How to manage all the paper that comes into your life.

by Bill Brautigam

Over the last thirty years, it has been my unpleasant experience to see some desks buried under mountains of paper that required attention of some sort—always tomorrow, which, of course, never comes. One of these desks was mine. Mine, many times over, I might add, until I developed some sure-fire techniques to facilitate processing and disposing of unnecessary paper. The problem with paper is determining just what can be thrown out and, more importantly, just when it can be gotten rid of. It seems the more important I thought I was becoming, the more paper I was being inundated with on a daily basis. My significance seemed to be inexorably tied to how much waste paper I was receiving. I was so insecure, I became afraid to throw anything out, for fear it would prove to be my undoing and demonstrate what an ineffectual manager I had become. I was, in essence, believing my own unpublished press notices, and lived in fear you all would see through the fallacies contained therein.

I developed a foolproof, simple method to handle the seemingly massive amounts of inter-office and external mail I received on a daily basis, even when I was not at work. I first started by implementing my own priority tracking system. In plain English, all I did was either do something with each and every piece of correspondence/note I received, when I received it, or I forwarded it to my "do something with this in the future" pile. Herein lies the heart of the process, as well as the downfall of so many of my associates. Before the item can go in the "do something with this in the future-week 1" folder, it is manually dated for "date received by me" and then, there is a 1" x 1¼" green "Post-It" note attached to the upper right-hand corner. It is then placed in a manila folder with all the other "do something with this in the future" deferred items. Once a week, on a particular day picked by me, I take this folder and replace every green "Post-It" note with a 1" x 1¼" red "Post-It" note, saving the green one for future use. The items that now have the red "Post-It" note are put in a "do something with this in the future - week 2" folder, thus making the "do something with this in the future - week 1" folder available for this week’s incoming deferred mail, correspondence, notes or message items. Now the magic begins! On the next week, I move all the items that I have let take up space on my desk for the last 13-20 days from the "do something with this in the future - week 2" folder and transfer them to the waste basket. If I looked at them three or more times and could not figure out what to do with them, then they are obviously not worth the importance I have been placing on them, and getting rid of them is the action they merit. Keep in mind, you are free to interrupt this process at any time and just throw out whatever you want before it reaches maturity as a piece of recognizable trash!

We will next explore techniques for handling the items that were promptly handled at first glance and then stored in a permanent file folder. All legitimate, permanently stored documents are exempted from further handling/culling. Examples of these types of documents are accounting, legal, purchasing and corporate records and should be stored in a separate file area and appropriately marked as being "permanent records". Seek guidance from your lawyer and/or accountant for permanent record retention requirements for the Federal Government, your state government and/or your local government. Keep your permanent records in accordance with the most restrictively long requirement. All other type records may be considered time sensitive and of a non-permanently retained nature, e.g. meeting notes, time sensitive product information, general correspondence of relatively unimportant historical or future importance, and letters of inquiry. This is a subjective judgment area, but discretion is stressed, favoring non-retention of "trash". Whenever I put papers in non-permanent record folders, as differentiated from those marked as "permanent records", I two hole punch them and affix them with an "ACCO brand fastener" to the folder with the most recent filing, always on top. The first benefit of doing this is that anyone desiring a piece of information is obliged to take the entire folder, which minimizes the chance of loss due to mis-filing when returned, as well as the chance of loss due to general misplacement, or being tossed out as unnecessary paper. The second benefit to this is that I get the chance, once a year, to throw out those pieces of paper which are no longer of importance/value to me. Every month I go through all the folders for two letters of the alphabet, beginning with "A & B" in January (W, X, Y & Z are done in December). This helps prevent storing long term, no longer needed, "valuable" paper in files in lieu of properly putting them in the trash can when they are only of "limited future informational benefit" and now worthy of that level of storage.

Following these simple steps has cleared my desk of 50-70% of its former clutter and made my storage files easier to use and retrieval of information much more expeditious. All of this takes some getting used to, but more importantly, a lot of personal commitment and discipline is put into effect. Try this for the New Year and let us know how you do using these simple techniques.