I've managed to set up my desk at home for GTD but my desk at work is driving me crazy. I'm a graduate student who works in a university research lab. My desk is set up so that I have three shelves above my desk(two of which I can see easily), my desk (which I would say is a little over three feet wide), one small drawer under my desk where I keep my office supples, and a bookcase to the side of my desk which contains two shelves.

The problem I am running into is in managing my filing system. I have tons of research articles which are currently organized in stacks of manilla folders above my desk. When I need to find an article I have to take down the stack and go through and check each folder label. Needless to say its annoying and not conducive to me wanting to add more folders to the stack.

So my question is does anyone else have an office not suited for adding a file cabinet (I've thought about it but there is no space since the space under my desk is taken up by my legs) and how have they come up with a work-around to this problem?