It used to be organised and filed once, but then you got busy.

Now you’ve forgotten how you used to organise your paper files and you’ve started storing some of it electronically. But you don’t want to throw the paper away in cased you can’t find the electronic version.

And so it goes on.

Help is at hand and you don’t need to be in a city to get that help.
First up let’s look at some hints and tips so you can start to tame those feral piles of papers.

1. Clear a desk or table or even some space on the floor
2. Get a large rubbish bag and put it beside your cleared space
3. Decide on a 15 minute block of time to work on the feral paper
4. Pick up one pile, no more than 20 cm high, and put it in the cleared space
5. Pick up each piece of paper and decide if you still need to keep it. If you don’t need it, put it in the rubbish bag. If you do need it, put it in one corner of your cleared space.
6. Repeat with the rest of this pile, sorting the papers into smaller piles with similar items, eg all bank statements in one pile, credit card statements in another, research articles in another etc, etc

Try not to get distracted by anything that looks particularly interesting.  Your 15 minutes will disappear in no time.  Put these interesting items in a separate pile and make a date with yourself to read them another time.

Next steps:

1. Find a permanent home for those items you are going to keep so you don’t simply create new piles of paper
2. Get a system in place to help you decide how long you need to keep certain items
3. Decide if you need to keep a paper copy or if an electronic version will be sufficient
4. Make a time to go through another pile tomorrow or in a few days.  Put the time in your diary.

If you need more help contact me. The Terrace Consulting file tamers can visit you in person, can Skype with you to talk and have a look at your paper and advise you, or we can simply talk to you on the phone and give you some ideas to tame your paper filing.

Terrace Consulting has taken me on an amazing journey.  I’ve met some wonderful people, some of whom I can now count as friends; I’ve had some exciting assignments; and most of all I feel I’ve made a positive difference to the way the organisations I’ve worked with have managed, accessed and stored their information.

It hasn’t always been an easy road for the people I’ve worked with as inevitably they have had to change the way they work.   The changes have come about largely by the changing way people who need information want to access it.  That has been heavily influenced by technologies.  No longer do people want to, or have time to, browse the library shelves or search the physical file stack.  Many people want information delivered to their desktop and want it NOW. “Google it” has become part of everyday language.

My biggest challenge has been to match the way the end users want to get information with the way the suppliers deliver it and to have a happy bunch of people at both ends of the process.  That  didn’t always happen.

A personal challenge has been to find a substitute for work colleagues to bounce ideas off and to keep up to date with current trends. That has been most interesting and very rewarding

So what is ahead in the next ten years for Terrace Consulting?

More of the same I have no doubt.  Also for some time now I’ve been aware that new businesses get little if any advice on how to keep good business records.

2012 will see the development of instructional advice on the Terrace web site, using a range of media, to small and medium business owners and managers on a range of record keeping and information management issues.  First off the block will be instructions on how to manage email – this seems to be the big issue for 2012.

Thank you everyone who have been part of this journey over the past 10 years. Without you I couldn’t have done it.  I hope you’ll continue to be on my journey from 2012.

The biggest thing to hit me so far this year is the problems people have with their in-box. It was right up there with losing weight and getting fit as  a NY resolution.

Before we had email it used to be the in-tray that caused people grief, especially on a Friday afternoon when the tray had got higher and higher during the week and there’d be no time to move into it.

It became a Friday afternoon job to sort the in-tray and move stuff on to other people, like the journals that were circulated around the office.  You’d have a quick flick through to see if there was anything interesting.  If there was, you’d send it on without crossing your name off the circulation list so it would come back to you another time when you hoped you’d have time to read it (that seldom happened!).  If there was nothing that took your eye – you’d cross your name off the list and send it on its way to someone else’s in-tray, where it would sit for another week or two in someone else’s in-tray.

It’s worth using the same sort of technique with your email inbox. Spend a few minutes every Friday afternoon going through your emails. You’ll be amazed how many you can delete in 5 or 10 minutes even. Then the rest will look more manageable – until next week at least!

Not everyone is able to create this sort of space for a home office. So you need to create a ‘virtual’ space if you are going to run a business effectively from home.  By ‘virtual’ space, I mean putting yourself and your mind into work mode.

Make sure you’re working in a clear space, not amongst household clutter.

Even if you can’t work in a separate room, its important that you have your own desk that is for work purposes only.  Your desk is not the place for everything that is moved off the dining table when the family sits down for dinner. Nor for the washing that needs folding, or the toys that don’t have a home.

If your work space is already cluttered, consider clearing it as one of the household chores and tidy your work space before you get into work mode. Tidy your work clutter away each night before you ‘leave’ work.

The most  important part though is to think in work mode.

I took two cousins from England for a tour of the West Coast, southern lakes and Fiordland.  We spent a lot of time in rain forest and it rekindled my memories of other holidays in the area and of school geography about the structure of the native forests.

