Back to Basics: Reference Filing
I of the greatest sources of clutter in just most whatsoever function environment is unfiled paperwork. I think everyone suffers at least a little from Continue-It Syndrome, that horrendous affliction that causes us to imbue every fleck of newspaper that crosses our desks with a mysterious power that makes it near incommunicable to throw anything away.
At least office of the trouble is indecisiveness. Many of the papers that we go on aren't really necessary, merely we keep then "only in example" we demand them down the route. Since they're not particularly useful, they're hard to organize in whatever meaningful manner, so they stack up or get shoved into a shoebox or crammed into an unruly filing cabinet in no particular order.
But that's only part of the problem. A deeper problem is knowing we need something, just non knowing how to file information technology in a way that keep s it out of our way when nosotros don't need it simply makes information technology piece of cake to retrieve in a moment when we do need it. The fearfulness of losing something of import, or forgetting about information technology, tin be paralyzing, often leading us to leave more stuff out than we file away.
Filing is probably the easiest, least thought-requiring task you can do in an part, even so because so much is at chance, it creates a great deal of feet – and in virtually every office environment I've always worked in, that feet has contributed greatly to the failure of the filing getting done.
And so what to exercise?
First of all, we need to distinguish between several unlike kinds of papers. The beginning are projection files, which I've discussed before – these need to be shut at hand, and are usually the easiest to effigy out. The second are official documents – invoices, bills, receipts, forms, reports, meeting minutes, etc. These also tend to fall into natural categories that propose themselves and are piece of cake to develop a filing system around.
The real problem area when it comes to filing is reference material. Reference cloth is anything that contains data that we need or will need at some point and which will have an application beyond their firsthand utilise. For me, one major trunk of reference material – we're talking maybe 10,000 pages here – are academic articles and notes that I've been collecting since I started graduate school over a decade ago. Equally an bookish, I use this material for writing papers, researching topics for presentation in form, and provoking new ideas – but none of it does me any adept if I can't find what I'thousand looking for when I'k looking for information technology.
The system that immediately suggests itself is alphabetical, and for years that was how I organized most of my papers: alphabetical past author'south last name, just like my books. The trouble with this system is that while it's easy to figure out where new papers become – just await at the author'south last proper noun – file retrieval is a hurting. If I want information on food taboos in the South Pacific, for example, I have to call back that Margaret Mead wrote about that topic. Mead'due south easy to remember – she is probably the most famous of all anthropologists – but what if the paper I desire is something I glanced at past an author whose name I can't call back, perhaps a graduate student at an obscure academy?
To solve the problem of retrieval, I reorganized many of my files according to master subject. This is the organisation that David Allen recommends in Getting Things Done, and it does profoundly help with retrieval. After several years of topic-based filing, I had several nicely organized drawers with folders bundled alphabetical past topic: "Colonialism" after "Cold State of war" and before "Counter-Insurgency". Finding a folder full of references on any particular topic was a breeze.
On superlative of the filing chiffonier, though, was a growing pile of unfiled papers. Un-file-able papers. Papers that dealt equally with two or more than topics, papers that didn't lend themselves to any hands-remembered topic heading, and so on. As Allen notes, if it takes more than a few seconds to file something, the chances that you'll practice it drop drastically – filing has to be quick, piece of cake, and fifty-fifty fun, or nosotros'll resist doing it. Which ways that as my pile of work I couldn't categorize, characterization, and file in a few seconds grew, I became more than and more than resistive towards filing altogether.
And thus my empire of paper fell.
Enter the Paper Dragon
The system I am commencement to implement is inspired past the organization used by the Newspaper Tiger document management software. In the Newspaper Tiger system, files are numbered and filed low to high. Each new document or group of documents goes into the next bachelor empty folder, and a description of the contents and keywords are entered nether that folder's number in the software's database. Thus, my folder total of resource on counter-insurgency might exist in folder 08174; to find it, I just search the database for "counter-insurgency", which volition tell me exactly where the documents I need are.
The Paper Tiger software isn't cheap – the full-featured version of private end-users is around $170. Instead, I'g creating a simple spreadsheet, with columns as follows:
Folder # | Championship | Author | Keywords | Notes
The folder number cavalcade is already numbered to 1000 (or 01000, actually – I tin can add more than numbers upwards to 99,999 if I need to. I'm thinking long haul, here!). The idea is that to notice annihilation, I tin CTRL-F search. Later, I can create queries confronting the table, but for now, a simple "find in page" search should be sufficient. Later on still, I can import the whole shebang into Admission or another database – maybe I'll go crazy ane weekend and import it into MySQL and write a Carmine on Rails front end end! (I've always wanted to learn Cherry on Rails…)
The Paper Tiger is essentially a tagging organization for physical documents (although technically it could exist extended to comprehend digital documents on my PC or, indeed, any item anywhere that I was willing to catalog. Just the important thing is, information technology solves both the problem of filing – without being restricted to 1 topic heading, I no longer have to worry virtually not being able to find something because I filed information technology under "Imperialism" and looked for it under "Colonialism" – and the problem of retrieval – the only skill I need to discover a file is counting.
What about you lot? How have you solved your filing problems – or have you? What hasn't worked for you in the past (or the nowadays), and what has? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Source: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/featured/back-to-basics-reference-filing.html
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