Lord help us, we're spending the rest of March celebrating the seven desktop tools that are essential to managing paper in your office! I call these tools The Sorted Seven, and you can see an overview of the whole system here.
We begin at the point where paper enters your office, where its first stop should be: the In/Out/To File Sorter. I totally recommend the model shown here, because it has three open areas with a lot of space between them. I've put books, CDs, sections of the newspaper, even a t-shirt on these shelves with no problem.
Also, the horizontal arrangement (rather than an angle arrangement with slots) means that you can see everything, and that index card with the phone numbers on it won't get lost at the bottom of a tray. And there's a set of holes on the back to enable you to attach it to the wall if you need to save space on the desktop.
I call it the In/Out/To File Sorter (although I think its official name is the "three tier desk shelf") because that's how I've labeled the shelves from top to bottom. Here's a brief overview of how the system works.
IN: This shelf is where every piece of paper that enters your office lands. This is stuff you haven't seen. This is unopened mail. This is stuff your colleagues have handed to you, saying, "Can you look at this for me?" This is notes from a meeting you haven't had time to transcribe or review yet. This is a flyer HR has handed out to everybody. This is a temporary holding spot.
OUT: Once you're done with something and need to send it on to its next destination, it goes into Out. Also, if something doesn't belong in your office, it goes on this shelf so you'll have one dedicated place to look the next time you leave your office and need to take that thing to where it belongs. This is where outgoing mail goes, or the file that someone left in your office, or the DVD you borrowed last week. (I put my calendar there to remind me to take it with me when I leave the office.)
TO FILE: If you've gone through your In shelf and have found some stuff you don't want to toss and don't need to act on, but do want to hold on to (don't worry; we'll be discussing these decisions in detail in the days to come), then that stuff goes in To File. Since the stuff that needs to be filed isn't time-sensitive, it's okay to let it pile up a bit in To File until you've got a good stack of stuff to file, then spend 5-10 minutes filing.
The most crucial part of this sorter is the In shelf, and there is one essential rule for the In shelf: nothing ever goes back into In. Once you've taken it out of In, you have to make a decision about what to do with it (again, we'll talk about those decisions) and move it along the pipeline. Otherwise, your In shelf turns into a bunch of postponed decisions, and as my mentor Barbara Hemphill is very fond of saying, Clutter Is Postponed Decisions™. An In shelf that has turned into a clutter magnet is no use at all; if that happens, the system has pretty much broken down.
So that's how you use the In/Out/To File sorter. Think of it as the way station for paper in your office: the first place it goes when it arrives, the last place it goes before it leaves and the waiting room to catch the Filing Express.
Next time, we'll talk about the trinity of trash: your Wastebasket/Recycle Bin/Shredder. How to decide whether to get rid of something and how best to get rid of it.
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