How To Organize Your Paperwork

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.