In your home office, do you find yourself buried by clutter? Do you feel unorganized and don’t know what to do to get organized? You’re not alone.
Working from home can present unique challenges. Filing systems, both digital and tactile, are things that must be conquered early on in order to maintain and keep yourself productive. I can hear your thinking now, “HOW to I go about doing THAT?”. Let’s discuss.
Having a filing system for paper is a key element in any office structure. But my suggestion to you would be to try to keep the paper flow to a minimum. Scan and digitally file documents that can be handled that way. For some of us, it is much easier to have documents accessible in digital format rather than having to search through paper files. Scanning can assist us in becoming free of the clutter of paper.
But, (there is always a “but”) if you take all your data to digital format, be prepared to back up, and back up often. There are many services online that you can use to back up your important files. The one that I have been using for the longest time is Mozy. It allows unlimited backup for only $4.95 a month and has a “Home” version as well as a “Pro” version. There is also a “free” version that allows 3GB of space. Mozy is dependable and can be configured to back up anything on your computer. You can schedule your backups to occur daily or weekly: it’s completely up to you. Mozy runs in the background and silently backs sp a the times that you have designated.
Going digital is a great way for getting out from under your clutter. In my next article, we’ll discuss what to do with those paper files that you must keep!
Kris Rowlands is a Professional Productivity & Organization Coach. With over 20 years experience, she can most certainly help you to become all that you want to be! Please visit her blog, Fresh Focus...On Productivity! to view the GTD and Organization products that she has created, as well as scheduling one-on-one time with Kris. Your confidentiality is guaranteed. Let her know what you need and you can make it happen!
Great post about clearing office clutter. Have you ever heard of/used Neat Receipts. I am thinking of starting to use it as I have a river of paper running through my office on a daily basis. I’d love to cut that way down. I have 2 redundant BU drives attached to my computer. Thankfully I have never had to restore anything and hope I never have to. Thanks for the thoughts about office clutter.
@Michelle
Tools such as Neat Receipts do make a difference. Two for the Mac that I like are Yep and DEVONthink.
I believe that it is better to make sure the docs are all indexed (via OCR and PDF keywords) and stored in a reasonable folder structure.
The problem is that document management systems use proprietary metadata (e.g. the tags and such), so if you switch to another product you will lose much of the metadata.
Tad Harrison’s last blog post..What should you have in your toolbox?