To continue the discussion from the last post in regards to paperwork, you might be at the stage where all your physical paperwork is organised – which in turn means it is easily filed and retrievable. After all – and this holds especially true with organising paperwork - your system is only as good as the speed you can find something with. This in turn leads us into another area of organising; - digitising your paperwork.

Prior to starting digitising your paperwork

Before you do anything, be aware that you can quite easily create the same piles that you have on the floor, your desk, and in your drawers, replicated in your computer files. The only benefit that computer-based filling has in regards to this is that you can find documents by search terms. As with anything to do with organising, you need to develop a system and stick to it.

Here are some tips to keep in mind when you start digitising your paperwork

Create very few folders
Name the document really clearly – what will you search for when you need this piece of paper?
Date the paper - In another article I stated I am quite font of writing 090614 rather than 6 September 2014 because of retrieval reasons later in the year.
Scan like your life depends on it (and it could if you have mountains of paper).

To give an example of how this works, say if I have training notes from the 5th of September. I would scan it and save it as follows: 090514 – Training – [name of training or company]. I would file this not in a folder called training but in my folder called Work Diary. Everything that I worked on is saved in this diary (folder) an as I already flagged it as training when I want to retrieve it, it will quickly come up in a search. This in turn is saving time that was normally spend looking for a particular document.