Day 17: Organize the Physical Inbox
30-Day Biz Owner Challenge | Day 17
Day 17: Organize the Physical Inbox
We all know you have a stack of papers hiding somewhere on or around your desk that you need to organize.
One of my least favorite parts of being a business owner is the constant barrage of physical mail, which often includes important documents like tax forms, insurance notices, bills, etc.
Given my personal life is pretty paper-free, it’s taken me a while to figure out how to manage the deluge of paperwork we deal with at the business. Despite digitizing large parts of the business over the past few years, the mail just keeps arriving every week.
So, I’ve come up with this system to organize my physical inbox. This isn’t rocket science, just a system that seems to work for me (though I only started two months ago).
First, all mail goes into a physical inbox on my desk. This includes paperwork that crewmembers hand me during the day, such as receipts. I have to have scheduled time each week to organize that physical inbox.
I have a simple 5-tray paper organizer next to my computer screen, with one tray corresponding to each of the below categories:
Deal with ASAP: These need to be added to my To Do List in Todoist and organized there so they get actual deadlines.
Deal with Eventually: These also need to be added to my To Do List, and just allocated to the correct projeccts.
Scan & Dump: Once this tray starts to fill up, I set aside some time to scan each one (using the Dropbox app on my phone), effectively “filing” it away. Then I recycle the paper.
Give to Ops Manager: I give these to our Ops Manager at our 1:1 each week.
Unsure/TBD: I don’t want to get bogged down while doing the organizing. If I can’t quickly figure out where the paper needs to go, I put it here for deeper processing later.
So for today, just tackle that annoying stack of papers. If you don’t have a paper organizer, just make it 5 stacks of paper, with the header above of them on a post-it note. Something to get your physical inbox to zero.
That’s Day 17! Thanks for following along, and have a great week!
Thanks,
Kaustubh // Guesswork Investing