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Take Control of Your Paper in 3 Easy Steps

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Do you have piles of paper on your desk. Many do and don't know how to deal with them. They have no working system to deal with the day to day influx of paper, email, magazines and other information. Worse yet, after a while that pile on your desk gets moved to the top of the file cabinet. And the pile on the file cabinet gets moved to the window sill. Pretty soon you have piles of paper all over your office. Are you or someone you know in this situation?

That's how my office used to look back in 1985 when I decided to stop this insanity and get control over my work life. It only took about 2-3 hours to get totally organized and I have never again returned to those days of piles and piles of paper cluttering my workplace and causing the anxiety that comes with not knowing if something, anything in there is important, forgotten or needed to be done. Here's what I did.

I brought in a big 30 gallon trash can into the office and closed the door. I also made sure I had one legal pad of paper, a pen, a marker, a stapler and a box of manila folders. Put these supplies aside until Step three of the process. Step one involves getting control of the paper. Stack everything from every pile into one big pile. Include every piece of paper you see in your office or work area notes, reports, phone messages, bills, letters, receipts, calendars….everything. Your stack will be quite high but fear not. You are starting to gain control. Now instead of a few or a few dozen piles scattered all around the room you have one place to put all of your focus. By the way, my stack when I did this was literally 3 feet high. Step two is another easy one. You will look at every piece of paper one by one and make this determination - is there anything on this paper I need. If the answer is yes then start a save stack. If the answer is no then throw it in the trash can. Do not stop to do anything about any thing on a piece of paper. Just rip through each piece and determine if it stays or goes. If there is an address on it that you want to keep put it in the keep stack. Maybe it's a flyer reminding you of an event you might like to attend. Save stack. Maybe a report you need to file, a receipt you need to record for reimbursement, a phone message that you need to return the call. If there is anything on the piece you are reviewing that needs some action, save it. Otherwise, throw it away. You should rip through your pile very quickly and be able to throw away quite a bit. It took me about a half hour and my 3 foot pile had now become about 1. Wow! Two-thirds of the stuff I was keeping wasn't even important. This feeling alone of reducing your paper piles to just the stuff you really need causes a great feeling of control over the situation. But it gets even better.

Now you are ready for step three. Get out your legal pad and pen and have it right next to your newly created save stack. You are going to make a master task list and reduce your stack even further. Even if you have another master task list or to-do list go through this exercise. Go through each piece of paper again. This time you are going to write down on your legal pad the action you need to do to get rid of the piece of paper you are looking at. Use one line per task. If what you write down eliminates the need for the piece of paper, throw it out. If there is further need for the paper like to read, to file, to distribute to someone else then start a new save stack. Phone message? Write down to "return phone call from Bob" and throw it out. Major report you need to review? Write down "review accounting report on first quarter sales" and place in your save stack. Letter from someone whose contact info you want to keep? Write down "Bob Smith, 123 H St., Anytown, 555-1234, bobs@smith.com and throw the paper out. You get the idea. For each and every piece record a related task in you new master list and either put the paper in the save stack or throw it out. You'll be amazed at the further reduction in paper as we tend to keep five page reports because there is a phone number on page three that we need. My experience was an hour and a half and my leftover paper was now about four inches high. Remember we started with 3 feet of paper.

I would venture to guess that most of what is left after going through this three step process is paper that needs to be read or needs to be filed. Use your marker and folders to create the necessary files. Do not file paperclips and such. Staple multiple sheets together for easier filing. To stay on top of this in the future, get yourself a three bin unit and mark one "to read" and one "to file". The top bin make an "in-bin" and anytime paper comes into your office put it in there. When you have time make sure you process your in-bin in a similar fashion that has been described here. Transfer info from your in-bin into action tasks or put on your to-do list and get rid of the paper. The trick is to handle any piece of paper once.

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