Managing your Documents is Managing your Documents. Whether they are digital or not, they need to filed  and managed correctly if you want to be able to pull them up with ease in the future. Both types work off of the same essential principles:

- Grouping your documents

- Knowing how big to keep your groups.

A simple example can be seen by looking at the Student’s Binder.

A student is taking 5 classes. All of his professors provide him with presentations, assignments, and supplementary notes that he can print out and bring to class.

At the beginning of the semester, the workload was low. Professors were allowing some time to get used to coming back to school again after the break. The student’s binder was relatively empty, as the course notes had not yet begin to pile up. At this point, it made more sense to keep all subjects in one large binder with sections separated for each class. This way the student could easily go to and from classes, without have to worrying about carrying multiple binders. It was also relatively easy to find what the student was looking for.

As the semester continued, the student realized that the one binder was getting too full. The tabs had become too numerous, and the binder was reaching it’s capacity. It was taking too long to find items in the binder because of the amount of paper. At this point the student decided to separate the binders by subject. Each binder had identical organizational structure, making it easier for the student to find what he was looking for in any binder. Each class had it’s own binder, which meant that the student was required to plan more carefully what he was doing that day. What seemed like a burden at first, eventually turned out to be an amazing habit to have acquired. The student was more organized than he was before, which was beneficial as the semester was coming to an end and exams were coming.

After successfully writing his exams, the student decided to keep his well organized notes. Seeing that there were related topics being studied in his upcoming semester, he felt it would be beneficial to keep them as a reference. At this point, he emptied each binder into a large plastic sleeve, and stored that in a labelled oversized binder, which he stored on his bookshelf at home.

Keeping an organized record of your documents is important. A small amount of time spent now, can greatly reduce the time spent later when trying to access that information.