Business and Work

Tip No. 184: Conquer Your Paper Piles

Are teetering piles of bills, reports, receipts and magazines creating chaos on your desktop, shelves and tabletops? As soon as you get one pile cleared away, does it immediately reappear somewhere else, as though a poltergeist had plunked it there? The fault lies with your system (or lack thereof). Conquer those piles once and for all, step by step, sheet by sheet—no exorcisms required.

Steps

Tackling the piles

1. Deal with new papers first. No matter how high the old piles are, begin by devising a system for the new arrivals.
2. Decide immediately what to do with each piece of paper that comes across your desk. Do not postpone these decisions. Paper piles are messy monuments to a long series of small procrastinations.
3. Act on each decision. Pick up that piece of paper and sign it, forward it, scan it, file it or trash it. Decoupage a wall with it, if you like, but don’t toss it onto a pile.
4. Use a stepped desktop file if you’re determined to keep some papers close at hand. But don’t just stuff the file sections with loose sheets. Put them in labeled folders first, then in the stepped file.
5. Take a deep breath. Once you are faithfully dealing with new papers in a systematic way, haul out all the unfiled, deeply piled older papers and—in either one marathon session or a series of shorter ones—take each ancient sheet through your newly devised system.

Stopping the influx of paper

1. Submit invoices via e-mail attachments. They’ll arrive at their destination instantly; you may even get paid more quickly.
2. Use your contact-management program or PDA for storing notes and to-do lists. Retrieving the information is far easier than searching through a snowdrift of scratch pad notes.
3. Scan business-card information into a contact-management program. If you don’t want to invest in a scanner, you’ll need to enter information manually—but you’ll be richly rewarded for your time when you need to find a contact and can remember only the person’s first name or the company’s location.
4. 4. Limit your hoard of business magazines and journals. Keep only current issues if the publications archive articles on their Web sites.

Tips

Label inbox trays so that an assistant can easily make sense of your system and sort papers into them. No assistant? Train yourself to sort your mail or the contents of your briefcase and put papers in the appropriate trays.

Use a highlighter to mark pertinent information as you read the mail. Type the highlighted information into your computer, then toss the paper. Print the notes out and work them into your planning calendar or to-do list.

Who Knew?

Get rid of your fax machine. Use a software program to send and receive faxes via e-mail, then only print out what you need to.

Put your printer on a diet.

If you are constantly refilling its paper tray, you’re printing out too many e-mails and documents. Ask yourself if you need a hard copy before you press the print button.