Making a New Start:
at work, at study, at home

It is January. The start of a New Year and a chance to set out on a different and hopefully better course. And where best to start? At the place where you do most of your planning, your thinking and your work.
For a lot of us that will be a desk or a workstation, for some it might be more transitory and simply be a “borrowed” corner of the kitchen or dining table and a pin board … whichever it is, you can seriously boost your productivity and your success by making a commitment to getting organised. Creative types usually run for cover at the very mention of order but being organised seriously increases the time at your disposal for creative and more productive tasks… and for pleasurable family time, come to that. Just imagine what would happen if you turned you back for a moment and a freak wind sucked up all the bits of paperwork from your work area and swirled them about or a bunch of toddlers were let loose on it all, where would you be then?… enough said?
Invest in a pin board that you can place near your workspace and use it to site a month by month planner or calendar so you can record all the key dates you need to remember each month and have them as a visual reminder right in front of you. If you are of the type that is driven by aspirational images then pin pictures of those “long to visit” places, “long to buy” houses, to your board. Add a few upbeat pictures of your friends, partners, or children, and any postcards or invitations you receive. This is also a very good place to pin up any limited offer coupons which you might otherwise misplace. You should also have an A4 sheet of paper headed Remember To pinned to your board to which you can add the things you must remember like, for example, insure car or renew road tax, pay credit card bill, pay for children’s school outing, or book rail tickets, book babysitter, make dental appointments, etc etc… You can change this sheet every week and celebrate every time you manage to get everything on the last week’s list done.
If it takes you ages to shuffle through a mess of bills and notes, letters, clippings, and messages to get to the one you are looking for then you need to start a simple and basic filing system from scratch. This is most important for anyone in a financial mess or who is forever getting stung with penalties for inadvertently making late payments. Being organised saves you time, worry and money. It seriously pays off.
So, take a deep breath one rainy morning, afternoon or evening and sort all loose and bundled pieces of paper into piles – paid bills for filing, unpaid bills for dealing with, bank statements, credit card statements and receipts into files for safe keeping, travel tickets, and important things like birth certificates, insurance certificates, MOT certificates, product guarantee cards, passports, into a sensible order. Keep a To Pay This Month folder on the go too if you are forever missing key payment deadlines. If you don’t have a filing cabinet then buy one of those expanding heavy paper concertina-type filing wallets or a series of folders which you can label according to their contents. If you shop around this needed cost much more than £5. Then, for example: anything connected with your house or flat whether it be your contents insurance or bills for electricity or rates could all go into a section labelled HOME with individual folders for each home category like utility bills, mortgage or rent, household appliances etc. Your credit card, mobile phone bills, and any loan statements and agreements should all be retained kept in case of future queries and can be popped into their own section – personal expenses. Your payslips, any documents concerning benefits and any other financial correspondence from the taxman should be kept under, say, a heading of income; certificates of achievement and other certificates of qualifications should also be filed safely away as you never know when you might need to produce them… etc… etc…. You create as many categories as make sense to you and your life.
Don’t rush the task of setting up your system or it will fail you – be sure to cover off all the categories you need to access information for and get all the paperwork you are about to file into date order. If it all seems too much then spread the task over a few days but be sure to complete it before you are scrabbling around yet again searching for that elusive bill, appointment card, or insurance certificate.
Some of us are continually clipping and snipping newspaper and magazine ads and articles for future reference – but this is useless if you can’t find them when you need them. Make life easier by buying a box of clear A4 sized plastic pockets and some sticky labels and a lever arch file, multiply this several times if you a serial researcher/hoarder. Pop, say, all the articles on places to visit; or those recipes or “How To” articles by category in the relevant labelled pocket and they’ll be all the easier to find when you need them as well protected from drips from coffee cups, spilled water etc etc. This is also a great way for children to build up their reference sources whether for their hobbies or for school or college work and is easy for them to adopt. Think how much it will help them with projects to have all that info to hand!
Be sure to keep your actual working surface – be it a desk or table top clear of clutter. Pop all pens and pencils into a beaker or old coffee mug, keep rarely used items tucked away out of sight and restrict yourself to a single paper tray. The single tray helps keep you on track with the ideal of handling each piece of paper just once – i.e. dealing with it as it comes in rather than allowing it to accumulate and become an obstruction to your clear desk policy. Remember too that email in boxes get horribly full too in no time at all. Set up folders on your PC to save any essential emails and images – and delete both your inbound and outbound boxes ruthlessly and frequently.
If your work requires that you keep records of your expenses then be sure to establish a simple entry sheet for these along with a folder for all the receipts and invoices you pay. Keep one folder for each week or month – depending on the volume. Then it will be much easier when it comes to making your tax returns. On the same hand, if your work requires that you invoice others, establish a simple system giving each invoice a consecutive number and be sure to keep copies filed in number order and mark them as paid when payment comes in. Many people find that keeping simple household accounts much in the same way helps them to stay on top and in control of their finances. This is particularly important to do is money is tight or if you are saving hard towards a major purchase. It also helps to show where money is being wasted too which is no bad idea these days when we are looking to live greener and simpler lives.
In short – start 2008 as you mean to go on – fully in charge of your life and in control of your business and personal workload. It is much easier than you think!