43 Folders

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Another desk organization question

I've managed to set up my desk at home for GTD but my desk at work is driving me crazy. I'm a graduate student who works in a university research lab. My desk is set up so that I have three shelves above my desk(two of which I can see easily), my desk (which I would say is a little over three feet wide), one small drawer under my desk where I keep my office supples, and a bookcase to the side of my desk which contains two shelves.

The problem I am running into is in managing my filing system. I have tons of research articles which are currently organized in stacks of manilla folders above my desk. When I need to find an article I have to take down the stack and go through and check each folder label. Needless to say its annoying and not conducive to me wanting to add more folders to the stack.

So my question is does anyone else have an office not suited for adding a file cabinet (I've thought about it but there is no space since the space under my desk is taken up by my legs) and how have they come up with a work-around to this problem?

Sosaidh's picture

Then, it's easy to find...

stevecooper wrote:

Then, it's easy to find a particular report; look in your index, find the code, go to the alphabetically-ordered shelves. Adding something is a matter of labelling a new file, putting it into your text file, and printing it again.

This may, of course, be no help at all; )


Actually it's a lot of help. The major weakness of my system was that it was organized by research group with no real index. The text file should be easy for me to keep up so theoretically I should be able to keep it up to date.

 
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