Get It Together 

January 27, 2000

By Liz Kelley Kerstens, CGRS

This column is posted on the Clooz.com Web site with permission of MyFamily.com. The column was originally posted on the Ancestry.com Web site.

Piles, Piles, Everywhere Piles of Paper!

Now that you've got your desktop cleaned off, it's time to tackle those piles of papers. I'm assuming you have piles of papers that have become unmanageable, otherwise you likely would not be reading this column. Believe it or not, paper piles are primarily a time management issue, and only secondarily an organizing issue. Take a look at one of your piles and think back to when that pile began to grow. You might have thought, "I don't have time to deal with these papers right now, I'll just set them aside and take care of them later." But the time has not yet arrived, and without some help, the time may never arrive.

You may be surprised to learn that taking the time to get those piles organized and filed will save you minutes even hours later when you need to find something. How many times have you rifled through stack after stack of the wrong papers trying to find an important document for your taxes or insurance company? Who has that kind of time to waste? Let's try to make some sense of those piles.

If you've been reading the past several weeks of this column, you'll know about the method suggested to clean off your desktop by setting up temporary and permanent action files. If you haven't read the columns, I suggest that you do. They are archived at http://www.ancestry.com/learn/. Last week's column, especially, will explain the theory about setting up files using a numbering system rather than an alphabetical system. It's very likely that your current filing system is set up alphabetically. If that system works well for you, then you just need to take the time to file your papers. But, I'm willing to bet that your filing system isn't working for you, which is why you have piles of paper scattered about.

There are many reasons why filing systems become outdated and unusable, which, it turn, leads to the proliferation of paper piles:

--Individual files become unwieldy over time without being culled for no-longer-usable papers.
--File folder labels are too generic, such as "insurance" instead of "health insurance," "life insurance," "car insurance." Files that are generic tend to accumulate lots of papers, which increase the amount of time you spend looking for papers within them.
--Many papers have no home in the system because the system hasn't kept up with lifestyle changes. As you have added new credit cards or cars, you haven't added folders to correspond with the new paperwork.
--If your filing system is used by more than just you, there's a good chance that files are labeled according to what made the most sense to the person that created the system. Those labels may not make sense to the other people that use the system. Before I switched to a numeric system, my husband and I had difficulty because I had labeled the file that contained all the information on our cars, "Car." He tried to find the file under A for "Automobile" and came up empty. This is an example of what can happen in any filing system when it's used by multiple people.

In next week's column, I'll discuss setting up your reference files so they can work better for you, and those who use your system.

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Original Article on ancestry.com