How Did I Navigate My Father’s Papers After His Passing?
My father passed away at the age of 87. He lived alone, in Budapest, Hungary. I, his only son, live in Toronto, ON., Canada. How, in a matter of a week or so, after his funeral, did I manage to take care of his affairs in a country famous for its bureaucracy?
You see, my father has always been what you might call, absent-minded. As he got older, his short term recall has also begun to fail. In order to combat his memory challenges, he developed a “system” for filing his papers.
This “system” was, what helped me navigate his papers quickly and effectively, even though we live a world apart. As it were, he developed the most advanced filing system, which is the basis of Paper Tiger. This system is the numerical filing system.
What I found on my father’s desk, was a box, containing large, numbered, vertically stacked, cardboard envelopes and an index card in front of them. The index card listed the content of each numbered envelope, with a main heading, followed by key words of the documents they contained. Not unlike a report you might print from Paper Tiger. I just sat in front of the box…and I was “in business.”
It so happens that I am a professional organizer specializing in office/business organizing. Having been a user as well as a re-seller of Paper Tiger for the past 6 or so years, I was surprised and not any less impressed by having discovered my father’s “manual” version of this fantastic system.
Anyone familiar with the Paper Tiger knows, that locating paper documents is really just a matter of seconds. Try to tell that to a person sitting at, what must be his/her desk – except that the latter is not visible for all the paper piles covering it. The usual answer is that “I have no problem finding what I’m looking for.” However, when I ask: “OK, but could someone else find it, when you are not around?,” I suddenly have them scratching their heads. That’s when the light goes on.
So there you have it. One of the biggest, yet less often thought of benefits of using Paper Tiger is, when someone else needs to navigate your files. My father, who has never had or used a computer, managed to figure out the “secret” behind the Paper Tiger system. Leaving me sadly alone with his numbered envelopes and his index card, I was able to navigate his papers with ease. My heart might not have been at ease, at the time, but I had no problem finding what I needed in order to take care of his unfinished affairs.
Alex Revai, Productivity Solutions
Tags: document management software, The Paper Tiger 'Finding' Filing System
