Pigeonholes & Paradigms

If you walk into any long-established school staff room in Britain, you'll likely spot them along one wall: a grid of small wooden compartments, each labelled with a teacher's name. These pigeonholes, once the lifeblood of internal school communication, now often hold a curious mix of outdated circulars, forgotten Christmas cards, and the occasional official letter deemed too important for email. Though increasingly redundant, they remain stubbornly present, like vestigial organs of institutional communication.

The humble pigeonhole embodies a fascinating duality. On one hand, it represents a system of order and efficiency, neatly sorting people and messages into their assigned places. On the other, it reminds us of our troubling tendency to do the same with human beings themselves, to ‘pigeonhole’ people into reductive categories that rarely capture their complexity.

This tension shows itself as we simultaneously celebrate individuality while relentlessly sorting humans into ever-more-specific boxes. We complain about being ‘pigeonholed’ even as we build sophisticated algorithms to classify and predict human behaviour. And as these physical message compartments gather dust, we drown in digital notifications while perhaps secretly longing for the constraints that pigeonholes once imposed.

Why They're Called Pigeonholes

I did a bit of digging and found that the term "pigeonhole" has a rather literal origin. These compartmentalised storage systems were named for their resemblance to dovecotes and columbaria, structures designed to house pigeons. Medieval and early modern dovecotes featured individual nesting spaces arranged in grid patterns strikingly similar to the organisational furniture that would later adopt their name.

As Richard Steele noted in a 1709 issue of The Tatler, "I... made my Nest in a Pigeonhole like a Letter-Box, which, being a very large Closet, gave me leave to Flitter up and down at discretion." The physical resemblance between message compartments and pigeon nesting boxes gave us a name that eventually evolved into a metaphor for our way of organising not just papers, but people.

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the metaphorical use of "pigeonhole" as a verb, meaning "to categorise or classify, especially in an overly rigid manner", to the mid-19th century. By that time, the physical object had become so familiar in offices and homes that it offered a ready-made metaphor for our human tendency to put everything, and everyone, in their proper place.

“There is no employing class, no working class, no farming class. You may pigeonhole a man or woman as a farmer or a worker or a professional man or an employer or even a banker. But the son of the farmer will be a doctor or a worker or even a banker, and his daughter a teacher. The son of a worker will be an employer - or maybe president.” Herbert Hoover

This etymological journey reveals something important: our tools for organising information often become templates for organising our understanding of the world and each other. The physical structures we create to manage complexity can subtly shape how we think about it.

The Constraints of the Box

The physical pigeonhole imposed meaningful constraints that our digital communication environments have largely eliminated. A pigeonhole could only hold so much, its capacity was immediately visible and inherently limited. When it filled up, something had to give. This simple fact created natural rhythms of attention and response that have vanished in our hyper-connected world.

Teachers once checked their pigeonholes upon arrival, during lunch, and before departing, creating natural processing cycles for information. You dealt with what came in to you in the morning, then moved on with teaching until checking again later. This rhythm aligned with human attention spans and the practicalities of the school day. The limited capacity of pigeonholes created a natural prioritisation system. Important memos stood out, and overflow signalled that immediate attention was required. Contrast this with email inboxes that expand endlessly, with urgent messages from the headteacher buried among promotional emails and unnecessary reply-alls.

Perhaps most importantly, pigeonholes were visible to everyone. Their fullness (or emptiness) provided immediate visual feedback about communication flow. A colleague could glance at an overflowing pigeonhole and recognise that now might not be the time for another request. Our digital communication load remains largely invisible to others, creating asymmetric expectations about response times and availability.

These limitations weren't bugs but features. They forced an intentionality in communication that we've largely lost. When preparing a staff memo required paper, photocopying, and physical distribution, school administrators considered carefully whether the message was necessary. Contrast this with the near-zero cost of sending an email to the entire staff distribution list "just for your information."

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesisers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.” E.O. Wilson

The Bombardment Problem

Our relationship with messages has become very different since the pigeonhole era. The average person now receives 144 emails per day according to a 2025 report. For teachers and school leaders, add in parent messages on lots of platforms, student submissions, department communications, safeguarding alerts, and various other channels, and the modern educator drowns in a sea of communications that would never have fitted in a physical pigeonhole.

