Nov
How To Organize Your Paperwork
Posted by
Lorraine Pirihi
Many people have a huge challenge coping with the incoming paperwork. (Whatever happened to the paperless office?).
Paperwork lands on your desk and somehow finds its way into your in-tray. Eventually the in-tray becomes so high it explodes and ends up all over your desktop. That’s because you avoided taking action on those messy pieces of paper the moment they arrived. Now you have no option but to sort through the explosion and tidy up the pile or actually do something with the paperwork.
It’s also frustrating when you need to search through the pile to look for information someone has asked you about. Many times I’ve contacted people to follow them up and I can automatically picture their desktop as they search their in-tray for the information I’ve sent them.
How can a pile of paper cause you so much stress? If only you could organize the paper so that it would disappear! Looking at it is enough to raise anyone’s blood pressure. Well here are a few organizing tips to help you tame the paperwork.
Purchase a large vertical wire step file (available from stationers)
Sort through your in-tray/s or piles and organize the paperwork into similar categories, ie.
Correspondence
Reading
Clients
Invoices
Staff
Label manila folders with the above categories.
Place folders into step file.
Now you’ll have all your work to do sitting in manageable files. It’s much more effective than shuffling piles of paper.
This simple but practical device saves my accountant 2 hours per week. Do you know what that means to an accountant who charges out at $100 per hour?
Save Two Hours / Week @ Hourly Rate of $200
2 HRS/WEEK = $200
= 8 HRS/MTH = $800
= 96 HRS/YR = $9,600
You don’t need to be an accountant to understand the significance of saving a small amount of time and the impact it has overall. It’s always the little things in life – the one percenters which make the difference.
Lorraine Pirihi is Australia’s Personal Productivity Specialist and Leading Life Coach. Her business The Office Organiser specialises in showing small business owners and managers, how to get organised at work so they can have a life! Lorraine is also a dynamic speaker and has produced many products including “How to Survive and Thrive at Work!”
To subscribe to her free ezine visit http://www.office-organiser.com.au
This article may be reproduced providing it is published in it’s entirety, including the author’s bio and all links. For further information please contact Lorraine Pirihi; lorraine@office-organiser.com.au
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I agree completely with Lorraine’s suggestion. A few other categories you might consider are:
– Calls, Phone Calls, Calls to Make, etc.
– Decisions to make
– Waiting on Response
– Data Entry
– Banking
– Order, Buy, Purchase, etc.
– Write, Fill Out, etc.
By categorizing your action items you can make quick switches in activities without wasting your time on figuring out what it is that you want to do with each piece of paper.
One other tip. When you put your papers in each folder or envelope, mark in the upper right corner little memory joggers. Often, we will file a paper in an action folder and then when we go to look at it we have forgotten the specific action that we wanted to take. By writing in the upper corner, we do not have to remember later.
To your success!
Steph