CHAPTER 7 I ORGANIZING: SETTING UP THE RIGHT BUCKETS
Most people seem to wind up with 200 to 400 paper-based
general-reference files and 30 to 100 e-mail reference folders.
Large-Category Filing Any topic that requires more than fifty
file folders should probably be given its own section or drawer,
with its own alpha-sorted system. For instance, if you're managing
a corporate merger and need to keep hold of a lot of the paper-
work, you may want to dedicate two or three whole file cabinets to
all the documentation required in the due-diligence process. If
gardening or sailing or cooking is your passion, you may need at
least a whole file drawer for those designated hobbies.
Bear in mind that if your "area of focus" has support material
that could blend into other "areas of focus," you may run into the
dilemma of whether to store the information in general reference
or in the specialized reference files. When you read a great article
about wood fencing and want to keep it, does that go in your
"Garden" cabinet or in the general system with other information
about home-related projects? As a general rule, it's best to stick
with one general-reference system except for a very limited num-
ber of discrete topics.
Rolodexes and Contact Managers Much of the information that
you need to keep is directly related to people in your network. You
need to track contact information of all sorts—home and office
phone numbers and addresses, cell-phone numbers, fax numbers,
e-mail addresses, and so on. In addition, if you find it useful, you
may want to maintain information about birthdays, names of
friends' and colleagues' family members, hobbies, favorite wines
and foods, and the like. In a more rigorous professional vein, you
may need or want to track hire dates, performance-review dates,
goals and objectives, and other potentially relevant data for staff
development purposes.
The telephone/address section of most of the organizers sold
in the last fifty years is probably (along with the calendar) their
most commonly used component. Everyone needs to keep track