We evolved to process information at a human pace, not at the speed of fibre optics.

There is a fundamental tension in our relationship with digital communication, which I am navigating myself on a regular basis. Our neurological architecture developed in an environment where information travelled at the speed of human legs or, at best, a galloping horse. Our brains simply haven't evolved to manage the constant barrage of information that characterises modern professional life.

Some organisations have begun to recognise this problem. Daimler implemented a ‘mail on holiday’ policy that automatically deletes emails sent to employees on holiday. The French government enacted a ‘right to disconnect’ law limiting after-hours work emails. These initiatives attempt to artificially reintroduce the constraints that physical pigeonholes once provided naturally.

Yorkshire Water introduced ‘Quiet Fridays’ when no internal meetings are scheduled and email use is discouraged - a modern attempt to recreate the rhythm of communication that pigeonholes once enforced. Such approaches acknowledge what we've lost in the transition from physical to digital messaging, such as natural limits that protected attention and created shared expectations about response times.

“No is a complete sentence.” Anne Lamott

Slowing Down the Message

The pigeonhole system, for all its limitations, had one significant virtue: it slowed things down. Messages required physical transportation, sorting, and delivery before they reached their destination. This created a natural buffer between sending and receiving, a space for reflection that's largely disappeared in our world of instant communication.

We see growing evidence that this loss of ‘friction’ in communication has real costs. A 2021 study by Microsoft Research found that rapid response expectations in workplace messaging apps significantly increased stress and reduced satisfaction among employees. The researchers noted that "the absence of natural pauses in digital communication creates an always-on expectation that wasn't present in earlier communication systems." And I think this has only gotten worse in the last four years. 

This insight resonates with the work of British psychologist Catriona Morrison, whose research on ‘digital cognitive styles’ suggests that constant connectivity may be altering our fundamental thinking patterns. Her work indicates that the rapid switching between tasks required by digital bombardment reduces our capacity for sustained attention and deep thinking, which are the very mental states required for complex problem-solving and creativity.

She did a great TED talk which you can watch here. 

Some innovative approaches aim to deliberately reintroduce this friction, which I am playing around with after listening to a brilliant talk from my friend, Andi Lewis, who was forced to slow down herself after suffering a cardiac arrest at just 50 years old, and who was brought back to her life by her 16 year old son. Incredible. 

• The Slow Email movement encourages batch processing of messages at designated times rather than constant checking. 
• Scheduled send features allow messages to be composed now but delivered later, creating breathing room for both sender and recipient. (It also gives breathing room rather than reactive answers that perhaps could have time to stew!)
• Email alternatives like Twist emphasise asynchronous, thread-based communication that doesn't demand immediate responses.

These approaches share a common insight that sometimes slower is better. The instantaneous nature of digital communication creates an illusion of urgency where none may exist. The measured pace of pigeonhole communication, with its natural delays and physical limitations, better matched our cognitive architecture and social needs.

Philosopher Matthew Crawford, in his exploration of attention in the digital age, argues that what is needed is not just better time management techniques, but a more fundamental reconsideration of the proper pace of human thought. The pigeonhole, with its inherent constraints, might offer a model for this reconsideration - not to return to paper-based systems, but to design digital tools that better respect human cognitive limitations. He also takes aim at the mass media:

“The media have become masters at packaging stimuli in ways that our brains find irresistible, just as food engineers have become experts in creating “hyperpalatable” foods by manipulating levels of sugar, fat, and salt. Distractibility might be regarded as the mental equivalent of obesity.” Matthew Crawford

The Psychology of Pigeonholing People

While the physical pigeonhole system imposed helpful constraints on communication, the metaphorical process of pigeonholing people imposes harmful constraints on how we perceive and interact with one another. When we pigeonhole others, we reduce complex, multifaceted individuals to single categories or traits: "the quiet one," "the troublemaker," "the maths teacher," "the dyslexic student." This tendency has deep psychological roots. As the British cognitive psychologist Frederic Bartlett demonstrated in his pioneering work on memory and schema in the 1930s, our minds naturally organise information into patterns or frameworks (schemas) to make sense of the world. These mental structures help us process new information efficiently by providing ready-made categories for understanding.

“Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organised past reactions and experience, and to a little outstanding detail which commonly appears in image or in language form. It is thus hardly ever really exact, even in the most rudimentary cases of rote recapitulation, and it is not at all important that it should be so.” Frederic Bartlett

While this cognitive efficiency serves us well in many contexts, it becomes problematic when applied to our understanding of other people. Our tendency to categorise people into groups and assign characteristics based on those groups can lead to prejudice, discrimination, and a failure to recognise individual differences within groups. In educational settings, pigeonholing can be particularly damaging. A student labelled as "difficult" or "lazy" early in their school career may find that perception following them for years, influencing how teachers interact with them and ultimately affecting their own self-concept and performance. Indeed, my lived experience as a “livewire”, “full on” and “never stops” were all down to “just being a boy” rather than a formal diagnosis and treatment for ADHD until I was 39. This phenomenon, known as "expectancy effects" or the "Pygmalion effect," has been well-documented in educational psychology.

British educational psychologist Susan Hart's work on ‘learning without limits’ addresses this directly, arguing that labelling children according to perceived ability or behaviour creates artificial ceilings on their potential. When we pigeonhole students, we often create self-fulfilling prophecies that limit what they believe themselves capable of achieving. This same dynamic plays out in workplaces, where being pigeonholed into a particular role or skill set can limit opportunities for growth and development. Research by organisational psychologist Herminia Ibarra suggests that breaking free from these imposed identities often requires what she calls "possible selves" - opportunities to experiment with new roles and identities that expand beyond the pigeonholes others have placed us in.

It’s why I spend so long talking about alternatives generation when I do my FRAME coaching - we tend to stay in our known and comfortable schemas, lenses, paradigms or whatever we call our zone of proximal development!

The consequences of pigeonholing go beyond individual experiences though to shape societal structures. Philosopher Miranda Fricker's concept of ‘epistemic injustice’ describes situations where someone is wronged specifically in their capacity as a knower. When we pigeonhole people based on characteristics like gender, race, or social class, we often dismiss or devalue their knowledge and perspectives, creating what Fricker calls a "credibility deficit."

When we pigeonhole others, we treat them as objects to be categorised and managed rather than as subjects with their own rich inner lives and unique perspectives. We reduce the "Thou" to an "It"; something to be understood and controlled rather than encountered in an authentic relationship.

The Paradox of Categories

But this creates a fascinating paradox: we need categories to make sense of our complex world, yet these same categories can limit our understanding when applied too rigidly. The organisational pigeonhole represents this paradox perfectly as it brought necessary order to communication while simultaneously symbolising the reductive nature of rigid categorisation.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's concept of ‘family resemblances’ offers one way to navigate this paradox. It was an extension of his language games philosophy which I loved to teach at A-Level back in the day. Wittgenstein argued that many concepts cannot be defined by a single set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Instead, they are united by overlapping similarities, like members of a family who share resemblances without any one feature being common to all. This more flexible approach to categorisation allows us to recognise patterns without forcing everything into rigid boxes.

“I can think of no better expression to characterise these similarities than 'family resemblance'; for the various resemblances between the members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way. - And I shall say: 'games' form a family.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Similarly, psychologist George Kelly's personal construct theory suggests that we all develop our own unique systems of constructs, bipolar dimensions along which we understand the world. Kelly emphasised that these constructs should be permeable, allowing them to be revised in light of new experiences. A permeable construct system allows us to categorise without pigeonholing, to make sense of the world while remaining open to its complexity and unpredictability.

The field of intersectionality, developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw and further explored by others, offers another approach to this paradox. Intersectionality recognises that people belong to multiple social categories simultaneously, and these intersecting identities create unique experiences that cannot be understood by considering each category in isolation. This framework helps us move beyond simple pigeonholing to recognise the complex, multifaceted nature of human identity.

