This article by Denise Landers, founder and CEO of Key Organization Systems Inc. and Paper Tiger Expert, will help encourage and empower you to do something about the piles on your desk and get organized! Denise also recommends Paper Tiger Filing System Software and Document Management to help with your filing system and actually be able to find what you need, when you need it.
“Don’t touch my piles! I know where everything is.”
Do you have someone in your business who is accountable to you and who says that? If you do, you should be concerned. Chances are good this person is not nearly as productive as he or she could be because the piles have to keep shifting to locate information. However, there is another factor impacting business accountability. When the only person in a company who can find something needed is that person whose office it is buried in, there is no accountability within a department.
No one ever likes to foresee emergencies and extended absences. Even short, unplanned absences can be problems. While you probably know the general projects a colleague is working on, would you be able to easily fill in during two weeks of unplanned absences, knowing who they needed to call each day, and where they had left off on the current project? Would you be able to find important contracts and reports within seconds, not minutes?
If you are working with someone who looks disorganized to others, but who guards his or her piles of papers with the explanation that he or she knows where everything is, that person may simply have no knowledge of how to create an effective system for handling daily work flow. On another level, it can represent an effort to retain control and maintain job security because no one could take over amid the disorder.
Almost everyone today is working at full capacity in struggling to manage time effectively and get more done. Having to fill in for an employee who is absent without advance planning adds to the strain on colleagues as they strive to cover for that team member.
The next time you hear someone say that he is not disorganized, but that he can find anything amid the stacks in his office, consider the bottom line for your business’ accountability. That disorganization not only slows down an individual’s personal daily productivity, but can directly impact the company’s production efforts.
To achieve accountability, give your staff the training that will develop company-wide processes for handling work flow. While everyone has different duties, creating effective systems and then tailoring them for the individual job functions will allow you to cover for each other as well as increase personal effectiveness.
If you could use ideas on how to create effective systems for your office, our training CDs, The Productivity Series can guide you in setting up easy-to-implement systems for managing time, paper, and email.
Denise Landers @timetrainer
Key Organization Systems, Inc.
Tags: Document Management, Organize, paper filing systems, Productivity
