Originally appeared on: https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/qdtarchive/how-to-create-a-self-maintaining-filing-system/
November 17, 2015
Let your files determine when and what you do with them, so when it’s time to simplify, you have everything you need to do it quickly and completely.
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Backlogged files just kind of creep up on you. Not literally, of course. I mean, they don’t grow little backlog legs, sneak into the kitchen, and grab little backlog knives, and then prepare to attack you when you’re not looking. That doesn’t happen ever! But they do just sit there and quietly multiply when you’re not looking.
Europa has discovered that single-handedly running the economy of the entire Eastern Bloc generates a lot of paperwork. Once the paperwork has served its purpose, it gets filed. At this point, Europa’s filing cabinets fill her office and are spilling over into the hallway. When she wants to get the latest inventory report for the plant store, she has to wade through dozens of files on the world Iridium market, her secret ownership of the world’s entire production of Incandescent Light Bulbs, and several other “I” topics before she can get to Inventory.
She’s at the point of pulling her hair out, and who can blame her? At this point, she has ever single file from the last twenty years saved up somewhere in her maze of filing cabinets.
Identify Expiration Dates
If you want to keep your filing sane—and this applies to paper files or electronic files—you need to realize that papers pile up, just like furniture and other possessions. When you’re young, you’re in the mode of accumulating stuff. If you’re furnishing your first apartment, you think, “Gee, I need a new couch!” So you get one. This happens year after year, and one day, you wake up and realize you own nineteen couches.
Papers accumulate, too, and you need to get rid of them.
When you file papers, think about when that item will no longer be relevant. What’s the expiration date? Grab a sticky note and stick the expiration date on the thing you’re filing. Even if you don’t know the exact date something will become irrelevant, you can certainly choose a date by which they’re certainly useless or expired.
Europa recently fired a minion. The minion sent a letter promising to seek revenge by sabotaging her hidden Swiss Alps (no, I don’t mean Swiss bank account, I mean Swiss Alps. Apparently she secretly bought them in 1998 when Switzerland was having some issues).
Since she let this minion go because they had no follow-through, she’s confident that the letter is irrelevant after a year. She writes today’s date, one year in the future, on the letter when she files it.
Identify Disposition: Trash, Scan, Delegate
It addition to the expiration date, also write the disposition on the thing you’re archiving. Since right now, you know what it is, it’s a much better time to decide what to do with it than when you’re pondering it six years from now, trying to remember why it matters.
Paper accumulates, and you need to get rid of it!
If it’s a Publisher’s Clearinghouse sweepstakes entry that you’re saving for nostalgic purposes, the disposition might be “Trash.”
But if it’s a sensitive legal document that contains enough information to reveal your plans, the disposition would be “Shred,” “Liquify,” or “Obliterate.” Europa is particularly fond of the “Obliterate” option.
For paper legal documents, the disposition might be, “Scan to DVD and throw away the paper.” Then the DVD, itself, would have an expiration date at which time you would toss it, and that item would be gone from your life forever.
Think through the disposition now so when the date comes, you can just take care of it, lickety split.
Use Tags
“But Stever,” you cry, “how can I put a stick note on a computer file?” For that, use tags to keep track of your disposition date.
In Mac OS X, you can put tags on a file. Tag each file with the four-digit year of when the file expires. Also tag it with the disposition: TRASH, SHRED, SCAN. If you need a more precise expiration date, add a third tag with the year and month.
When Europa realizes that her secret option to buy the Austrian Alps will expire in June of 2020, she tags the scanned options with the tags 2020, 2020–06, and TRASH. When her cleanup date arrives in March 2020, she looks for all files with the tag 2020． Before disposing of each one, she checks to make sure that there isn’t a more specific tag on individual files. Sure enough, she sees that the options expire in June, so she doesn’t dispose of them this time around, since they’re still good for three more months.
Remind Yourself to Clean Expired Files
Now that you’re labeling stuff with due dates and dispositions, make sure you actually get around to doing the disposing. Schedule a day explicitly, once a year, or every other year, where you do nothing but go through your files, scan for expired files, and send them to their final destination.
When you scan through your notes, you see the disposition and send them straight to the trash or shredder.
What comes around goes around. But if it’s a file, you want to make sure that it’s going at the right time, in the right way. Label your files with the expiration date and disposition. If the files are electronic, use tags to do the labeling. Then purge your files every year or so. It’ll be a snap, because one glance will tell you which files are due for purging, and what to do with them next.
Sadly, Europa didn’t label her files when she created them. So she’s hired her old minion back with guidelines for how to label her reams and reams of folders. It will keep the minion too busy to think about revenge for decades, and pretty soon, Europa will be able to schedule a yearly cleanup day to get her files down to one modest, attractive filing cabinet.
I’m Stever Robbins. I have programs to help you be Extraordinarily Productive, and build an extraordinary career. If you want to know more, visit
Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
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About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the Get-it-Done Guy podcast, an iTunes top-10 business podcast, from 2007 to 2020. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a degree in Computer Science from MIT.
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