At hand files

Many thanks have to go to my friend Mark for supplying me with ideas and products to help me in my quest to get organised.

Whenever I've tried to reorganise my stuff in a more orderly fashion in the past, I've always come up against what to do with the things I need close at hand. The things I'm working on right now, or the things that I can't deal with in the moment and need to check back on in a few hours or days. In the past this has been my desk-side pile, which inevitably got out of hand, became two piles, then tree, then just a heap of stuff mixed together. Well, thanks to tabbed folders, those days are over!

I currently have two tabbed folders sitting in my "Really Useful Box" that I got from the stationers. I have one folder for church related things and one for non-church. I'm hoping that these won't grow too much into amorphous storage systems, but only regular reviewing (the cornerstone it seems of making any organisational system work) should prevent that happening.

As an example, my church folder has tabs for:

Things I need to give to other people

Preaching plans

Pastoral care

Core BPV's (beliefs, practices and virtues: This is something I'm working on derived from The Connecting Church)

Church magazine

Church display stuff

David and Kylie's wedding

David and Tina's wedding

The two weddings are fairly short term projects, one this weekend and one in September. Once the wedding is over anything useful can be filed and anything not useful can be binned. The church magazine can accumulate ideas for the next issue, is a place for the draft of the current issue, you get the picture.

The great advantage of these files is that they are right there where I can reach them, so I can review them, process them and work on their contents very easily. I like this a lot.

The other great thing Mark introduced me to was post-it note tape. Just like post-it notes it sticks and peels off, but it's on a roll. That means you can put a strip down the front of the tabbed folder and write on it. When you've finished you can remove the tape, put another strip on and reuse the folder. Marvellous! I write in pencil too, so I can erase an index when I've processed the contents of a tab and no longer need it.