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No matter how organized the rest of your office may be, its easy to feel like things are out of control when your desk is covered with papers. Although you may have heard rumors that the so-called "paperless world" has arrived, you and I both know that we have more paper coming at us than ever before. If you feel like paper is a pain in the butt, youre not alone. But the good news is if you put the right systems in place you can get the papers in your office under control.
In order to come up with strategies for how to deal with paper, we need to understand that paper has a lifecycle of its very own:
1. Papers come into your officeprinted from the computer, through the mail, or maybe brought in from meetings or conferences.
2. You sort the papersyou put bills in one stack, magazines and periodicals in another, correspondences you need to write into a third.
3. You process the papersyou pay bills, read magazines, or write letters.
4. You archive the paperspapers youre keeping long-term are put into your file cabinet or a box.
5. You remove the papersyou drop the junk mail in the recycle bin or shred sensitive documents.
These five stagesin, sort, process, archive, and outare the basic framework for your paper-management strategy. The key to managing your paper is to have dedicated space for each stage in your papers lifecycle: an inbox for all the things that are brand new; a "hot files area" to handle the sorting and the processing steps; an archival area for all the papers you want to hold onto long term; and an outbox for papers that are leaving your space entirely. Lets look at each of these in a bit more detail.
First is an inbox. This can simply be a basket, box, or tray where you place all incoming papersmail, printouts, etc.--keeping it all in one place so that it doesnt get lost in the chaos of your desk. When its time for you to actually sit down and process your new papers, you dont have to waste time searching your space. Aside from collecting your incoming papers, this first stage is completely action free.
Of course, many papers do require some action on your parta signature, a response, a payment. This is where most peoples systems tend to fall down. Typically there will be a "To-Do" stack, but that isnt always helpful because we simply have too many different kinds of actions we need to take on any given paper. I think its helpful to have a hot files area: This can simply be a desktop file box, maybe 6" to 8" deep, which is readily available in any office supply store. Inside of this file box you would have a series of hanging files; this enables you to break out your To-Dos into the different actions you need to take, with specific words for each action that your papers represent"Call" for phone messages, "Sign" for papers that require signatures, "Calendar" for events you need to add to your schedule, "Correspondence" for letters, and so on. Now, when you go through your inbox you can sort your papers into the specific actions that each paper needs. This makes it a lot easier for you to actually take those actions: now you can grab the "Call" folder and make all of the phone calls at once, or take the "Sign" folder and sign all of the documents at one time. Rather than going through a stack of To-Dos and going back and forth and shifting gears, now youre streamlining how youre dealing with your paper. Creating this system should save you a lot of stress, a lot of frustration, and hopefully quite a bit of time as well.
Once youve taken action on your papers via your hot files area, there will be some you need to hold onto. Those will go in your archivesa file box, file cabinet, or file drawer. This is your long-term, cold storage area. You can name these files whatever you likewhatever makes the most intuitive sense to you.
Of course not every paper you take action with needs to be stored. Some of your paper will need to be recycled, shredded, or sent back into the world. It is helpful to have a recycle bin and a shredder right next to where your new mail or paper comes in. For the papers that need to go back into the world (outgoing mail or interoffice documents), its best to have a corresponding outbox right next to your inbox. This would be where everything that youre taking back out into the world would live until youre actually leaving.
