FILING: How To Find What You Need When You Need ItWritten by Monica Ricci
Filing: How To Find What You Need When You Need ItNobody enjoys filing, at least nobody I?ve ever met. But like it or not, keeping track of paper information is crucial to living an organized life or running a successful business. The biggest problem most people have with filing isn?t how to store it, but how to retrieve it. So how do you create a filing system that works? Here are three basic steps to get you started. 1. Sort your material into BROAD TOPICS. (common categories are money, house, health, auto, hobbies/interests, family history/identification, insurance, etc.) Try to keep it to about ten broad categories. The plastic tabs on your hanging files should be at FAR LEFT side on FRONT flap of folder, not rear one. This makes folder easier to open, you simply grab tab that you want and pull it toward you to open it. The FAR LEFT tab position is a visual cue for you that this folder begins a broad category. Also, as you are sorting, this is perfect opportunity to PURGE your files of old, outdated, and irrelevant information that has been taking up space. 2. Then, sort each broad category into smaller subcategories. For example, MONEY might be subdivided into Banking, Retirement, and Investments while INSURANCE may contain subcategories Car, Health, Homeowners and Life. For each hanging folder you have in this section, place your plastic tab in CENTER position on front of folder. The center position is a visual cue for you that folder is a SUBcategory of something larger.
| | LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION FILES! Organizing Your Office By TaskWritten by Monica Ricci
Lights, Camera, ACTION FILES! Organizing Your Office By TaskYour desk is most important part of your office. It is a work space, however many people make mistake of using desk as a storage space! In order for you to be focused on task at hand, desk should be clear and free of distractions, such as piles of paper, books, notes, bills, etc. How can you manage these items without losing them, find information you need to work on, and still have a clear work space? Action files! Action files are merely temporary homes where papers live until they either end up filed away permanently or thrown away. Your action files may sit on far corner of your desktop, they might be in your file drawer, or in baskets on credenza. Whichever method works for you is fine. Label them according to what actions fit best with your industry. (ex: CALL BACK, TO FILE, TO READ, TO MAIL, TO PAY, etc) Clearly label your files so you will always know what is in them, and just as importantly, labels will remind you what not to put in them. An important add-on to your action files is a HOLDING file. This will be a key player in organization of your office space, as it will hold all information that requires an action some time in future, rather than immediately. For example, if you get an invitation and map to a seminar you?d like to attend in a few months, how do you keep that information without losing it or forgetting about event entirely? This is precisely where ?Holding file? comes into play.
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