The Gritty Virtual Assistant Blog

Here’s an article published this week in The Portable Business™, which you can subscribe to here.

I’m not much of a spring cleaner… I’m more of a fall cleaner. To me, it’s the perfect time to start gearing up for the coming new year. One of the ways I prepare is by purging, regrouping and organizing. Below are a few activities you might to consider doing as well.

1. Organizing Emails. I’m an Outlook user. Personally, I like using folders to store and organize emails. The search feature fails to find mail I’m looking far too often to be a reliable method. So what I do is create folders under the “Deleted Items” section rather than in my “In” box area. I don’t keep a lot of folders. The only emails I am a packrat about are those to and from clients. I give each client a folder and under each client, I create subfolders for each month.

2. Deleting or Archiving Old Emails. Around the end of the year, I go through my list of folders and archive those of clients with whom I am no longer working. I keep six months of current client folders and archive the rest.

3. Taking Stock of Your Online Documents. This is also a great time of year to do a quick run-through of your document files and folders and see where you can reorganize, consolidate and purge.

4. Cleaning Out the Supply Closet. Okay, I’m sort of an organizing freak so this is something I enjoy doing periodically. Supply areas are places where we tend to put “stuff” and forget about. Again, this is a great time of year to clean out the old, give away extra or old equipment to someone who can use it, and make room for the new year with a clean slate.

5. Streamlining Hardcopy Files. There’s a lot of paper that I put into PDF and store online. I’ve also gone entirely electronic billing and online bill pay. However, paper is still a fact of life. There are just some things that are easier to read when they are printed out. And scanning printed materials to turn them into PDFs does create an extra job that you might not have time for. So for the paper that I do keep, I have five different hanging folder filing sections:

Green – client files
Blue – tax, licensing and financial files
Red – accounts payable
Yellow – employee and contractor/subcontractor files
Clear – subject files

For those folders that deal with date ranges, this is a good time to add a new folder for the coming year. For example, say you have a file for bank statements and you keep these in a folder marked with the current year. Now is the time to create new folders for the coming year and stick them in the file. Then at the end of the year, when you are pulling out old files (such as old clients you no longer work with, for example), you can also pull out all your 2010 folders for storage and you’ll already have the new 2011 folders ready to go.