I'm going through one of those phases at the moment where I'm getting slightly obsessive about organising things. It's something that has happened over the last few years, mainly as I get busier and have ended up spinning more plates. A number of different things have caught my eye - a combination of articles, software and solutions. I really enjoyed one of the articles on 43folders on managing a paperless office, which resonated with me because I'd previously (about 10 years ago) tried something similar with the then new and trendy Visioneer Paperport scanner. That failed, mainly as the scanner was pretty limited in what and how it handled, and the OCR capabilities around at the time were pretty bad. However, I'm wondering if it may be the time to revisit this, as the filing cabinet is getting far to full.


If your desktop looks like this, then have a look at the article on Kinkless.com linked below.

I also really liked the article on Kinkless.com on ways to avoid a massively cluttered desktop. I just wish that there was a way that I could establish this easily on the work PC (but I guess that I should just be grateful that it's finally working normally again), but the tools beyond the basics are all for OS X. However, i went some way towards this over the weekend with a general clean up of the iMac HDD.

One of my friends refers to this kind of stuff as 'productivity pr0n', as you need to be very careful that you don't just get obsessed with fiddling with new systems. I agree with this up to a point, but I do think you need to try out the various options to see what works for you. I'll probably post some more links and software notes over the next few weeks.