we still own. Further down, however, you begin to encounter objects from earlier periods of technological history. There are cables with connectors I haven’t seen for years, chargers for mobile phones that were probably considered advanced when Tony Blair was Prime Minister, and several black power adapters that look virtually identical but apparently produce completely different voltages. I know that last part only because each one carries a tiny label containing figures that I can no longer read without finding my glasses. That in itself is a challenge as I get older as most of the time I cant remember where I put them, although they are often already on my head. Once I found them in the fridge, which was interesting…..

There are also cables in the drawer whose purpose has never been established. They don’t appear to fit anything currently in the house, but throwing them away would feel reckless because the moment I did, something important would inevitably stop working. I would then spend several hours searching for exactly the cable I’d confidently discarded three weeks earlier, before discovering that a replacement was no longer manufactured and the only surviving example was being sold on eBay for £107.50 by somebody in Bratislava. So the cable stays, not because we know it’s useful but because we can’t prove that it isn’t, which is quite a different thing but somehow feels just as persuasive when you’re standing over a bin.

the cable stays, not because we know it’s useful but because we can’t prove that it isn’t, which is quite a different thing

This is how the content of the drawer grows, and why manipulation by a spatula becomes more and more necessary. Nothing enters it following a conscious decision. Nobody purchases a mysterious cable and says, “I think this belongs in the kitchen drawer for the next fifteen years.” Things simply arrive there after completing whatever purpose they originally served. A new phone replaces an old phone, but the charger survives. A printer stops working and is taken to the recycling centre, but somehow the power cable remains behind.

I don’t know why we separate these things from the equipment to which they belonged. Perhaps it’s optimism. The device may be useless, but the cable still looks perfectly good. Throwing it away seems wasteful. A cable, unlike the broken printer, doesn’t visibly deteriorate. It sits there looking capable and purposeful, even when nobody can remember what it does. There’s something rather persuasive about a neatly coiled cable. It gives the impression that it has a future.

Admittedly, “neatly coiled” may be overstating matters. The contents of our drawer have somehow intertwined to form a single large technological organism. Even if you can get the drawer open, trying to remove one cable brings six others with it, along with some dead batteries and a plastic key of uncertain origin. Untangling them merely seems to encourage them. I’ve occasionally spent ten minutes separating the cables, winding them individually and placing them carefully back in the drawer, only to discover the next time I open it that they’ve reassembled themselves. Apparently, they do this when nobody is watching.

Every few months I make an attempt to clear the drawer out. I begin with determination because it’s obvious if you’re being objective that most of its contents are useless. I remove everything, spread it across the kitchen counter and announce to my wife that this time we’re going to be ruthless. (Actually my attempts at being ruthless usually involve asking her to make all the difficult decisions while I stand nearby holding an unidentified adapter and explaining why it might be important.)

And the process usually starts well. A few obviously broken items are discarded. Some old batteries are placed in a bag to be taken for recycling, where they’ll remain for another six months because we can never remember to take them with us. (Bizarrely, the bag often manages to make its way back into the cable drawer when no one is looking.) Then the uncertainty begins.

“What’s this for?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do we need it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Should we throw it away?”

There’s usually a pause here while we both imagine a completely unrealistic future emergency in which this particular piece of wire is the only thing standing between us and disaster.

“Perhaps we should keep it just in case.”

And back into the kitchen drawer it goes.

It has to be said that, at the start, the drawer must have contained useful things. In fact, it probably still does. The problem is that the useful things have become indistinguishable from everything else. If I need a cable, I know there’s a reasonable chance that one exists somewhere in that tangled mass, but finding it requires time, patience and a willingness to identify connectors last commonly used during the remarkably short reign of Windows Vista. The drawer preserves everything, but it helps us find almost nothing.

The drawer preserves everything, but it helps us find almost nothing.

I’ve often wondered what archaeologists of the future will make of these types of drawers. Assuming civilisation survives long enough for someone to excavate suburban kitchens (which is doubtful), there’s every chance they’ll conclude that early twenty-first-century households worshipped cables. No other explanation really fits. Why else would we preserve them so carefully while throwing away the expensive devices they were designed to connect to? An archaeologist uncovering our kitchen drawer in three hundred years’ time may quite reasonably conclude that these objects held a deep religious significance to us.

The other day, while frantically looking for a charging cable that turned out to be plugged into the wall next to where I’d been sitting, it occurred to me that many organisations have created exactly the same drawer. This isn’t the first time I’ve written about the difficulty organisations have in getting rid of things they no longer need. In fact, I explored the subject in A Good Data Die, which still contains one of the better titles I’ve come up with. Unfortunately for me, this article is about a drawer full of unidentified cables and, despite spending an embarrassing amount of time thinking about it, I haven’t managed to find anything equally witty. If anyone was expecting The Charge of the Light Adapter or For Whom the Cable Tangles, I’m afraid I came up short.

