Filing is a distasteful fact of life: We are constantly receiving information that we need to store for possible reference in the future, but depending on how we go about filing these documents, when it comes time to actually retrieve them, we may be facing a major headache. Productivity systems devote vast chunks of book space to explain to us just what we need to do to finally have the filing system of our dreams and we would like to now provide you with a final, one-step system that will eliminate your filing pain and bring order to the documents you will need to access later.

Who Needs to Start – a Filing System Review

The very first step to starting or improving your filing system is identifying what does not work with your current one. Are you spending too much time hunting for filed documents, because labeling hierarchies are not clear, and you have no idea if your car insurance papers are in the folder labeled “car,” “insurance,” or in some lower strata in a pile on your desk? What you will want to do first is find out where and how you are filing at the moment. Take a second and jot down all of the places you keep your reference documents. Even if the place is something like “filing cabinet,” if you have one at work and one at home, make a note of them both. Potential places could be, but are not limited to: Filing cabinets (work and home), folders, My Document folders on your computer, email boxes, rolodexes, and big, unruly piles amassing like paper haystacks.

Make sure you catch all areas, because people often make the mistake of only including the places where they are officially filing—but if you have a stack of unopened/opened mail on your coffee table, for instance, getting bigger and bigger, that has become an undesirable collecting point for material you wish to reference!

Pruning- a Filing System with Hierarchies

Once we have identified the places we keep the materials we wish to reference, we can get to work on making the system more efficient and tailoring it to our needs. What takes the most time, but may be the most effective in the long run when setting up the system is establishing folder hierarchies and divisions before we have an item we want to file into that category. Many productivity systems, including David Allen’s Getting Things Done, recommend creating a new folder when the need arises. The problem with this is that we may find ourselves creating duplicate folders, or folders that, in our laziness, we have not made specific enough.

Before you create your folder hierarchies, go through and establish exactly what divisions and labels you need for all the places you store reference materials: Your filing cabinets (home and office), your documents on your computer, and your email inbox. Establish categories that make sense to you, that you know you will need and use, and then when an item comes in, you will be required to be more discerning in where you file it. This method also eliminates cross-referencing folders, or folders that differ only insignificantly from each other. The filing system should work to filter out the things that are only cluttering up space and files; these things need to get thrown away…

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