By Affiliate Leslie Shreve of Productive Day
This blog post is an answer to a question recently received from a reader, Rose K.
“I work two jobs, but one is on a computer all day. So because of access to the computer at work and not much time to work at home, I conduct my personal business online during my lunch hour. The problem comes in with my organizational system and carrying things back and forth and getting things filed (they are mostly piled until I can get to them.) Any ideas?”
Thank you, Rose, for your question. Yes, I have a few ideas for you.
First, let me add two tips that may help with your overall situation. I’m seeing more here than just an issue with carrying things between work and home and staying organized.
1. It’s really important to have a trusty file system at home in which you can drop things when you’re finished with them (unless you can toss a few).
I know in another e-mail to me you mentioned, “Once I get home [the papers] get shifted – eventually – from my bag , then to a file pile… which I never seem to get time to get rid of.”
So investing some time to get the file system at home organized and squeaky clean will make it a lot easier for you to dispense with papers once you get home and you can avoid letting things pile up. You want it to be SO easy to file that you never create a to be filed pile. The time invested up front will allow you more freedom in the future.
2. Reduce your bill-paying burden… and no, I don’t mean we can make the bills disappear. This is something I’ve recommended to both clients and friends… it’s setting up a special account at your bank just for bill paying where each bill is automatically withdrawn every month by the company billing you.
This is an account that always holds an amount covering all standard (read: not wildly fluctuating) bills that recur every month: electricity, heat, mortgage, rent, water, cable, phone, internet, car insurance, etc…
These are amounts that pretty much stay the same from month to month and as long as the special bank account has the total monthly amount available (and maybe a dash more for cushion), you won’t have to write checks or pay online or watch the calendar ever again. Plus, it will help you get crystal clear about what you’re paying for, when it gets withdrawn, and perhaps will give you a chance to consolidate, if the opportunity presents itself, or cut back if need be.
This could greatly help you reduce the amount of bill paying, paper carrying, and payment planning you might be doing. I’ve been doing this for at least 15 years and I’ve never once regretted setting it up. It has made my life SO much easier because I’m only thinking about one big account and not a dozen little individual bills to pay.
So with these two tips in mind, I’ll try to fulfill your original request for ideas. As you travel between home and work it sounds like you’re carrying a lot of stuff back and forth. So these are three different avenues you can take to stay organized.
Scenario #1
When you’re taking paperwork to and from home, only take what you can work on and complete at work that day. I realize that some issues and circumstances drag on past the first day you try to resolve them, but exclusive of those, try not to be over-zealous by taking everything you have to do when it can’t comfortably fit into one of your lunch hours. This will reduce the amount of things you’re hauling back and forth between home and work.
Or…
Scenario #2
Another approach would be to bring all of your personal papers and files into work that you want to work on for the week and leave them there in a file drawer. If you rarely, if ever, get to work on these papers at home anyway, they could stay safely locked up at work in a file drawer in your desk.
I recommend setting up a “Personal” file (or whatever you want to call it) at work in a desk drawer so you can reach for what you need when you need it. Then when it’s finished, toss it or take it back home and file it.
Also, you may want more than one file because “Personal” might be too big a bucket, so you can separate your papers according to major categories like finances/banking, insurance, health/medical, family (for fun, vacations, RSVPs, etc.), Home, and Bills to Pay. This is where an organized file system at home helps you too, because you can mirror the major file categories you have at home in your files at work.
And you may need other files in addition to or instead of these, but you only need a handful. Fewer is better here. Just be sure you can find what you need when you need it.
Oh, and for all you readers out there who have children, a category for them is handy too, for school, activities, hobbies, etc… Rose told me that she and her husband don’t have kids at home anymore, so that wasn’t part of the list of things she’s carrying back and forth. But for everyone else, it could be a helpful category to have.
Or…
Scenario #3
3. If you’re not comfortable leaving your papers at work, then purchase a portable, expandable file at Office Depot, Staples or other office supply retailer that has multiple dividers or pockets. You can use this to separate your papers according to the major categories already mentioned above.
Put a file name on each section according to the kinds of papers you generally carry back and forth and make it easy to find what you need when you need it. And again, mirroring the major file categories you have at home in this portable file is going to help – not all of them, only the ones you need.