Organisations don’t necessarily keep their drawer in the kitchen, although I’ve worked in places where that wouldn’t surprise me (one organisation kept a lot of their important and confidential things on top of the staff fridge.) Instead, it exists across shared drives, document management systems, inboxes, data warehouses, collaboration platforms and folders with names such as “Archive”, “Old”, “Previous”, “Miscellaneous” and, most ominously of all, “Do Not Delete”.

it exists across shared drives, document management systems, inboxes, data warehouses, collaboration platforms and folders with names such as “Archive”, “Old”, “Previous”, “Miscellaneous” and, most ominously of all, “Do Not Delete”.

They store reports whose original authors left years ago, spreadsheets containing measures nobody can explain, presentations relating to programmes that ended before most current employees joined, and datasets collected for projects that everyone vaguely remembers but nobody can describe in any detail. They also accumulate multiple versions of the same document, each carrying increasingly desperate names intended to reassure future readers. I’ve always been fascinated by the way people name documents because the naming convention generally starts with optimism and ends with surrender. What begins life as Quarterly Performance Report quickly becomes Quarterly Performance Report_v2, then Quarterly Performance Report_v2_Final. The word "Final" should be understood in the same way historians use the phrase "the war to end all wars". It represents hope rather than reality. Before long there is Quarterly Performance Report_v2_Final_Updated, followed by Quarterly Performance Report_v2_Final_Updated_NEW, and eventually Quarterly Performance Report_v2_Final_Updated_NEW_USE_THIS_ONE, which somehow manages to be both more authoritative and less trustworthy than all the others. I’ve occasionally encountered documents whose file names appeared longer than the reports themselves. At that point the filename effectively becomes a written history of organisational indecision, preserved indefinitely in the same way as all the other information nobody has quite managed to throw away.

As with the cable drawer, none of this usually results from a deliberate decision to create clutter. Each item entered the system for a reason. Somebody needed the report, commissioned the analysis, requested the dashboard or asked for the presentation. At the time, creating it may have made complete sense. The problem is that creation tends to involve an explicit decision, whereas retirement often happens only if somebody remembers to make another one later. Usually, nobody does.

The problem is that creation tends to involve an explicit decision, whereas retirement often happens only if somebody remembers to make another one later.

Things therefore survive long after their original purpose has disappeared. A report remains on the shared drive because nobody knows whether someone still needs it. A spreadsheet is retained because it contains data that might be useful. A dashboard stays online because switching it off would require someone to accept responsibility for deciding that it no longer matters. Nobody is entirely sure what would happen if it disappeared, and uncertainty nearly always favours keeping things. Perhaps someone will ask for it. Perhaps we’ll need to look back at it. After all it’s possible the original project will restart (but unlikely).

As I argued in A Good Data Die, information assets shouldn’t automatically acquire immortality simply because nobody wants to decide when they should end. Reports, dashboards, datasets and documents all have lifecycles. I won’t repeat the entire argument here; the short version is that organisations tend to be much better at creating information than retiring it. “Perhaps” is responsible for an extraordinary amount of organisational storage.

The true cost of clutter isn’t simply storage. Digital storage is relatively cheap and, unlike the filing cabinets that once filled offices, another document doesn’t block a corridor or prevent a drawer from closing. Nobody trips over an obsolete dashboard on the way to a meeting. The real cost is attention: the time spent searching through irrelevant material, comparing different versions, checking whether a report is still current and asking colleagues whether anyone knows what a particular spreadsheet does. It’s the uncertainty created when five documents appear to answer the same question but contain slightly different figures. It’s the risk that somebody finds an old analysis, assumes it’s current and uses it to make a decision its original author never intended it to support.

The drawer becomes a problem not because it contains useless cables, but because the useful ones become indistinguishable from them. Organisational information behaves in much the same way. Keeping everything feels safe until somebody genuinely needs something and discovers that preservation and accessibility were never the same thing.

Keeping everything feels safe until somebody genuinely needs something and discovers that preservation and accessibility were never the same thing.

Occasionally, of course, an old cable does turn out to fit something. When that happens, the discovery is so satisfying that it appears to justify keeping everything else. You find the forgotten charger, hold it triumphantly above your head and announce that this proves the drawer was worthwhile. Nobody mentions the other seventy-three objects that remain unidentified (actually sometimes my wife does but I just ignore her). Similarly, an organisation retrieves one useful historical document from an archive and takes this as evidence that retaining thousands of irrelevant ones was a sound information strategy.

I’m not arguing that organisations should delete everything. That would be ridiculous, not least because there are legal, regulatory, operational and historical reasons for retaining particular records. Some information is important and must be managed carefully. Some data becomes more valuable over time, and some documents provide vital evidence of what happened, why decisions were made and what people knew at the time. The trouble begins when “some information needs keeping” gradually becomes “keeping everything is safer than making a decision”. Those aren’t the same thing.

Deciding what to retain requires thought. Somebody has to understand what the information is, why it exists, who uses it, how long it remains relevant and what risks are associated with keeping or deleting it. Keeping everything avoids that conversation. It looks cautious, but often it’s simply delayed decision-making dressed up as prudence.

Keeping everything ... looks cautious, but often it’s simply delayed decision-making dressed up as prudence.

And now, inevitably, we have AI.

