I recently contributed towards an article on home working and electronic filing on Francoise Murat’s website along with Linda Ralph from BeSorted. I thought it would be worth reproducing the article on this blog as many small business owners would find these tips useful.
Francoise Murat is an interior and garden designer and has written many blog posts and articles on home improvement. She recently discussed setting up a garden room as an alternative to the humble shed and thought that following on from that a little expertise from two specialists in the electronic data field would be rather useful.
Along with lighting, heating and security, organising yourself with files and paperwork will ensure you get off to a flying start.
Generally, the worst problem in your Home Office is the pile up of paperwork, it is amazing how quickly it can grow and become completely daunting!
Here are some tips to get your Home Office paperwork sorted out and help you stay on top of it!
- Cull everything you can throw away. Start with obvious junk mail and catalogues. Put them in recycling bags and take them out of your office immediately.
- Open any official mail such as bank statements, invoices, client orders, utility bills etc.; throw away the envelopes and any advertising inserts. Put the official mail to one side.
- Shred any loan offers or those blank cheques you receive from credit card companies immediately.
- For paperwork you need to keep but don’t need now, put this into boxes, clearly labelled and take it out of your office. If you use the garage or attic as secondary storage, plastic boxes work best as they are not affected by damp conditions.
- Sort your official ‘active’ paperwork into as many folders as you need, doing a secondary cull of irrelevant inserts as you do so.
- Arrange chronologically within each folder with the most recent correspondence on top.
- Make a separate folder of ‘To Do’ items such as invoices not yet due for payment. Use a different colour for this folder to differentiate it from the others. Place in the front of the filing cabinet.
- Write on each folder to indicate the content. Put them away in the filing cabinet or drawer.
- Arrange the folders alphabetically or alphabetically within a specific topic e.g. Clients or Utilities.
- Put everything away so you completely de-clutter your desk and have a clear work space.
- Make it a daily routine to go through the mail, discard the rubbish immediately and file the rest.
Now you have your paperwork sorted out, think about your PC and your electronic files and folders.
- How many Outlook messages are there in your Inbox? Have you read them all? Deleted anything?
- Do you move messages to your Personal folders in Outlook? Do you have personal folders? Should messages be there or should they be moved to document folders in ‘My Documents’ on your PC?
- Does it take ages to find a specific file/document on your PC? Just how much valuable time do you waste? Do you know what you need and what you don’t? How do you name the files?
- Are you protecting your electronic files and working out of the office a lot?
Backing up
- You need to ensure that all your documentation is backed up for your security – you never know when your computer may fail, and viruses can cause no end of problems.
- Buy an external hard drive for your computer – they’re inexpensive and you can purchase a 250GB – 320GB hard drive for approximately £50.
- Use a remote back up service – Sugarsync.com is an excellent service not only providing a secure back up but the ability to retrieve files while out and about from your own personal website using a laptop or mobile phone. Prices start from $50 per year for 30GB storage, so not much for peace of mind!
Working Remotely
You may find that you’re out of the office a lot & need to organise your documentation remotely as well.
- Using the Sugarsync service allows you to not only retrieve your files while working remotely, but also synchronise your computers. So when you’re back in the office your laptop and main desktop will synchronise automatically with updates to the documents that you’ve edited or created.
- Using an email service such as Gmail allows you to download your work email (yes you can set up multiple email addresses on Gmail) and keep the emails on the server, so you don’t download email onto separate computers. If you have a Blackberry or iPhone then of course you can check emails on those too.
- Using a service such as Skype means you can make cheap calls over the internet cutting costs on phone and mobile calls!
For help or more information on how to organise your electronic files and documents, as well as your paperwork, check out Linda Ralph at BeSorted.
To find out more about Francoise’s design services and improve your home office environment as well as your home and garden, check out the Francoise Murat & Associates’ website.
