Filing without sorting

Filing without sorting

Among the many challenges I face at work is the mind-numbing task of filing. Fortunately, I don't have a vast variety of documents to monitor, just two types in fact, which made it quite easy to eliminate the time-consuming monotony of sorting with good tracking and a Bates numbering (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bates_numbering) system.

25¢ breakdown: I take a batch of filing, print Bates numbers on them, scan the batch to a PDF, enter the document info in a spreadsheet, then add the physical and digital documents to the end of the previous filing. That's it. No sorting in folders except for adding more files.

The spreadsheet lists the document ID and has links to the PDFs. Each new entry gets added under a new Bates number, which is basically an arbitrary ID, in numeric order. That is the only order used for organizing, so there's no sorting of new files; just slap them on the end.

The key is the tracking list. You want to find a file, you don't search the files; you search the spreadsheet. And as an added bonus, I OCR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition) the PDFs, so they're mostly searchable too. Requires a little data entry time, but filing time, putting documents in the right folders, is cut to nearly nothing, and any file can be found in seconds. Now that's my kind of filing.
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