You might be wondering how I managed to get from a kitchen drawer to artificial intelligence, although regular readers probably expected it. I can get from almost any household irritation to AI given enough time. My wife considers this one of my less appealing qualities, particularly after recently mentioning her dress buying habits.

AI changes the economics of information. Reports, presentations, meeting notes, summaries, policies and guidance that once took hours can now be produced in minutes. The question here, however, isn’t whether AI can produce information more quickly. It’s what happens when the cost of creating information falls dramatically but the effort required to evaluate, manage and eventually retire it remains largely unchanged.

Readers of The Dress That Nobody Needed will recognise part of that argument. In that article, I questioned whether reducing a three-hour task to ten minutes should automatically be treated as a productivity gain when the task may not have needed doing in the first place. I don’t intend to take the same route again. The cable drawer presents a different problem. Even where each report, presentation or summary seemed individually justified when it was created, somebody still has to decide what happens to it afterwards.

AI can create a detailed report, an executive summary of the report and a shorter summary for people who don’t have time to read the executive summary. It can turn all three into a presentation, produce notes from the meeting at which the presentation was discussed and draft an email directing everyone to the notes. It can do all of this quickly, efficiently and with sufficiently professional formatting to make the results look as though they deserve to exist. Each item may appear reasonable in isolation. Taken together, they become the organisational equivalent of another charger being placed in the drawer.

AI can ... make the results look as though they deserve to exist. Each item may appear reasonable in isolation. Taken together, they become the organisational equivalent of another charger being placed in the drawer.

This isn’t necessarily because the material is inaccurate. Much of the discussion around AI quite rightly concentrates on hallucination, bias and confident nonsense, but an organisation can drown in perfectly accurate information just as easily as inaccurate information. The quieter risk is volume. AI may allow us to create so many plausible, polished and individually defensible things that the genuinely useful ones become harder to identify among everything else.

Human beings have always found creation more satisfying than curation. Producing something feels like work. Reviewing what already exists, removing duplication and deciding that something needn’t be created at all leaves much less visible evidence. Nobody receives much recognition for reducing the number of documents in a folder. There are no awards for removing eight obsolete reports from a reporting cycle, although I continue to think there should be. People rarely update their performance objectives to say they successfully prevented the creation of twelve unnecessary dashboards. Creation leaves evidence. Restraint doesn’t.

The danger is that AI allows us to produce material on the vague possibility that it might prove useful. There seems to be little harm in generating it because it only took a few minutes. We might as well have it. Somebody may want it later.

That sounds remarkably similar to, “Keep the cable. It might fit something.”

When thousands of people make that decision every day, the organisation begins to fill with information faster than anyone can evaluate it. People receive AI-generated notes for meetings they attended, AI-generated summaries of documents they could have read and AI-generated emails explaining information contained in attachments that were themselves produced with AI. The content expands, but the amount of human attention available to interpret it remains stubbornly unchanged. AI can generate another eighty pages before lunch, but it can’t give the reader another three hours in which to read and understand them.

AI can generate another eighty pages before lunch, but it can’t give the reader another three hours in which to read and understand them.

This is why information governance, data management and critical thinking matter even more when production becomes cheap. An organisation capable of generating almost unlimited content needs better ways of deciding what should exist, where it should live, who owns it and how long it should remain. Otherwise, it risks using increasingly sophisticated technology to create a digital environment in which nobody can tell what is current, authoritative or worth reading.

AI may even appear to offer the solution. Organisations can install better search systems, create new naming conventions and ask AI to catalogue or summarise everything they’ve accumulated. Some of that will undoubtedly help, but a more intelligent system for searching through clutter is still a system for searching through clutter. Asking AI to summarise thousands of unnecessary documents may make the drawer easier to open, but it doesn’t explain why the unidentified adapters are still in there.

The next time I clear out our kitchen drawer, I intend to be more ruthless. I’ll identify what belongs to devices we still own, recycle what can be recycled and dispose of the rest responsibly. At least, that’s what I’ll announce at the beginning of the exercise. What will probably happen is that I’ll find three cables I recognise, fail to identify the remaining and put most of them back while assuring myself that progress has been made because the drawer now closes without the spatula being wielded.

Organisations may do something similar. They’ll reorganise folders, introduce a retention policy, buy a new information-management system and use AI to index the contents. There will probably be a steering group. Someone may even produce a dashboard to measure progress, followed by a monthly report explaining the dashboard and an executive summary for people who don’t have time to read the report. Before long, the attempt to reduce the information clutter will have produced an entirely new collection of information requiring its own folder.

Before long, the attempt to reduce the information clutter will have produced an entirely new collection of information requiring its own folder.

The answer isn’t simply to become better at finding everything we’ve kept. It’s to become better at deciding what deserves to survive. One day, someone will open the organisational equivalent of the kitchen drawer looking for the one thing they genuinely need. They’ll find hundreds of reports, thousands of summaries and countless documents created because producing them was quick, cheap and apparently harmless. Somewhere in that tangled mass, the information they need will almost certainly exist.

The danger isn't that we won't have the information. It's that when we need it most, we won't know which cable to pick out of the kitchen drawer.