Small businesses know all too well the difficulty in managing their documents. Here are some quick tips that can help you increase your office's efficiency by managing your documents smarter.
1. Stop saving everything!
Everybody gets a ton of email everyday and most of it is completely useless. Many people get overwhelmed so they simply give up on trying to maintain any type of order and keep everything. If this is you stop, your wasting space on your computer and making it slower everyday. With the average size of an email being around 50-75 KB the data that your email takes up can grow fairly quickly. Take a quick glace at each email and if it isn't mission critical and relevant delete it.
2. Name Folders Similarly
Establish a way to name your folders so that they make sense to you. If you can't understand it then they're going to be more of a problem in keeping you organized than a help. Some ways I recommend doing this is dividing them up into customers, vendors or other parties at the top level and then to each project for them (if you work only on in house things then skip the top level).
3. Hold the Stuffing
Hold back that urge to stuff your folders full of files. Just because you have one level of folders, this isn't going to help unless you have organization on the inside as well! A common pitfall is throwing all the files into the group folder which makes it impossible to find anything in a timely manner. Divide those top level folders into something organized