Take action on filing!

If you took the advice in the last article and organised your filing systems, you are now ready to make sure you have an effective action and follow up system in place.

There is no sense filing documents well if that’s the last thing you do with them. You should only keep essential documents so it follows that some action or follow up might be required.

Here’s how I make it easy for myself to keep track of what I’m working on and what I need to do.

Organise your documents by date

For paper documents, note the date on the top of it – this will make it easier to file and later locate without having to trawl through all the documents in a folder. Likewise for soft copy, try including a date in your file name when you save it.

A simple trick for keeping soft copy documents in order, particularly if the rest of the file name is the same as others, is to write the date backwards. When sorting file names, computers automatically sort numerically, so if you write a date of 11 May 2014 as 110514, it will come after the date of 01 December 2014 which becomes 011214. Even if you use the full day month format your computer will sort alphabetically and the months will be out of order. However, if you reverse the date as YYMMDD, making the above examples 140511 and 141201 respectively, they will be sorted correctly in chronological order.

Use “tickler” files, also known as the “43 folders” method

This is a handy system used by many people to organise files. You create 12 folders (one for each month of the year) and an additional 31 subfolders (for each day of the month).  Then fill each folder with the documents that you need to action or follow up on that day. At the beginning of each day, open the folder for that day. Take all the items out and move them into a “today” folder or onto your desktop. Then move the empty folder into its place in the next month.

If you can’t complete some work items by the end of the day, transfer them to the folder for the next convenient day.  At the end of each month take the items out of the next month’s folder and place them into the correct daily folders (which by now have all been moved forward a month as you progressed through the current month). This system of file management helps you keep track of your action and follow up items and also doubles as a diary. It can work in both hard and soft copy as long as you make it a habit to do it properly.

These methods work for me, but remember, for any system to be useful and effective it must be convenient for you. To a large extent, the methodology you use will depend on the nature of your business or the type of work that you do. So although there is no “one size fits all” solution to file management, these tips may give you a good starting point and allow you to customise a method that is effective for you.  In the long run, setting yourself up a simple filing system and habitualising your use of it, will help reduce your stress levels and make running your business and personal life easier.