Make a Filing Cabinet System Workflow

[Orig­i­nally from Life­hacker.]

Whether your fil­ing sys­tem has got­ten away from you or it was never really under con­trol to begin with, you can use our handy guide to beat it back into shape.

Many peo­ple have a fil­ing sys­tem that is largely acci­den­tal. At some point they had more papers than they could store effec­tively on their desk so they started squir­rel­ing them away in cab­i­nets, draw­ers, and so on. In other cases you inherit a fil­ing sys­tem, like with a new job, and an office packed with paperwork.

What can you do to tame your file cab­i­net and make it a use­ful stor­age and ref­er­ence tool instead of a paper orphan­age? You need a fil­ing sys­tem work­flow. A fil­ing sys­tem work­flow is a road map for papers to fol­low as they nav­i­gate through your office. We can’t pro­vide an exact road map for you, but by answer­ing some of the ques­tions below and assess­ing your home and office needs you’ll be able to con­struct an effec­tive fil­ing sys­tem work­flow of your own.

Make an Assess­ment: What do you want from your fil­ing sys­tem and what does your fil­ing sys­tem need to pro­vide? Whether look­ing at your per­sonal file cab­i­net in your home office or a bank of cab­i­nets in your tra­di­tional office, before you do any­thing with your file sys­tem you need to ham­mer out what exactly it is that you want from the sys­tem and why you’re dis­pleased with its cur­rent state enough to be read­ing a guide to beat­ing it into shape.

Can you eas­ily find documents?

• Is file removal and replace­ment easy to do or do you have to force fold­ers back in?
• Are files within cab­i­nets you use most fre­quently cur­rent and imme­di­ately nec­es­sary and useful?
• Do you have ade­quate space for the files you need to have on hand?
• Some issues are eas­ily resolved. If your dif­fi­culty in find­ing doc­u­ments is the hand­writ­ten labels left by the pre­vi­ous occu­pant of the office you can rem­edy that sit­u­a­tion with a label maker and a free after­noon. Other issues will take a lit­tle more time to sort through, like hav­ing far too lit­tle stor­age space for the files at hand. Before you put in a pur­chase order for ten new file cab­i­nets how­ever, you’ll need to do some­thing first.

Purge Your File Cab­i­net: You’ve looked over your cab­i­nets and listed some rea­sons why you’re not happy with them, but before you make any rad­i­cal changes you need to dive in and ditch the dead weight. There are two kinds of file cab­i­net purges, in one phase you shred old and unnec­es­sary files and in the other you move nec­es­sary but old files into deep storage—deep stor­age can be a sep­a­rate file cab­i­net in the base­ment, the records room at your office, or any place that is away from your cen­tral office. What are can­di­dates for the categories?

Can­di­dates for Shredding:

• Util­i­ties Bills — If you have a cur­rent bill in your hand and the infor­ma­tion on it is cor­rect, you can shred the old ones. Do you really need a cable bill from 2002?
• Pay Stubs from Prior Years — Once you receive W-2 or other offi­cial doc­u­ment from your employer at the end of the year, you can ditch the pay stubs.
• Bank and ATM receipts — When you see the amount appear on your online or paper state­ment, there is usu­ally no press­ing need to keep these annoy­ing lit­tle pieces of paper.
• Credit Card State­ments — You can shred these, like util­ity bills, once you have a new one with the cor­rect bal­ance on it. You may con­sider plac­ing a credit card state­ment that has a large pur­chase on it like an HDTV in with the war­ranty infor­ma­tion for that large pur­chase if your credit card has extra con­sumer pro­tec­tions that would help with replac­ing the larger purchase.

Can­di­dates for Deep Storage:

The above exam­ple list is in no way com­pre­hen­sive, but it gives you a start­ing point for con­sid­er­ing the lifes­pan of your indi­vid­ual files. If you have a fairly sim­ple tax sit­u­a­tion you can find tons of ref­er­ence lists online regard­ing how long you should keep var­i­ous files. If you have any ques­tions, we highly rec­om­mend con­sult­ing with your accountant.

Cre­ate a Work­flow: Now you’ve assessed things that you would like to change about your file system—needs bet­ter labels, cab­i­nets are poorly designed, etc.—and you’ve purged files to cre­ate some room in your cab­i­nets. The cre­ation of a file work­flow will ensure that you’re not sit­ting there in a year spend­ing a week­end beat­ing your file sys­tem back into shape. Your file work­flow can take sev­eral shapes depend­ing on the needs of your office and the size of the orga­ni­za­tion sys­tem you’re wran­gling, but for simplicity’s sake we’re going to assume you’re not the archivist for a multi­na­tional corporation.

A com­mon file work­flow for a home office might look some­thing like this:

Daily: Empty inbox and sort mail. File or shred new doc­u­ments by end of day.

Monthly: As new bills come in, shred old state­ments. Once a month take a few min­utes to read over the labels in your file cab­i­net and deter­mine if any files can be shifted to deep stor­age. Jan­u­ary is a crit­i­cal month for being mer­ci­less about what goes to deep stor­age, lest you start the new year with the old year’s clutter.

Quar­terly: In addi­tion to your monthly appraisal, look over your deep stor­age and see if any files there have out­lived their usefulness.

Yearly: Once a year you’ll be sift­ing through files for infor­ma­tion related to taxes. This is an excel­lent time to be bru­tal in your weed­ing. Send old files to the shred­der, cull out files related to projects that are defunct or no longer inter­est­ing. Any old bills, receipts, and so on that aren’t directly related to your taxes and some­how escaped your eye ear­lier in the year should be shredded.

Adhere to the Work­flow: You don’t lose weight by think­ing about exer­cis­ing and intend­ing to eat bet­ter, and you don’t get a tight and easy to con­trol file sys­tem by intend­ing to finally empty your inbox and get around to sort­ing through your files. If your file sys­tem is a wreck you’re going to have to spend some time beat­ing it into shape, label­ing fold­ers, and mak­ing deci­sions about what to shred and what to put into deep stor­age. Once you’ve got the file beat­ing out of the way, how­ever, you’ll sim­ply need to fol­low the work­flow you’ve set down for your­self and the doc­u­ments and files will nat­u­rally find their way to where they belong and prac­ti­cally march them­selves to the shred­der when their time is up. Using a file work­flow is a habit that rewards you with an easy to use fil­ing sys­tem and a file cab­i­net that won’t creak under the weight of use­less files.