Home Sweet Home Office

  2008-08-24 17:23:41Hope that all of you are following along with the home office organizing steps that I’ve been writing about. So far I have talked about gathering and sorting, organizing and containerizing and paper separation.

In my last post I mentioned that you should have at least one and possible more of my favorite organizing tool the “Desk/File Sorter. I like all three styles - the number 1 through 31, the letters A-Z and the combination of numbers 1 through 31 and January through December. If there are multiple years that you need to sort you should either have multiple sets or else work on only one year at a time. If you choose to only have one set of Desk/File Sorters for multiple years (I suggest you do not) work on the newest papers first.

Now are you ready to get back to work? You know what we have to do to move forward. We have to get those stacks of papers sorted so that we can see what we have. I hate to harp on any one subject but this is an important one. Do you have multiple years involved? If so listen up.

For anyone with paper piles that span multiple years the first thing to do is sort the papers by year. Once you get the years sorted then you can move ahead with the rest of us.

I suggest that you decide how you want to file the papers once they are sorted. Credit card receipts are a good example. Sorting credit card receipts can be looked at in a couple of different ways. I pay my credit cards online. I also pay them several times a month. So sorting credit card receipts according to the date works well. If I only pay once a month I do not mind having the receipts sorted by merchant. When I download the spreadsheet from my monthly statement it is easy to find the correct receipt in the order that they are listed.  You can see that much of this is a personal choice.

If you plan to file your papers (no matter what they are) then the A through Z works well. You have the opportunity to decide what is important to keep and what is not. I scan my paperwork into my computer and this set up makes it easy to name my computer files.

Banking information works well in the number 1 through 31 and January through December Desk/File Sorter. Keep your daily banking receipts such as deposit slips and ATM receipts in the 1 through 31 sections and keep your Monthly Statement in the January through December. Like you I do much of my banking online but I still print my statement in order to balance it. Also like some of you I am not always able to keep up on all of my bookwork. If I fall behind everything is in place to quickly catch up.

This will be a long process for some if you but it is worth every minute. You should never have to re-sort and file what you have already accomplished.