5 tips to organise your paperwork

Paperwork is the biggest contributor to clutter – organise your paperwork in order to work effectively next year.

Getting and staying organised can help you reach your full potential at work. Organising your paperwork before you go on leave will give you freedom, clarity and room to breathe when you return to work in the new year.

5 tips to organise your paperwork
Tracey Foulkes, corporate speaker and owner of Get Organised, offers the following advice on how to sort out your paperwork:
1. Gather all your loose papers at one central point.
2. Have a look at all your papers and make an immediate decision if it stays or goes. Use FAT to help you – it stands for File, Action and Toss.
- The papers for filing should be placed in one pile. Filing is anything you need to keep for reference or legal purposes. People generally keep 80% of what they don’t need, so be ruthless when it comes to your filing pile.
- Have a second pile dedicated to action. An action item requires you to do something with it. Any unfinished business other than filing needs to move to the action pile. You will use your action pile in conjunction with your to-do list.
- The third pile is for all the papers you don’t need or want. These can be added to the toss pile and recycled.
3. Go over your file pile and place your papers into broad categories like banking, research, etc. The categories that end up with too many papers can be refined further into sub-categories, like FNB, Nedbank, and Absa.
4. Once you’ve worked through your paper piles, you’ll have a clear representation of what type of filing system will work best for you.
5. Organise your paperwork either in lever arch files or top retrieval folders and clearly label each one.