Is this you?
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, Kathy Paauw, of Paauwerfully Organized, can help out by teaching you some powerful techniques that will help you increase your personal and professional productivity. In fact, don’t be surprised if you can add an hour or MORE to your day EVERY DAY.
Imagine what you would do with an extra hour each and every day. That is an additional 365 hours or over nine 40 hour work weeks of extra time. Think of this next time you make the statement, “I wish I had more time”.
Here’s what you’ll be able to accomplish when you attend Kathy’s upcoming ‘Buried in Paper’ webinar and put what you learn into practice:
Attend Kathy’s upcoming ‘Find Anything in 5 Seconds or Less!’ webinar and put what you learn into practice. During this webinar you’ll:
About Kathy Paauw
Kathy Paauw of Paauwerfully Organized is a Certified Professional Coach and Productivity Consultant. She helps busy professionals overcome overwhelm by helping to de-clutter schedule, space, and mind to be able to focus on what matters most.
Kathy says, “Organization for the sake of ‘being organized’ has no value, but it is a vital tool to help you accomplish what is most important to you. Organizational skills and effective systems can improve productivity, reduce stress, and improve the quality of your personal and professional life.”
You may have already heard of the 100 Thing Challenge. It is the idea that people do not need more than 100 things in their homes and life. The belief is that by cutting down on the amount of things you own, you will bring more joy and simplicity to your life. You may not be ready, willing or able to make this kind of drastic commitment, but you may still be able to have some of this same joy by simplifying to some degree and organizing the rest.
If you feel your home or office conditions are causing you unnecessary stress, it is time to make some changes. If you feel the things you own are beginning to own you, it is time to regain some control. If you feel you have been avoiding going into your garage, attic or offsite storage unit because you can’t bear to see all that stuff, you owe it to yourself to at least consider simplifying and organizing the rest.
The most basic rule of simplifying is taking the time to sort through and evaluate what you have. Separate items into piles such as “Keep,” “Sell” and “Donate.” It isn’t about going off the deep end and getting rid of everything including things you will later come to need. In fact, when in doubt, always keep something if you are hesitant. The next time you go through and do a spring cleaning, you may know for sure if a particular item really can go or if you are glad you kept it.
Once you have narrowed down your personal “inventory”, you can decide what you will keep out, what gets stored in the home, office, basement, or rented storage unit if there is even still a need for one. Ask other family members to get involved. Each person can take care of their own belongings and help decide on the items that are shared by the entire family.
Then decide how you will go about selling the items to be sold, and where to drop off the items to be donated. Then make plans to do it instead of putting it off until another time.
For items that you decide to keep, your best bet is to use Paper Tiger Filing System software. Getting organized means not having to fight clutter, wonder where something is or search for an item or paper file again. You can use Paper Tiger’s indexing system to keep track of anything that can be numbered. This could be paper files in your filing cabinet, your craft supplies, your Xbox game collection or your book collection, whether the items are in your home, office or require storage in an off-site location.
Type into Paper Tiger’s indexing system whatever is going into each file or bin and use as many possible keywords you can think of for the items. This will help at a later time when you need to conduct a search and can’t recall what you may have called the item or if someone else needs to do a search and isn’t sure what you may have called the item in the system. That’s all there is to it really. Your bins or files can be numbered and put away until you need them again without worry that you’ll be able to find them when you need them. Do a regular spring cleaning and be sure to update your indexing system database to reflect the addition, move, or removal of any items.
After all, getting organized is half the battle — being able to easily and quickly retrieve those items and knowing where they should be returned to is the other half of the battle to stay organized.
If You Prefer the Alphabet…
If you like the idea of using The Paper Tiger document management software, but find the concept of indexing or numbering your paper files impractical — or even frightening — fear not! You can use the filing system software and stay with the age-old alphabetic method of filing. You can still have the advantage of automatic cross-referencing, search your files to find a particular item, and automatically print out your file labels, a File Index, an Item Name Index, or a File Retention Worksheet.
You may have a situation where you want some locations with random numbers and others in a particular alphabetical or numerical order. That’s not a problem!
If you want all your locations in alphabetical order, you can move the grid line between Location and Item Name to the left margin and you won’t even be able to see the numbers. If you are using both methods, you can just ignore the Location field.
When you place the cursor on Item Name, a sort arrow will appear. Click once, and the Item Names will appear in alphabetical order in reverse order; click again and they will appear in alphabetical order following the “open” items. If you don’t want to see the “open” items, go to View/Quick Preferences, and remove the arrow from Show Open Items. (“Open” items must be visible when you are adding new Items.)
To add new files in alphabetical order, just enter the Item Name in any “open” field. Then use your cursor to resort your files in alphabetical order.
When you print out your File Index or Item Name Index, just ignore the numbers. Should you later decide to use the random numbering system, you can just add the numbered file tab assigned by The Paper Tiger to each file folder. You may choose to leave your text labels on as well.
Basically, you can continue to use the alphabetic method for filing but by adding The Paper Tiger software, you will be supercharging your work, making it much easier to find your information. When, and if, you become comfortable with the random nature of The Paper Tiger method, you can easily switch to it without losing any of your investment of time. The best of both worlds!
Getting Organized is described in many different ways. Consider just a few: get organized, paper filing, setup a new filing system, clutter control, document management, the paperless office, declutter, paper management, messy desk, archiving, etc. You can do a Google search on these terms and many, many more to find a link back to The Paper Tiger software. There are tens of thousands of companies around the world that made this search and decided to purchase The Paper Tiger software.
Now, each day, they get the pleasure of being much better organized with their paper filing. They realized that paper was not going away and that they needed a better way to deal with it. Using The Paper Tiger software each day to stay on top of things, really gives them a bit of a thrill and makes them feel good. And in today’s economy, who doesn’t need to feel just a little better each day?
Make yourself feel good by making the commitment to install, fully implement and convert to the software. Once you have it in your office, you are not likely to go back to the old methods. Filing is a difficult, but necessary, task and making it FUN! (okay, well almost fun), is really important so that you will stay on top of it and streamline your office.
Be sure and see our new What is The Paper Tiger? video.
We stand ready to help you achieve your goals!
The Paper Tiger Team
When entering keywords in your Paper Tiger database, ask yourself, If I or someone else wanted to retrieve this file later, what words might be helpful? You want to input as many keywords as you think might be helpful.
