Tag Archives: Filing

Image via Wikipedia

Well, perhaps I’m a bit behind the times, but I have finally decided to go totally paperless. No more filing cabinets! I’m not sure if the impetus for this decision was that I needed the space or the fact that almost all of my vendors have been pushing hard for me to go paperless. But it makes absolute sense. Bills, Bank Statements, Tax filings (most of these are already filed on line anyway these days), business cards—basically everything that used to go into a file folder will now be filed on my computer and backed up to DVDs. My electronic filing cabinet of choice is going to be Microsoft OneNote, a program I have used for several years and really like. I think the reason I like OneNote as much as I do is that it works a lot like the manual filing system I’ve used for my entire business life, so the transition was easy.

A huge advantage with OneNote is that it has the ability to read and file everything, even graphic images with text; so finding something that might have gotten inadvertently misfiled is a breeze, and a task that would probably be impossible in a manual filing system.

Deciding how/where to file business cards has been an ongoing puzzle for me. Add them to Outlook? my email list? put them in a Rolodex? put them in plastic pages designed to display them and keep them in a notebook? Each had its problems: Business cards for casual contacts in Outlook just made finding the names of current and active contacts difficult; this being compounded now that I have also decided to synchronize everything with my new Droid SmartPhone (another change for 2010). Putting them in the mailing list is a good idea, except that it’s not so easy to access them for anything other than a mass mailing. The Rolodex is just archaic, though I understand there are now ‘virtual’ Rolodex solutions for the computer. Keeping business cards in those plastic pockets that are then stored in a notebook gave me an attractive and colorful scrap-book to browse through, but you could never find a contact number if you needed one.  Read more... (691 words, 3 images, estimated 2:46 mins reading time)

Share/Bookmark

Share/Bookmark