Dealing with the flood of paperwork that daily flows across our desks and around our offices is one of one of the toughest organizing challenges in today’s working environment. Statisticians have figured that we waste up to an hour and a half a day looking for papers that are lost among the others that accumulate around us.

Most work environments contain at least one filing cabinet filled with paper. The routine of filing all papers processed in offices derives from the days before computers, when only hard carbon copies were available as records, and information could not be stored in, or accessed, from computers.

Even the most physically organized office needs to operate a time management system to be truly efficient. Time-saving organizing techniques have no purpose unless the time saved is used productively.