CHAPTER 7 I ORGANIZING: SETTING UP THE RIGHT BUCKETS
Another example: people who find it easier to deal with bills
by paying them all at one time and in one location will want to
keep their bills in a folder or stack-basket labeled "Bills to Pay"
(or, more generically, "Financial to Process"). Similarly, receipts
for expense reporting should be either dealt with at the time
they're generated or kept in their own "Receipts to Process" enve-
lope or folder.*
The specific nature of your work, your input, and your work-
station may make it more efficient to organize other categories
using only the original paper itself. A customer-service profes-
sional, for instance, may deal with numerous requests that show
up in a standard written form, and in that case maintaining a bas-
ket or file containing only those actionable items is the best way to
manage them.
Whether it makes more sense to write reminders on a list or
to use the originating documents in a basket or folder will depend
to a great extent on logistics. Could you use those reminders
somewhere other than at your desk? If so, the portability of the
material should be considered. If you couldn't possibly do that
work anywhere but at your desk, then managing reminders of it
solely at your workstation is the better choice.
Whichever option you select, the reminders should be in
visibly discrete categories based upon the next action required. If
the next action on a service order is to make a call, it should be in
a "Calls" group; if the action step is to review information and
input it into the computer, it should be labeled "At Computer."
Most undermining of the effectiveness of many workflow systems
I see is the fact that all the documents of one type (e.g., service
requests) are kept in a single tray, even though different kinds of
actions may be required on each one. One request needs a phone
*This approach can be dangerous, however, if you don't put those "Bills to Pay"
or "Receipts to Process" in front of your face as consistently as you should. Just
having them "organized" isn't sufficient to get them off your mind—you've also
got to review them appropriately.