Getting Organized: It s Contagious by Pete Lorenco

Flu season is winding down, and I bet you've been doing your best to avoid getting sick. After all, much of the country has had a tough winter already, so who needs to spend a week flat on the couch, groggily binging on Law and Order reruns?

Instead, here's hoping you can catch something else going around that's contagious in a good way: the organization bug. For small business owners, a new year offers a fresh start. Q1 is a prime time to establish goals, get organized and set the groundwork for a productive, profitable year.

Catch the organization bug, and you'll feel better. But keep in mind it takes a lot more effort than lining up for a flu shot (you did get your flu shot, right?). We just posted an article in our Knowledge Center that offers some great organization strategies to help you get started. It suggests that you begin by tackling the relentless distractor and productivity killer-your email inbox.

The report features customer experience guru and Creative Good blogger Mark Hurst, who details a sound three-step information organization approach. His smart suggestions (popularized in his now-classic book, Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload) empower you to clean out your inbox without the risk of losing important emails.

Hurst's approach of sorting email by action items, useful email to hold onto and junk to delete, is worth sharing with your staff. It's a good discipline for an employee because it becomes perfectly clear what needs to be done. Instead of 3,000 things you could be working on, there is one thing that you are focused on now. Once you see how much time you save and how much better you're serving your customers by setting policies and procedures for handling email, you can apply a similar approach to the rest of your data. Ask yourself questions similar to those you would ask when reviewing emails:

Which of these records do I need daily?

Which ones do I use just occasionally?

Which ones do I seldom need (but can't destroy because of legal and/or compliance requirements)?

If you have the answers, that's great. Go ahead and share them with a trusted records management partner that can set you up with a retention and storage solution. Don't have the answers? No worries: A trusted vendor can support your due diligence and program development.

An expert in records management can also help you train your employees, equally important here as it was in establishing your email policies. The goal is to create a system that you and your staff can maintain and that will make critical information easily accessible. No more time wasted searching for an invoice or a customer email. All you need is to take the time to put the right system in place.

That sounds less painful than getting another flu shot, right? So here's what you're going to do: Get plenty of sleep, arm yourself with hand sanitizer, and instead of a virus, catch the organization bug.

Do a True 360 : Organize Your Firm's Most Precious Records

LINK:	http://blogs.ironmountain.com/2014/service-lines/small-business/gettin...
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