Do you have piles of paper on your desk. Many do and don't know how to deal with them. They have no working system to deal with the day to day influx of paper, email, magazines and other information. Worse yet, after a while that pile on your desk gets moved to the top of the file cabinet. And the pile on the file cabinet gets moved to the window sill. Pretty soon you have piles of paper all over your office. Are you or someone you know in this situation?

That's how my office used to look back in 1985 when I decided to stop this insanity and get control over my work life. It only took about 2-3 hours to get totally organized and I have never again returned to those days of piles and piles of paper cluttering my workplace and causing the anxiety that comes with not knowing if something, anything in there is important, forgotten or needed to be done. Here's what I did.

I brought in a big 30 gallon trash can into the office and closed the door. I also made sure I had one legal pad of paper, a pen, a marker, a stapler and a box of manila folders. Put these supplies aside until Step three of the process. Step one involves getting control of the paper. Stack everything from every pile into one big pile. Include every piece of paper you see in your office or work area notes, reports, phone messages, bills, letters, receipts, calendars