Is it archive?

by wschnell

Whenever a piece of paper has made it beyond the wastebasket, when you hold it in your hand, you can decide whether it is part of work-in-progress or it is archive “matter”. We will talk about the matter part of the archive soon, but for now we can take a look at the great divide: what is WIP should be stored close to your workstation, what is archive can be physically farther away.

My complete WIP is at arms’ length, reachable from a sitting position, all paper upright and waiting in a box of suspension files that is just 16 cm deep. In my very personal case, the labels are:

– open invoices (cash to come)
– invoices that go into project budgets
– saturday work
– monthly close (to accountant)
– work day
– 2011 (for yearly tax)
– 2012
– ideas
– sheet music
– Mensa

My paper archive, on the other hand is just one Alzheimer away, uhm, that was the last thing I remembered … I’ll come back to that later …