My Organization System – Papered and Paperless

I spent some time this morning with a friend. He’d recently purchased a new iPad and wanted to move toward the idea of a “paperless office.” Or, perhaps more generally, a “paperless life.” He asked about what I do in service of that goal.

First of all, and as Bill Gates once said, “we will have the paperless toilet before we’ll have the paperless office.” I agreed with him then and agree with him even more now. Printer sales are testament to that, as are sales of paper itself. I have in my office a box of printer paper – 12 reams in all. I buy maybe two such boxes a year. I have a 20-year-old printer that works as well today as the day I bought it, perhaps because I use it less.

But use it I do. There are just some things that beg to printed out. We will get back to that in a moment.

Secondly, while I am pretty good at paperless technology, I still resort to paper on a daily basis. Why? Well, because of what I wrote here: Take Note of This: Handwriting is Better for Memory!  and because of this: Ten Good Reasons to Carry a Paper Notebook

Suffice to say that technology has its place; more specifically, a balance of virtual-based and paper-based approaches to everything in our lives.

What follows are some thoughts on my system, my way of managing email, documents, calendars, To-Do items, etc.

1. Email is the scourge of modern living. Aside from many of my students who don’t seem to want or need email anymore, I know of no one else in my life who doesn’t have an email address and who uses it virtually every day. Obviously, it begins and ends in a paperless mode. I suppose that 80-90% of emails never get printed out. They are read, responded to and maybe then deleted, or tagged and stored.
2. When I say “tagged,” I am referring to Outlook’s wonderful ability to categorize emails (which comes from “tagging” an email by a general subject matter category). Once read, and if not then deleted, I respond as necessary, then tag the mail and move it into a “folder” that I call “Cabinet.” The folder has 1,000s of tagged emails which are easily searched by tag. They appear in Cabinet in order to tag name and make going back to an old email much easier than searching through an overcrowded inbox.
3. One exception to this process is the use of what I call my “Hold” folder, aka, Pending. Hold contains unread mails which for whatever reason are to be followed-up upon at some future point. “Unread” is key. In Outlook, unread mails are bolded. At the moment I have 12 bolded “Hold” messages.
   1. Let’s say I buy something from Amazon. I get an email with the order number and within that the receipt.
   2. I glance at the email then mark it as un-read (which bolds it) and drag it into the Hold folder.
   3. It sits there until the order is received. And once the received product is opened and I can see that the order is complete, I un-bold the mail (marking it as read), tag it with a category name (in this case, what I call “iReceipts”), and move it to Cabinet. Done.
   4. I do this for other mails which require future action.
4. “Sent Mail” is an interesting animal. I keep all sent mail in the folder that Outlook provides (Sent Items). Now and then I will Tag a sent mail and drag it into Cabinet, but rarely.  By virtue of the Outlook system, Sent Mail all have notations as to the original mail to which it relates.

Now, as for documents created on any of my platforms (iPad, iPhone, iMac, MacBook, my desktop Windows machine, etc.), I use Microsoft’s OneDrive™ as my cloud storage.

1. When a document is created, it is created from within OneDrive™. Which is to say, it will begin life as an incomplete (empty) Word™ document that is then “auto saved” within OneDrive.
2. For example, Word™ (for Mac, iPad, Windows, etc.) will ask me where I want the document stored. The default is always to store it in what I call a transfer folder (“XFR File”) within OneDrive. Similar to my Hold folder in email, XFR is a resting point for documents. I use only Word, by the way. Nothing else.
3. Ultimately, the document when complete (or even as it is in process) will get dragged into a OneDrive folder.
4. Periodically, I go through the XFR File and move things to an appropriate folder within OneDrive™.
5. At present I have about 75 documents waiting to be moved. My goal is to have that at some minimum number. But I figure that just being alive and sentient will mean some number of files/documents being held there. “Zero in-box” or, in my case, zero XFR items, is a pipe dream.

So, what about notetaking by hand?

For that, I use both paper and technology.