Finding Balance

The dual nature of pigeonholes as both useful organisational tools and symbols of reductive categorisation challenges us to find balance in both our communication systems and our understanding of one another. For our communication systems, this means designing digital tools that incorporate some of the beneficial constraints of physical pigeonholes while taking advantage of technological capabilities. Imagine email systems with visible ‘capacity limits’ that encourage senders to consider whether their message is truly necessary. Or communication platforms that make workload visible, helping colleagues understand when someone might be overwhelmed by requests.

Some organisations are already moving in this direction. Two hundred UK companies have signed up to implement a permanent four-day week for all employees at full pay, compressing communication into fewer days. Digital platform Basecamp has implemented "library rules" for their workplace - long periods of quiet focus with designated times for discussion and collaboration. These approaches acknowledge that human attention is finite and valuable; something the physical limitations of pigeonholes once made self-evident.

For our understanding of people, finding balance means developing what philosopher Iris Murdoch called "unselfing". This is the moral attention required to see others as they truly are, rather than as projections of our own categories and expectations. It means holding our necessary categories lightly, recognising them as provisional tools rather than fixed realities.

In practical terms, this might mean regularly questioning our initial impressions of others, seeking disconfirming evidence for our categorisations, and creating opportunities for people to surprise us by showing aspects of themselves that don't fit our preconceptions. It might also involve the growth mindset we often return to in these articles, believing that people's capabilities are not fixed but can develop over time. It is possible to imagine a future where digital tools respect human cognitive limitations rather than exploiting our attention weaknesses. And this is because our tools don't just help us think; they shape how we think. The design of our communication systems profoundly influences our cognitive patterns and social relationships.

Similarly, our approach to understanding people continues to evolve. Advances in fields like narrative psychology, which emphasises the stories we construct to make meaning of our lives, offer alternatives to rigid categorisation. Rather than seeing people as collections of traits or members of categories, narrative approaches recognise the dynamic, unfolding nature of human identity.

Rom Harré's positioning theory offers another promising direction. Harré argues that rather than having fixed identities, we constantly position ourselves and are positioned by others through discourse. This dynamic approach acknowledges both the social nature of identity and its fluidity. We are not static entities to be pigeonholed but active participants in ongoing conversations about who we are and can become.

Going Forward

The pigeonhole, both as a physical object and metaphor, invites us to reflect on how we organise information and understand one another. Its constraints remind us that limitations can sometimes be valuable, creating necessary structure and rhythm in our communication. Its grid-like arrangement warns us of the dangers of reducing complex individuals to simple categories.

As we navigate an information environment radically different from the one the pigeonhole was designed for, we might look to this humble wooden structure for wisdom. Not to return to paper-based systems, but to incorporate its insights into our digital future. And as we interact with the rich diversity of human beings around us, we might remember the limitations of our categories, holding them lightly enough that we can still see the person beyond the pigeonhole.

This might look like a world where we:

1. Recognise the value of constraints. In a world of endless digital expansion, deliberately limiting communication can improve quality and reduce stress. Consider implementing time boundaries for email checking, quiet hours for focused work, or capacity limits that force prioritisation.

2. Make workload visible. The visibility of physical pigeonholes created natural feedback about communication volume. Find ways to make digital workload visible to colleagues, creating similar awareness and empathy.

3. Slow down to think better. The natural delays in pigeonhole systems created space for reflection. Resist the urge for immediate responses, and consider tools that deliberately introduce beneficial friction into communication.

4. Hold categories lightly. While categorising is necessary for understanding, rigid pigeonholing limits our perception of others. Regularly question your initial impressions of people and look for evidence that challenges your categorisations.

5. Seek complexity. Human beings never fit neatly into single categories. Practise seeing the multiple, sometimes contradictory aspects of others, recognising their complexity rather than reducing them to simple labels.

6. Design for humanity. Our communication tools should respect human cognitive limitations rather than exploiting our attention weaknesses. Support technologies and practices that align with our psychological needs rather than undermining them.

The pigeonhole stands as both warning and inspiration. It’s a reminder of how easily we reduce complexity to manageable units, and a model for how thoughtful constraints might actually enhance rather than limit human connection and understanding.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ And with that, I am turning my email notifications off on my home screen. Done. ☑️