Here are 9 tips to get your filing cabinet kicking butt and taking names:
(1) Buy a Good Cabinet:
There are some things in life that you just know you’re going to be using a lot. When that happens, it’s worth a little extra to get the right product. Look for a cabinet that slides easily, is properly weighted and is fire-resistant (so that even an office fire won’t lose your client’s assets).
If you’re like me you might also want to give your new filing cabinet a name. In case you’re wondering, mine’s called Sophie!
(2) Put it in a Handy Location:
Frequency of use is a function of proximity. The more effort it requires, the harder it’s going to be to stay on top of your filing. So keeping your filing cabinet where you can reach it, and never off in the garage or spare room. Remember this isn’t your archives, this is your day-day operations.
(3) Get a Label Maker:
Having a label maker makes a world of difference to how neat and tidy your cabinet winds up looking. Where scribbles can be hard to read as you quickly scan over the files, a clear, legible black on white or reversed label, should leap out and catch your eye.
Be warned though, once you start labelling, it’s hard to stop!
(4) Organise your cabinet into two sections, jobs and business:
Ideally each should occupy a different drawer. In your business drawer, keep everything that relates to your business itself – accounts, receipts, legal documents, contracts and so on.
In the other you’ll be putting in files for each job you work on. We’ll call these your ‘job bags’. Note that it can work well to literally use some sort of sealable folder or bag tucked away into your more traditional filing folders.
For each project you’ll start a new job bag and everything relating to that job goes in there. Whether it’s a disc of assets your client sent, notes from a meeting or a printout of an important email, file it all together and label.
It’s generally a good idea to file your job bags up by client, and keep those in alphabetical order. So put in all your clients beginning with ‘A’ and for each client, put in all their job bags. Then do the same for ‘B’ and so on.
(5) Print Out Important Documents:
While I don’t advocate printing stuff unnecessarily, there are times when it’s worth killing a bit of tree to preserve your documents properly. Important information gets lost all too easily in your email folders, file folders and desktop. Printing off a copy of anything that would be really painful to lose may cost a sheet of paper, but it’s worth it.
(6) Keep a Filing Cabinet Outpost:
Because at any one time you are probably in the middle of a job, it can be a good idea to keep a job bag out open on your desk. If left unchecked this can get messy, so keep a particular place for the current project and make it an outpost of your filing cabinet. When you change what job you are working on, change which job bag is open at this location and resist the tempation to start having multiple outposts.
(7) Subfiling:
Some jobs just never end, and some clients can’t help but weigh you down with files and assets. If a job bag is bursting at the seams, split it in to two sub job bags. Don’t split it arbitrarily though into part 1 and 2, rather do it according to some distinction in the job. So say a job has a print and a web component you could split it that way.
(8) Purge Regularly:
Do you really need to keep everything your client gives you? Do you really need to keep those hand sketches you did early on in the job? Purge your files regularly to keep them clean and efficient.
(9) Archive Regularly:
As your jobs move from current to complete or lapsed, it’s a good idea to move the job bags (and possibly whole clients) into archival. This might be another drawer in the same cabinet, or a whole other cabinet elsewhere. Archival will help keep your cabinet up to date and less files means it takes less time to find the one you are after.
So there’s my tips to good filing cabinet usage. What works for you?
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