How to 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.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

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. See 2 Set Priorities.

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. See 185 Create a Flawless Filing System.

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

6. Submit invoices via e-mail attachments. They'll arrive at their destination instantly; you may even get paid more quickly.

7. 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. See 3 Write an Effective To-Do List.

8. 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. See 11 Organize Your Contacts.

9. Limit your hoard of business magazines and journals. Keep only current issues if the publications archive articles on their Web sites. See 52 Categorize Newspaper and Magazine Clippings.

Tips & Warnings

• 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. See 7 Deal With a Flood of Mail.
• 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.
• 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.

on 7/23/2006 When I come home from work, the last thing I want to do is deal with whatever bill or notice just arrived. I do open everything immediately and throw out the envelope it arrived in, because if you leave it unopened you could be missing a time sensitive deadline and you won't know until it's too late.

I have two shoe boxes - one for things that I need to do something about, like unpaid bills and another for things I just need to archive (scan), like insurance policy info. When the "to scan" pile box gets full, I spend some time scanning and e-filing them and then I shred the originals. I also use this time to make a backup copy of the folder with these documents. I handle the other pile on payday or as I have time. As I complete a task, I move that page from the "to do" box to the "archive" box.

Maybe this will work for you, too.

on 7/16/2006 Get a nice notebook for your desk and write down each day's transactions in it as they happen - post & e-mails received, details from telephone conversations, new contact details, bills paid & to be paid, and to-do lists. Remember to put the date on every day.Tick or highlight things you have done, asterisk important things. Using this simple system, you will be amazed how quickly you can access information when you need it.

on 11/22/2005 Buy a self-inking date stamp and stamp today's date in the upper right-hand corner of every piece of paper you handle. Should you later find yourself going through a stack of papers, it will be much easier to toss something if you know it's six months old rather than six days old. This is especially helpful for handwritten notes. Write all your notes on full sheets of paper, with a title and the date in the corner. I actually save all my notes, because it's easier than sorting them. I add each day's notes to the file, all in date order, and bundle them up at the end of the month. I throw out a month's worth once it's three months old. On the rare occasions that I have to dig up old notes, I can usually tell from my calendar when I was last handling the relevant issue, and can easily find notes from that day.