1. Since I was a very young man, I watched how those around me kept notes. And almost without exception, they carried paper notebooks. From the late 1970s onward, I have therefore always had a notebook close at hand. Generally speaking, that’s all I use.
2. Now, occasionally, I will I use my iPad with the Apple Pencil for notes. And for that I use Notability (available on the Apple App store).  I have found that it is the most robust, easy-to-use application of the many available. Your mileage may differ, of course, and there are several really good notetaking apps out there.
3. However, Notability does not have the level of built-in encryption that I want or need. Thus, client and patient notes are always taken by hand into a paper notebook dedicated for that purpose. And they remain there, stored after hours in a locked cabinet. Remember – there is good reason to always carry a paper notebook. See this entry: Ten Good Reasons to Carry a Paper Notebook
4. By the way, if the notes I take by hand need to be stored digitally, I scan them using my iPad’s camera (or my iPhone’s camera) and drag them into an appropriate folder within OneDrive. Or they could go into Notability.
5. Lastly, I keep my paper notebooks forever. I have them from the late 1970s forward to today. What a wonderful record of life!

What about calendaring? Great question. For me, it’s a hybrid system.

1. Obviously, I live in a world where many meetings are scheduled using Outlook™. I accept or decline those meetings and my electronic calendar is thereby updated.
2. But that works only if I am at my computer (or on a device) and can quickly add/accept the meeting. However, for reasons that have more to do with convenience, I don’t want to mess with opening Outlook and creating a meeting.
3. So, in those instances, I create a meeting on my Week-At-A-Glance paper calendar first, then reconcile paper to Outlook — and Outlook to paper — on a regular basis. I actually enjoy that reconciliation process. I think of the process of tapping some kind of “eidetic” memory ability. I can “see” my day by having looked at the paper in ways that I cannot when looking at my Outlook calendar. Call me weird, but that’s what it is.
4. But more than that, I keep my paper calendars forever. I can look back. I can wonder for what I was going on this day 20 years ago, or 30, or 5. Kinda neat, when you think about it.

I call them “TooDues” – which is to say, everything that goes on a To-Do List has a due date. Yes, there is some cross-over between HOLD emails (those requiring further action) and this listing of TooDue items, but such is life. There is also some cross-over with follow-up action items recorded in my paper notebooks (for which I have drawn an empty tick-box to remind me). Not matter the cross-over, you must record your TooDues somewhere.

So, that’s the important part!! Get whatever you must do into a list of some sort, and then forget about them. Some of my clients call it a “Letting Go Journal,” which is a list of things they must do but would rather get OUT of their minds and into a list of some sort.

For this, I use an application called Todoist, which is available for nearly all platforms. It is therefore “cross-platform” and available to you on whatever device you are using at the moment. Go to Todoist | A To-Do List to Organize Your Work & Life

Generally speaking, my TooDue listings are relatively short, but then again, I am not a working adult anymore. For those of you who work at a job where TooDues come at you, then your Todoist listing will be much larger.

Regular, Every-Day United States Mail

Most of what our mail lady brings me is junk mail and quickly discarded. That said, and aside from parcels (see email HOLD discussion above), actionable mail is quickly opened, then either pended to a paper file folder for further action, or scanned as application, then discarded.

Simple.

When done with some discipline (while NOT making it a drudgery), the system works. I have managed to minimize the amount of paper I produce and keep and am able to find what I need almost instantaneously. Plus, it’s good for my mental health!

Hope you enjoy! Contact me with any questions on josephvrusso@gmail.com

An overall flowchart of my system appears below.

Other thoughts:

1. Keep your technology’s battery charged. Keep them plugged in. Default to using them plugged in. There is nothing more frustrating than reaching for an iPad or an iPhone or a ThinkPad and getting … nothing.
2. That said, get disciplined about draining your battery from time to time. I believe they call it “cycling,” and it helps me to extend the life of any given device’s battery.
3. I mentioned earlier that printing some items is unavoidable. Forms that cannot be completed and signed online, tax returns for safekeeping, some receipts, student papers to be shared one-on-one in a meeting, etc. In the past 20 years or so, I have gone from two filing cabinets full of paper down to one (and in that there is plenty of space).
4. What about editing a document on an iPad? Well, it depends. Word for iOS is available and can be used to edit a document. Or you can save a Word document as a PDF and then use Notability to annotate the document.
5. Do I use OneNote for notetaking? Yes, but not nearly as often as Notability. I prefer Notability’s support of the Apple Pencil.
6. And what about Android users? Basically, everything above still applies. Samsung has their S-Pen, which I have used and liked, and to my knowledge there are plenty of notetaking apps available on the Google Store.

Here’s a look at the overall system: