Organizing Your Paper and Email Files                          

Myth – There is no best scheme for organizing my paper and electronic files. The scheme may not yet be known to you, but you probably use pieces of it in your attempts to be organized.

Truth – The best scheme lies within the LATCH concept. Information may be infinite but the ways of organizing information is finite. I share this great idea with you from one of the best books I have read on understanding information overload entitled Information Anxiety 2 by Richard Saul Wurman.

The LATCH Concept - There are ONLY 5 ways information can be organized. They are listed, explained and a concrete example is provided below. Ultimately, you choose which of the five areas you want to start your organizing:

  • Location: This is by place, either physical or relational. For example, if you are a human resource director, you can create global files for the company’s various physical locations. If you are a doctor, you might create resource files for the locations in the human body from the head to the toes.
  • Alphabet: This provides you 26 familiar and ordered subcategories to file in. You probably already use this for the names in your address book but you can also use it for your CD collection or office supplies log.
  • Time: Anything that has a timeline can fit in this organizational scheme. Long-term projects, conference planning and quarterly reports could fit this area.
  • Category: This is probably the first area to look at when you need to organize a lot of information. Think about under what categories the information falls. Some examples could be categories of various types of products or clients, different medical plans and assorted types of insurances.
  • Hierarchy: Think about size in this area. Anything you can list from small to large or least to most (and visa versa) fits this area.

      Here is a real-world example: Dr.White works in a private practice. She currently has over 500 emails in sitting in her inbox and wants to "organize" them. She first reviews the emails to decide how she might want to group them together into separate folders. She comes up with these categories to start: Patients, Colleagues, Associations, Pharmaceutical Companies, Hospitals/Clinics, Family/Personal, and Research. Within each, she can then decide what other organizational strategy she could use. For example, within the Patients folder, she might have subfolders for each of three offices she practices in, then lists the patients alphabetically within each. Within the Research folder, she can identify categories of the research and create separate subfolders, then list the research by time/date. The Colleagues and Family/Personal emails might best be organized alphabetically.

      If you need advice on how to best organize your files, please contact us. Wishing you more efficient usability of your information!

TERMS OF PERMISSION TO REPRINT

This tip may be reprinted when the following byline is included:

Abby Marks Beale is founder of The Corporate Educator, a professional speaking and training company specializing in helping with busy people work smarter, faster and just plain better. Go to www.TheCorporateEducator.com.