GettingThings Done. The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

One of the best tricks for enhancing your personal productivity is having organizing tools that you love to use.

When considering whether to get and use an organizer, and if so, which one, keep in mind that all you really need to do is manage lists. You've got to be able to create a list on the run and review it easily and as regularly as you need to. Once you know what to put on the lists, and how to use them, the medium really doesn't matter. Just go for simplicity, speed, and fun.

The Critical Factor of a Filing System

A simple and highly functional personal reference system is critical to this process. The filing system at hand is the first thing I assess before beginning the workflow process in anyone's office. As I noted in chapter 2, the lack of a good general-reference sys tern can be one of the greatest obstacles to implementing a personal management system, and for most of the executives I have personally coached, it represents one of the biggest opportunities for improvement. Many times I have driven to the local office-supply store with a client and bought a filing cabinet, a big stock of file folders, and a labeler, just so we could create an appropriate place in which to put two-thirds of the "stuff" lying around his/her desk and credenza and even on the office floors.

If your filing system isn't fast, functional and fun, you'll resist the whole process.

We're concerned here mostly with general-reference filing— as distinct from discrete filing systems devoted to contracts, financial information, or other categories of data that deserve their own place and indexing. General-reference files should hold articles, brochures, pieces of paper, notes, printouts, faxes—basically anything that you want to keep for its interesting or useful data and that doesn't fit into your specialized filing systems and won't stand up by itself on a shelf (as will large software manuals and seminar binders).

If you have a trusted secretary or assistant who maintains that system for you, so you can put a "File as X" Post-it on the document and send it "out" to him or her, great. But ask yourself if you still have some personally interesting or confidential support material that should be accessible at any moment, even when your assistant isn't around. If so, you'll still need your own system, either in your desk or right beside it somewhere.

Success Factors for Filing

I strongly suggest that you maintain your own personal, at-hand filing system. It should take you less than one minute to pick something up out of your in-basket or print it from e-mail, decide it needs no action but has some potential future value, and finish storing it in a trusted system. If it takes you longer than a minute to complete that sequence of actions, you have a significant improvement opportunity, since you probably won't file the document; you'll stack it or stuff it instead. Besides being fast, the system needs to be fun and easy, current and complete. Otherwise you'll unconsciously resist emptying your in-basket because you know there's likely to be something in there that ought to get filed, and you won't even want to look at the papers. Take heart: I've seen people go from resisting to actually enjoying sorting through their stacks once their personal filing system is set up and humming.

You must feel equally comfortable about filing a single piece of paper on a new topic—even a scribbled note—in its own file as you would about filing a more formal, larger document. Because it requires so much work to make and organize files, people either don't keep them or have junked-up cabinets and drawers full of all sorts of one-of-a-kind items, like a menu for the local take-out cafe or the current train schedule.

Whatever you need to do to get your reference system to that quick and easy standard for everything it has to hold, do it. My system works wonderfully for me and for many others who try it, and I highly recommend that you consider incorporating all of the following guidelines to really make reference filing automatic.

Keep Your General-Reference Files at Hand's Reach Filing has to be instantaneous and easy. If you have to get up every time you have some ad hoc piece of paper you want to file, you'll tend to stack it instead of filing it, and you're also likely to just resist the whole in-basket process (because you subconsciously know there's stuff in there that might need filing!). Many people I have coached have redesigned their office space so they have four general-reference file drawers literally in "swivel distance," instead of across their room.