Where’s My Desk Wednesday/A Filing System Part I

There is one organizing process that I hear over and over again that people just despise – and that’s filing papers. It’s just not fun and if not set up properly, it can become intimidating, time consuming and down right difficult.

In 2005, a company called Outsell, Inc., which is a research and advisory firm for the information industry, said that 5.4 billion hours are spent each year searching for information. They also found that in 2005 the average employee spent 11 hours per week searching for information, versus 8 hours in 2001. That’s a lot of wasted time!

Having a filing system that works will save you time, money and headaches down the road when you need that certain piece of paper from last year.

I didn’t want to squeeze all the information about creating a filing system into one post, so I am going to break it up into several parts. Today, we are just going to go over why most filing systems fail and people just give up on the idea.

Here are some common problems people face on a daily basis:

• You get a call from you boss asking for another copy of that document he sent you. You know for a fact that it is on your desk somewhere, or stacked over there on the top of the filing cabinet. You tell him you will send it right over and then you are in a state of panic looking for it.
• You are known in the work place or home as the person who always loses papers and you have hundreds of papers piled on your desk with sticky notes all over them.
• You have bags and bags of papers that need to be filed, but your filing cabinet is already stuffed and there is not an inch of room for new papers.
• One day you decided you were going to create a filing system, so you got busy and made 50 categories and now your system is so complicated you have given up.
• The DVD player you just bought is on the fritz and you can’t find the receipt or manual anywhere so that you can return it.
• Worst case scenario: The IRS comes a callin’. Ugh!

I am sure there are plenty more that we could add. Feel free to do so.

Here are some common situatuions that cause the paper filing problem:

• Lack of a plan.
• Inconvenient storage.
• Papers do not have an assigned place to be.
• Lack of time to file your papers.
• Filing papers is B-O-R-I-N-G!
• You are not educated on how to create a filing system. You tried the ABCD way and it just didn’t work.
• You’re assistant files your papers at work for you, bot not at your home. That’s your responsibility.
• You just don’t think filing is important.

If you are having difficulty with your filing system, define what the problem is first. After you have done that, you can then move on to creating one that works.

Next week we will talk about some of the basics like: arranging your office so that paper filing is easy, choosing the right filing equipment, and deciding how to categorize your files so that you actually know where everything goes.