What You Need to Know About FIling Basics

Looking to learn filing basics to help you keep papers and files in order?

Want a better relationship with the general process of filing?

Filing papers is an everyday occurrence in any home or office.

All the more reason to learn how to file papers the smart way so you can find what you need in a pinch!

In this post, you’ll find five simple filing basics to help make filing paper documents as easy as 1-2-3.

Make a “To File” Inbox.

If you want to keep things tidy in your office or at your desk, you’ll do well to make an inbox for yourself.

The idea behind this is inbox is to simply give items to be filed a temporary home.

You’ll keep recently processed documents contained and will prevent them from wandering about your workstation.

Create a “To File” inbox, and store it on the top of your desk, or a nearby counter.

Place any items to be filed inside this box. When the inbox in full, simply file items.

What’s more, there’s a huge bonus in creating and using a “To File” inbox, and that is locating items while they’re in transit.

A recently used document should only be in one of two places: filed away in a filing cabinet or in the “To File” inbox.

Create files with the purpose of retrieval.

Whenever you create a new file, or evaluate the contents of an existing one, take a moment to consider whether or not your future self will be able to easily retrieve the items.

If it’s not easy for you to figure out what should go inside the file now, guess what?

Chances are it will be even more difficult for you to figure out how an item should be filed in future.

Don’t make yourself guess the contents of a file. Be crystal-clear when labeling and creating files.

FilE documents in reverse chronological order.

Want to quickly locate documents in a pinch? Try this tip.

File time-sensitive documents, such as monthly bill stubs or payment records, by placing current items on top of older ones.

This not only makes it easy to file items, but to locate items as well, should you have any billing or account discrepancies in future.

Here’s how it works: the oldest record for a year (January) should be placed towards the back of the folder

The most current record for a year (the previous month’s stubs or records) should appear towards the front of the folder.

Keep active and inactive/archived files.

Stop wasting time wading through files you no longer use on a daily or weekly basis!

Remove inactive files from your main filing cabinet or filing storage area.

and place them in a secure, dead storage location or another section of your filing cabinet.

Weed/clean out files regularly.

This may seem obvious, but any filing cabinet or filing area can hold only so many pieces of paper, folders, or documents.

Set a regular schedule to review and clean/out your files.

You can do this either quarterly, semi-annually, or annually to keep all those papers in check.

How about you? What gives you most trouble when it comes to filing? Join the conversation and leave a comment below!

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About the Author

Rashelle

Rashelle Isip is a New York City-based productivity consultant who helps successful entrepreneurs and business owners manage their time and energy so they can reduce stress, work less, and make more money in their businesses. She has been featured in Fast Company, Forbes, NBC News, The Washington Post, NPR, and The Atlantic. Get her free guide, 5 Unexpected Things You Need to Organize a Work Notebook, by clicking here.

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