Piling or Filing

Many people have piles on their desks. And for some of them these piles actually work. Some people are very visual and want to leave everything out in sight that they are working on because they are worried they'll forget it if it's files away. One problem of those piles is that they take up a lot of space. Another one is that no-one but you will know where anything is. Co-workers have virtually no chance of finding anything on a piler's desk.

There are a few practical solutions that save space and will make it easy to at least identify which pile holds what.

Using filing trays is one option. The ones that are stackable and are usually used as in-trays. Simply divide all your piles out into your different projects, then assign one tray per project and also label the tray.

If your projects are very paper intensive and would take up more than one tray, you can either divide your project logically into two trays (i.e. one for active documents, one for background literature) or you could use a literature sorter which can hold a lot more.

Getting your paper organised will help you save time finding things which you can use on actually working on your projects rather than looking for relevant documents.