Admin/office manager types: your best filing/archiving/sorting/weeding tips here please...

[WilfSell]

Because I have precisely 4 more hours tomorrow to finish sorting my office.

I have managed to chuck LOTS of paper but I have a finished project with LOTS more that I need to sort out. And I have no bloody idea where to start. It all has to stay in my office, nowhere else to store stuff...

We already have one and a half filing cabinets full, and there are five more boxes and a whole two shelves of ring binders and magazine boxes.

Help. It is OVERWHELMING me and I may have to just lie down and do nothing. And that would be bad.

Can you say what the subject is of your work?

The key is definitely being ruthless.
If I don't need to keep hard copies of documents for legal reasons (eg signatures etc.), then I keep electronic files, and keep these well-organised. [Making sure I back-up regularly and every 6 months or so have an extra copy back-up].

Put yourself in the position of someone who will need to refer to these in future. Why would they need to refer to them? What information might they be looking for, what sort of things will never be needed in future?

For me the three types of storage I use most regularly are:

• traditional suspension files in filing cabinet - tip keep them slim and well pruned, and make sure the folders are clearly labelled.
• box files - for larger stacks of documents. But again keep them regularly pruned.
• ring binders.

The best tip I ever received is to try and minimise the number of times you handle a piece of paper. So when it arrives on your office, if it is just giving you info and you will not need to refer to it again, then just bin it immediately. If you can, then deal with the item straight away and file/bin appropriate immediately.

Do not file pieces of paper in the first place just for the sake of it. Unless you work in a legal, financial or medical area, there is often no need to keep endless paper records.

HTH

Thanks roisin, those are quite useful suggestions. I'm an academic and the project is a research project with lots of data that will be used again, plus also all the management stuff, including financial records which maybe would be useful to keep? I dunno.

Some of it I want to keep for my own reference for future projects, contacts, forms etc to show how I did things last time. But am a total paper hoarder so probably need to be more ruthless...

I have a kind of filing system normally which is to pile everything onto my desk for 3 months, then file into nice coloured folders, then pile them up for another 3 months, then bury those in a filing cabinet and forget I have them.

Hmm, not working for me is it?

And how much of your time do you spend filing, binning, sorting, weeding etc?

Oh you need the inserts for folders
1-10
or
1-15

Then you simply name all inserts ie, invoices, misc. umm..taxis?, water, etc etc.

Oh lack of space. yes i am having same problem at the moment.

Oh Wilf - do you fancy having a mutual FlyLady type sort-out pact? I have dire piles of paper at home, which is idiotic, as I am nearly a cynosure of orderliness at work.

Actually it's far from idiotic, and the context is precisely relevant - at work I have lovely Scope for Showing Off about my tidiness; at home I only have dh whose efficacy & neatness of filing are positively germanic. Grr.

Well ... hence, anyway, a pact might help. What do you think?

On the finance side, have you submitted your final report to the funding body and been paid any expenses you are owed?

Your school/central finance office should keep all the project records for at least current year + 6 years but best not to chuck immediately!

marialuisa, yes all finances cleared. I'll keep them till end of this financial year I think. Good plan.

Bink: yes! Let's have an office clearing pact.

I commit to doing (ie weeding, sorting, filing, binning) one box per week (can't do more as am VERY busy)

What do you commit to, Bink? Huh?

Felinefine, inserts? What language are you speaking? I only know of, um, hanging files. I think you will have to educate me in the ways of stationery porn...

Wilf: my first commitment is to dredge up (and dredge is appropriate as the bits are I suspect scattered among the Piles) what's needed for my tax return. This I will have dredged by, let's say, Sunday night? OK?

Thereafter, there is a project that needs to be done re verifying bank statements against receipts.

Incidentally: Do you go by projects, or by piles? - are you thematic, or do you do the Augean stable approach?

oh Wiiilf ...
I've dredged as per commitment.

And guess what! It revealed that, although I should do a tax return (per my own reading of the rules) and have done one every year for xxxxx, they didn't send me one.

So I phoned up, and after 40 tries I got, er, yes, Ms. Mmmm, we've got a note here to send you one out for 2008/9 but, well, I'm looking to see if there's anything on your file to explain why we haven't sent you anything for 2007/8, and I'll just action that now and of course you'll have 3 months from when you get it. Oh, and, you're Mrs. Errr, now are you? Oh, you're not, you still use Ms. Mmmm for work? Ah, seems it's been changed on the system, yes I understand not at your request, I'll just change that back now

Shambles huh. Anyway, rescued from potentially grim shambles because of our pact.

Thank you!

(And how are you doing, mmmmm?)

Get lots of leverarch files/ring binders and separators at hand.

For projects, I concentrate on a section called 'key documents'.

Any working documents leading up to that needs to justify its existence. Working documents comprise things like correspondence and minutes of meetings or drafts of project documents. By keeping working documents in sections by themselves, in a year or two, when you need to find more space, you can just junk these working docs sections enmasse and keep 'key documents'. Also agree that if you have an electronic copy, to bin the hardcopy, unless that document is a key document you want to keep for a complete hard copy set for easy future reference.

To create space, you should prune old files first. I find that whilst I cannot bear to throw things out right away. Once a year or 2 has elapsed, I am happy to be far more ruthless. Instant feelgood to create more space and could be the momentum you need going forward.