Handle each piece of paper only once
A lot of time wasting occurs shuffling papers from one pile to another on your desk. When you receive a piece of paper either in the post or via email you should do one of the following four things immediately;
- Act on it
- File it
- Delegate it to someone else
- Throw it away - delete junk emails and throw away junk mail as soon as it is received. Unless you can justify keeping paperwork then you should bin it.
Do you really need a pending tray? Chances are it is full of paper that you don't know what to do with! Even if you decide to file a certain piece of paper you may find that you never look at it again. So if it really isn't necessary to keep it then just bin it!
A simple exercise to see if you are falling into the trap of shuffling papers around your desk is every time you pick up a piece of paper place a dot in the corner of the page and see how many dots you end up with on the page before you take action on it.