We saw the tall rimu, totara, kahikatea, matai and miro in the forest canopy, the ferns and mosses on the ground and the lower growing bushy trees in the middle.  It was all very lush and green. 

Quite beautiful, especially as we walked around Lake Matheson near Fox Glacier. This is the lake that is on picture postcards with Aoraki Mt Cook reflected in the perfectly still lake on a cloudless day.  It was neither perfectly still nor cloudless on the day we walked there but it was still beautiful.

The forest structure enables the trees and plants in the different layers to survive and thrive.  The ferns would not be so fresh and green without the bigger trees sheltering them from the sun and wind. The middle layer trees need the ferns to catch the moisture and keep them watered.  They also need shelter from sun and wind that is provided by the trees in the forest canopy

I couldn’t help but compare the layered structure of the forest with other aspects of my life.  We all need some structure in our lives.  If we didn’t we’d starve because we might forget to eat.

It’s so important to have structure in our small /medium businesses. And it’s so easy to let chaos reign and have piles of papers or masses of emails in your in box and brush it away by saying – “but I only have a small business so it doesn’t matter”.

That’s no excuse for not having some structured processes around the administration of your business.  No matter what size your business is, you still need to store the information you need for preparing invoices so you can send them and get paid by your customers or clients.  You still need to keep receipts etc so you can accurately calculate your GST.  You still need to keep good staff records if you employ people.  And so it goes on.

You need structure in your business to survive and to thrive, just as the layers in the rain forest enable the forest to survive and thrive.

By then most of their life was sorted and everything had a place in the kitchen, garden tools were stored neatly in the garden shed, the linen was neatly stacked in a hall cupboard and the PC ‘s were set up in the home office.  But there was still some visible pain. Where?

You’ve guessed it – it was the paper-based office stuff. Books were in piles on the floor waiting for new bookcases, but the bigger mess was the office papers that were in boxes still, some opened and not repacked as they looked for items that needed urgent attention..

They said they tried to keep all their home business information on their computer but found that with the best will in the world there was still lots of paper and they didn’t really have a system for dealing with it.

Before they left their previous home they had sorted through some of their papers and thrown out what they thought they wouldn’t need. The rest they had boxed up and put into storage so their house wouldn’t look cluttered while it was on the market.

What was concerning them now was where in all the boxes was current information they needed urgently to get their home business up and running again.

I suggested that they could benefit from having a simple filing system for their papers so they could easily and quickly keep their files up-to-date. Now was a good time to set it up – when they needed to find a home for all their business papers in their new space.

They agreed with me and we set to work. Now their office looks very smart with its colour-coded and clearly labelled folders for their paper files. They soon realised how great it would have been if they had had a system like this before they moved.  Their business would not have been disrupted at all while their house was on the market as the office space would not have looked cluttered.  And it would have been so much quicker and easier if they had been able to simply unpack all their files into the new office space in the same way as they had unpacked their kitchen, their linen and their garden gear.

They would have been less stressed in both houses, their business wouldn’t have suffered (They don’t know how much business they lost in the transition and have no way of measuring the loss) and they would have felt in control.  So next time they move house ….!!!

rengarenga lilies

Last weekend I was in the garden cleaning up around the rengarenga lilies that had been home to snails for some time. (If you don’t know these plants, they form low bushes of long fleshy leaves and a myriad of white flowers in spring and summer).

As I pulled off shredded leaves that the snails had feasted on, and scraped up the dead leaves that I’d left there to compost (but in fact had become snail birthing units and nurseries), I pondered on the wisdom of my strategy that effectively left the garden to its own devices.

Then my thoughts turned to other chores that are often left to their own devices and the mess that ensues. Take filing for example. How easy it is to put all the papers into a pile (or piles) and leave them for another day. Or to save a new document to be viewed on the desktop screen rather than find a proper home for it alongside similar documents so you can find it again easily. Or to leave all the emails in your inbox with a plan to clean them up at some (unspecified) date in the future.

The desktop screen is fine if you only have a few documents or only use it as a temporary home.  However, you might like to think how long is temporary.

If you have a simple file list that includes all the sorts of information you need in your business, and you understand how that list is structured, then it will actually be easier to save your new documents within that structure from the start.  Certainly it will save you time later because you will know where to find it and you’ll also be able to find related documents.  And wow – suddenly you have a full picture to help your with your business decision-making

Likewise with papers and especially with emails. Don’t you get tired of flicking through the piles of papers to find the single piece of paper that you know is there? And how do you start to find an email in amongst the hundreds (or even thousands) in your inbox?

I’ve often compared filing with housework. It’s not noticed until it’s not done. Now I’ve found another activity around the home that is comparable – that is, leaving the dead greenery where it is to compost au naturel.

So what’s my new strategy?

Well, I already file paper and electronic documents regularly.  So I need to practice that discipline in the garden as well.  If I clean up around the rengarengas regularly, the snails will have to find a new home-and maybe won’t breed quite so prolifically so the rest of the garden will be saved. That’s an added bonus. I’ll have a lovely display of rengarenga flowers over the summer. And the housework? – well that’s another story!

