Mult-tasking becomes far easier when you know what you want to achieve. Because you can work in those five minute slots that would otherwise be wasted. Tonight whilst cooking dinner I managed to complete the home office filing. I started it a couple of days ago, but over the course of a day or two the job is done. Why is filing important? Well I needed to find some documents the other week, and whilst they were filed, I still had to go to a couple of different places to get the information that i needed. So the first thing I needed to do was to change the filing system over, from one that was working OK, to one that will work much better. Ironic really given that I work for an organisation that deals in records management dontcha think. And we wrote the book on what files to make and what records and documents you should be putting in each one.

I'm also the editor for the Australian Record Retention Manual - a right riveting read, but it deals with all the legal stuff that says what penalties you will get if you don't file your documents properly and are then unable to produce them in a court of law. If you don't know what I'm talking about - then search the net for Enron, Andersen, BAT, Ansett, Morgan Stanley etc etc. They all got their filing systems wrong and most of them have paid dearly for their errors. OK, I know that my personal filing system is not quite the same as the big organisations, but it still cost me a lot of time trying to find what i needed to find. And time as they say is money, which means that if you don't do it properly you will spend more time trying to fix the errors. Which is why I do like to do my own filing. And why I was willing to say, what I had wasn;t working so let;s try something new.

Are you willing to put your hand up and say - hmm - not working, so what can I do differently? Only when you can do that, will you truly be able to get on.

cheers

Elle

p.s. oh the book is called "F is for filing" a simple guide - and you can find it at - http://www.iea.com.au - just click on publications and filing solutions if you want a copy. And no I didn't write it, and no I don't get any commission for telling you about it....hmm might have to negotiate something there though !! :-)

MMW1