“A filing system is absolutely essential.”
–Randy Pausch, Time Management
Unfortunately everyone has to deal with some number of physical papers, CDs, and so on. Enter the personal filing system.
Most filing systems fail out of the gate because they don’t optimize for insert time. Since starting my filing system two years ago I’ve organized 112 documents, and in those two years I’ve probably only retrieved a document five or ten times.
So here’s what I would suggest:
- Grab a box, a bunch of document-sized baggies, and a sharpie pen.
- Whenever you want to add a document, put it in a new baggy, write an autoincremented number on the front with the sharpie, and throw it in the box. That’s it.
- If you like you can keep an index of the documents on your personal wiki. Keep a table with three columns: document number, date added, and a text field description of what’s in the baggie.
For me this method beats the crap out of the traditional filing system with the filing folders, little pieces of plastic, and perforated sheets of labels.
Here’s a sample list of things in my filing system, pasted from the descriptions in my index.
- Zeo / personal sleep handouts / paper / sleep tracking forms
- Lenovo x61 recovery DVDs
- Stock certificate
- Friend’s memorial service handout (this one for sentimental value)
- Heavily used pocket/folded maps of Stockholm and Hamburg. (again for sentimental value)
- 2009 Income Tax binder, federal and state
- Christmas cards, 2009
- Etc
Ok, that’s it for now. Please share your own document organization tips in the comments! Thanks!
"Optimizing for insert time" is a good trick that I learned a few years ago. I save all my bills, bank statements, and receipts in a big shoebox. I just throw them in there when I've got one to save, which means it's roughly organized chronologically. I save dozens of items a month, but almost never need to retrieve them. When I do, it may take an extra 10 minutes, but I save far more time by optimizing insertion.
Posted by: Ryan Park | 01/03/2011 at 04:52 PM
Use a service like OfficeDrop to keep your office paperless.
They allow you to send in your documents via USPS or email in order to get them into their system.
Also, any paper docs when scanned are fully searchable. They allow you to tag and organize your docs as well.
Plus, they've recently added Google Docs and Evernote integrations.
It's a great service, period.
Posted by: John Gannon | 01/03/2011 at 06:12 PM