The Art of Filing Have you ever kept a client or your boss waiting on the phone while you’ve searched the piles of papers on your desk for an important document? As a secretary, if you have, your boss and your client may not have a good opinion of you because in a key encounter you’ve let them down. You owe it to yourself to file effectively, however boring this may seem. Imagine how much more impressive it would have been if—when asked—you’d smiled, accessed a well-organized filing system, immediately found the document, and quickly given the answer! Managing Time Even in the age of e- mail and the Internet, we still deal with many paper documents and files. There’s a flurry of data pouring in from all directions that we need to process and, usually, store to retrieve later. We want to be able to lay our hands on the information we need at the right moment, when we need it, so, it can be used for further analysis or report writing, or perhaps for creating a presentation. All too often, though, we waste our own time (and often the time of other people) searching for data that’s actually sitting somewhere on our desk or in an office filing cabinet. This adds to our stress, and makes the task of putting the data to use more difficult than it ought to be. So we need to get more organized and efficient with our file management if we’re going to get our work done in a timely manner. Managing Information Efficiently When you receive a document from a co-worker, vendor, or customer, it’s tempting to “just put it away” in a pile on your desk or drawer for the time being.“Hmm. Looks interesting, but I’ll take a closer look at this later, when I’ve got more time.”Sound familiar? After a while, many such documents build up, leading to a lot of clutter. It’s highly unlikely that you’ll ever find time to go back and get all of that information organized, especially considering that you’re usually under pressure with other things. You can spend hours of precious time searching for documents that you’ve filed away somewhere, because it’s easy to forget where you put it—or even to forget that you have the document in the first place. So how can you go about simplifying your work? Get better at managing files. Effective File Management Effective filing boils down to this: store the information in folders—by category, and in a sequence that makes sense to you. As a competent secretary, you should avoid saving unnecessary documents, follow a consistent method for naming your files and folders, store related documents together, whatever their type, separate ongoing work from completed work, avoid overfilling folders, and make digital copies of paper documents with a scanner.