Well, hello!
It’s been an entire week off of our path to Wootness, so it’s time to dive back in and get some good work done.
Today is Saturday, so I want you to abandon your daily list (you HAVE been keeping up with the daily list, haven’t you??) and do some hefty organizational jobs.
First, I want you to remove everything PERSONAL from your office. I don’t mean photos and decorative items. I mean papers, bills, insurance policies, etc. This office is for your photography business, not your household business. You want your time in this area to be as productive as possible, and if you have household stuff here, you will be tempted to work on that, instead.
While you are doing this, I want you to empty your filing cabinets of anything non-business related. Which brings us to the second job of the day – organize your filing cabinets. Seriously. A filing cabinet is not a place to stuff stacks of paper in a misguided effort to straighten up your office. It’s also not intended to be an alphabetical order-only organizing system.
My office has 2 2-drawer lateral file cabinets. That’s 4 drawers of organizational opportunity.
Drawer #1 has empty file folders and hanging folders. This is also where I store printer paper and and other printable items. My printer sits on top of this filing cabinet, so this is a convenient place for it.
Drawer #2 has all of my current jobs/bills. There is a folder for each month of this calendar year and that’s where all my receipts, bank statements, invoices and packing slips go. When I do my taxes, everything I need is in this set of folders. The remainder of the file drawer is filled with current client files. I have those organized into a complicated system that I’ll go over tomorrow.
Drawer #3 is my vendor drawer. This drawer contains information from each of the vendors I actually use (remember, we cleaned out all that extra stuff awhile back?). This is also where I have folders for each of the organizations I belong to and their marketing materials.
Drawer #4 is where I store my completed client folders for this calendar year. There’s no sense having the completed stuff fighting for attention in the current job drawer. Once I’ve wrapped up a job, I don’t want the folder in my way, but I do want it in a convenient place in case I need to refer to it again or a client decides to place a re-order.
So, there you have it – an example of a simple way to organize your files. Figure out a way that works for you and get your files up to snuff. Today. GO!