Peace of Mind Organizing

Taming the pile of active papers

15 June 2011

I have this clean desk policy that I’ve been blogging about since 2008. Basically, I make sure I clean my desk off at the end of every business day. It’s glorious and it helps me hit the ground running when I arrive at my desk in the morning.

But I’ll let you in on a secret. Sometimes I have papers that aren’t easy to put away or that are so current I don’t want to let them out of my sight. So I put them in a leather inbox I have resting on the radiator next to my desk. Not on my desk (that would violate my policy), next to my desk.

Yesterday I switched it all up. Pendaflex had sent me a bunch of products to consider blogging about and I was instantly drawn to the PileSmart Organizer Tray. This clear Lucite® tray comes with rigid, colorful dividers with tabs on both the short and long sides.

The idea is you can easily categorize piles of paper under the rigid dividers. It’s great for temporary storage and I could see it as a more sightly and organized landing space for my active papers.

So here’s how my inbox looked yesterday morning.

Pretty ugly!

I went through the papers, filed some of them, acted upon and threw out a few others and then put the rest in the PileSmart tray.

That feels better.

The tabs are supposed to be write and erase, but I couldn’t figure out what kind of pen to use that I could erase. No worries. I just used a Avery return address label to hand-write my labels. If I want to relabel, I’ll remove and replace the label (or put one over it).

There are six dividers and therefore six categories. The ones I created are:

• First Thing, for any papers associated with what I consider tomorrow’s most urgent task
• ICD 1 through 3, for my three most current projects relating to the Institute for Challenging Disorganization (I’m their Marketing Director)
• Quickbooks, for receipts waiting to be entered
• Pending

I like that the tray is lower profile than my last one. And I like that it’s slightly slanted to the back to keep papers in.

I think this will make cleaning up my desk at day’s end even easier. I also think that it will make me more mindful of dealing with the loose papers on my desk during the daily desk-cleaning process.

I know that that the challenge will be to stay on top of the papers there and make sure they’re all active and deserve to be there. If they’re not, I’ll file or toss them.

It’s always fun to try something new and I look forward to seeing how well this works for me.

Tagged with: clean desk, paper management, paper piles, pendaflex

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