It’s things like the contact lists of their clients and suppliers, their business planning documents, correspondence with prospective clients etc.

If they are using email for correspondence, they may leave the messages in their email system. However these are the very items that need to be saved somewhere outside the email system so they can be retrieved.

If your computer crashes, its stressful enough trying to get your documents, spreadsheets and databases back.  Email is notoriously difficult to retrieve if your computer crashes and often you can’t retrieve it at all.

So if you don’t have your electronic information stored somewhere safe, then please start NOW.  Don’t wait for disaster to happen.

There are many ways to store your important data.  For small amounts you can use CDs.  But more commonly now you can use a portable hard drive.  These now cost less than $100 and simply plug into a USB port on your computer.

The key to using one of these portable drives is to remember to do the back up.  To decide on how often you will do a backup, you need to work out the risks to you business if you lose updates. If your system crashes and can’t be easily restored, can you afford to redo an hour’s work? A day’s work? A week’s work?

Even cheaper are small removable USB flash drives.  These are great, easy to use but also easy to lose.  So take care.

Then you can decide which important information needs to be backed up. So do you want to save all your updates? Or just some of them? How do you decide what’s important?

Another way to back up your data is to store it in the ‘cloud’ – no not the one on the Auckland waterfront!  I’m talking about what is known as ‘cloud computing’.  This term is used to cover a wide range of activities in the big world-wide web.  I’m interested in exploring services that enable storage (and sharing) of files and folders on the Internet.

A couple of options include:

Dropbox is a Web-based file hosting service that uses cloud computing to enable users to store and share files and folders with others across the Internet.  You can update files on your own computer and they automatically get stored in Dropbox.  You can access them from any place where you have internet access, even if you don’t have your own laptop with you.

Google docs also provides storage for your files outside your computer in much the same way as on Dropbox.

Advantages of services like Dropbox and Google Docs is that you can access your files from wherever you are and you can share files with other people that you have authorised to access them. These features are in addition to having a backup storage facility.

It can be very confusing when you start to think about a filing system for your business.  You have the electronic files you create; you have stuff coming by email and other stuff coming in paper form through your PO Box and that suppliers hand to you in paper format.

Electronic filing only

If you decide you are only going to have an electronic filing system, you need to be able to scan all the valuable paper business information that arrives at your business.  You need access to a scanner and have a routine so that the scanning gets done regularly. If you don’t, the scanning is left to pile up in an ‘in tray’ or a ‘to be scanned’ tray.   And then it becomes a real chore, just like any pile of filing.

Your process needs to include selecting what paper information you will find useful in the future, useful enough to make the effort to scan and keep.

Then you need to have a list of topic headings so you can store similar information in the same place each time, even if bits of information come in weeks or even months apart.  Scanning and then storing the scanned item on your desktop or in ‘My documents’ may work while you only have a few documents.  It’s going to become hard to find once the volume builds as your business grows.

Hybrid filing – paper and electronic

You may prefer to store the paper based information in physical folders instead of scanning them. But then you have the issue of finding relevant electronic information when you want to see everything to form a full picture.

You can do this by using the same list of topics or subjects for both your paper and electronic files. When you start out you may get away with a simple list, maybe in alphabetical order.  As your business grows, you will probably need to have sub-headings.

Paper filing only

Obviously this is the other side of the first option described above.  If you are going to use a paper filing system as your ‘official’ business you will need to print out everything that you produce from your computer and put the printed version in your paper files.

This will be very time consuming and probably counter-productive.  I don’t recommend this but it is workable if you really need everything in paper.  After all it was the only way to file business information before we got computers

And as for those 2500 emails, well forget it; I’ll find the one I want if I ever need to.

There’s nothing new about filing.  It’s been a necessary evil for centuries. Did you know that secretaries existed in Rome before the Roman Empire? But men, not women.

Women didn’t get into office work until the industrial revolution on the 19^th century.

Filing cabinets were developed in the US in the mid 19^th century and this form of storage for office paperwork revolutionised businesses.

By the 1930s women began to dominate the role of secretary.  The role of Filing Clerk evolved through to the 90s when these roles were removed from organisations in the name of efficiency. Support staff such as filing clerks were seen as an overhead that contributed little to generating revenue.  The outcome of that was the filing devolved to front line people who didn’t know what to do and didn’t want to learn.

Now that has changed again since computers became widely used across all types of businesses.  Administrative support staff have a range of duties.  Fling papers, electronic files and email has become an important part of good business practices.

For small businesses however it’s often not possible to employ someone to do the office administration, especially when you’re in start-up mode.

It’s even more important then to have a good system set up as part of your start-up activities.  Then you get into good habits from the beginning and as your business grows. We can help you for less than $500. Even your bank manager won’t blink at that as s/he will be well aware of the long-term benefits to your business of making that small investment of time and money up-front.