Sunday, January 06, 2008

10 ways to tidy your paperwork

Writer's Desk I by Joaquin Mateo
Writer's Desk I

  1. Make yourself a cup of beverage of your choice and look at your desk area.
  2. Get a large box and put everything in it which will leave you with a clean desk.
  3. Only put back what is useful and works for you.
  4. Use plastic folders for documents and label them ( in my case to file, to do, to order, to pay).
  5. Put all your office tools ( stapler, paper,cellotape, envelopes, ink cartridges etc), in a neat order so you can access them when you need to.
  6. If you have a filing cabinet, separate business and personal.
  7. For business ; categories could be suppliers, customers, accounts, procedures
  8. For personal :utilities, banking,taxation; choose what system works for you.
  9. Whatever is left in the box; recycle, reuse or gift away.
  10. Organise your computer and email inbox in the same way. It may not work for others but you will know how to categorise it so it works for you.

This really reduced my stress levels and when stuff arrives, it gets filed in the plastic folders and I know exactly what to do with them.
More tea.....

For some continuing tips on organising your workspace you could look at the following websites :
flylady
Marcia Francois
Organising your workspace
eliminate chaos in your inbox

1 comment:

Marcia Francois said...

Anne, thanks for linking to me. I was just checking webstats and noticed your blog standing out.

Thanks so much - hope you and your readers find lots of great tips to sort out your paper - there is also a link on the Organising Queen blog to an article I wrote on paper control! It is a continual work in progress, I'm afraid :)