How To Manage Your Digital Files
How best to organise all your files, documents and articles? That’s what we’re looking at this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 251 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 251 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. Over the years, we have seen a lot of wonderful ways to organise our stuff. Elaborate notebook and tag structures in Evernote, Complex folders on our computers organising every facet of our lives. And all that’s great. It’s a fantastic way to get things organised and gives us the motivation to clear out our stuff—which is no bad thing. We do collect too much stuff anyway. However, are all these wonderful organisation methods the best use of our time? You see, getting all our stuff organised is a great idea, but that’s a one-time task that may take a few days or even weeks, but long-term we have to maintain this new structure and therein lies two problems. The first is it will take time for you to develop the natural muscle memory to move stuff to their rightful place, and in my experience, most people have enough on their plates as it is. And secondly, the deeper the organisation structure you build the longer it will take to move the stuff you collect in the future—which will mean you won’t do it. After all, you likely don’t have a great deal of free time as it is, so adding a new process that takes time is not going to solve any problems. So what can we do? Well there are a few things you can do and that is what we will look at this week. However, before we do that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Janine. Janine asks: Hi Carl, I am a professor at a large hospital and I not only have patients to see, I also teach. On top of that, I need to stay up to date with the latest research. This means I have a lot of papers to read, review and study. I really struggle to keep all these things organised and wondered if you have any tips and tricks that might help. Hi Janine, thank you for your question. This is the dilemma that has been creeping up on us over the last ten to fifteen years. More and more digital stuff has been replacing what typically would have been paper. I remember in the late 1990s, I had a filing cabinet in my study that held all the important papers and documents I needed to keep. My car and house insurance, a file folder for gas, electric and water bills as well as bank and credit card statements oh, and a place to keep my running magazines and Law Society Gazette. And because if I didn’t file these papers away almost immediately, they would be left sitting on the dining table, there was a constant reminder that these papers and documents needed to be filed. Today, most of these documents are now online or in digital format. I don’t get bank or credit card statements through the post anymore. They are all digital. I no longer have a filing cabinet in my office. I am now largely paperless—save for documents such as my passport, residency permit papers and such like. I can keep all these important documents in a single drawer in my office. However, the problem isn’t really just about these important documents. The problem now is we receive so much more digital clutter than we ever received paper. Largely because it is so much cheaper and easier to send out a digital document than a paper one, we get exponentially more digit