How to organize paperwork?
Please share any ideas on the best way to organize your paperwork and how you do it yourself. By the end of the day I have a pile to sort out and I'm sure it could be done better.
Do you have baskets or files, or do you keep everything online and have very little physical paperwork? Please suggest anything that could streamline the process and make it faster. I'm a big fan of Post-its and that's not the most efficient way to take notes but sometimes I need to write it down there and then or it slips my mind.
Any ideas would be appreciated for simple systems. Thanks!
The first pileis the immediate attention pile and I sort that pile out before I do anything else - everything gets attended to and placed in their files.
The other pile is attended to later in the day - I set aside a specific time of the day to attend to these.
The trick is to have a good filing system and place your papers into it as soon as you sort them, then go through it every month and throw out anything that you will not be using, and placing long term stuff into a seperate file.
Sounds complicated but it is important to keep everything where you can find it easily and not to allow clutter to build up.
I am ultra ungorganised naturally and run several projects at once so have to rebel against myself.
This is what I do.
Incoming paperwork
I try and save as much as possible onto PDF and have a filing system on my computer under office then accounts and the year of accounts. I have three folders here accounts, purchases and sales. In the purchases and sales folder I have added and not added folders. I simply save to the not added when I bug and move it over when I have added them to my account sheet.
For paper work offline
I have an expanding folder with labels on bank, credit card, utilities, invoices etc you can get about 20 different categories in the large expanding files and as soon as something comes in it goes straight into there.
Jobs I need to do.
I have a little box I bought from paperchase but a shoe box will do and a little note pad. I have divided the box into 4 sections and labelled then 1, 2, 3 and 4 to represent urgent and important, urgent not important, not important and urgent, not urgent not important. I put my job on a the little note pad (same size as a postit) and pop it in the relevant square and go through the jobs as I pull them out of the box in order of the 1, 2, 3, 4. This way I naturally prioritise and get more done.
Hope this helps